Meet May pet of the month - Reily
At our last audit, we found that one quarter of our procedures performed under anaesthetic are minimally invasive. This is a huge saving for our patients in terms of pain, fear and anxiety and massively reduces recovery times and drug use. Perhaps the greatest benefit we can achieve however is when a dog like Reily comes in. Born with a retained testicle castration becomes essential for medical reasons.
The difficulty with performing the operation to remove retained testes by open surgery is in locating them. A study showed that Vets correctly identified the position of retained inguinal testicles 49 percent of the time, which is ALMOST as good as guessing. Testes may lie under the skin, in the abdomen or even between the muscle layers of the body wall. Open surgery requires a large incision usually along side the penis and through the body wall to look for the lost testicle, often to find that it is not within reach. The wound has thus been made unnecessarily and another made to look elsewhere. This surgical challenge may then become destructive, time consuming and expensive.
Performed "keyhole" the testicles are located simply by peeping in with a 2.7mm or 5mm wide camera. The attached video shows how quick and easy it can be to see the offending gland and remove it through a tiny incision in the body wall. If the testicle is elsewhere we can simply follow the spermatic cord to locate it.
The net result is a simple, cost effective procedure which has all the benefits of keyhole surgery but specifically avoids open surgery which in awkward cases can get out of hand.
Reily is a very happy dog and we feel very happy to have been able to help him remain so.
At six o'clock in the evening we received a call from a local practice requesting help following another episode of canine greediness. The chicken satay, with skewer embedded, when merely waved within the vicinity of Bonnie dog was simply gone in flash, swallowed whole! Tricky! An attempt to encourage vomiting could lead to the stomach being perforated and leaving the skewer in place could likewise lead to perforation of the gut somewhere lower down the intestines. A perforated gastrointestinal tract will often lead to peritonitis which under these circumstances has a 50% mortality rate, even with surgery.
Buddy was brought to us as a second opinion having had a history of urinary stones, reaching back into his puppyhood. He had previously undergone open surgery at a referral centre to remove these calculi from his bladder which left him with a 10 inch scar, the size necessary to access his bladder for the procedure. A year later he had re-developed many more stones and came to see us. Three large stones were residing in his bladder with another sixteen or so queing up in his urethra close to his penis, which were blocking his urinary flow.
Brodie, a lovely natured ex hearing dog was a really interesting second opinion case. She presented following a year of intermittent tummy upsets which had frustrated her owners and vet. Although she had undergone blood and other diagnostic tests she came to us without a diagnosis, althougth her liver had been shown to be dysfunctional and damaged.