I'm glad to report Alik is going from strength to strength.
Well the same team have been at it again, performing even more complicated and intricate surgery to treat a friendly little terrier cross, who goes by the name of Rocky.
Rocky's probl
ems started several months ago when he developed a soft cough, not an uncommon presenting sign among our canine patients.
With no obvious recent contact with another infected pooch, kennel cough was unlikely but couldn't be ruled out as a diagnosis.
His chest sounded clear, his heart fine and his temperature was normal; as he was bright in himself we decided just to monitor him initially to see if the cough would improve.
Though he continued to appear bright with a good appetite, unfortunately, Rocky's cough worsened and so we decided to carry out some diagnostic tests, initially in the form of thoracic X-rays.
What we found filled us with concern – he evidently had a solid mass in his chest, just in front of his heart that appeared to be pressing on his trachea (windpipe).
The shadow was about the size of a golf ball and could be a number of things from abscess to tumour, all potentially serious because of its precarious location.
Trying to definitively identify the tissue, Jean Paul took biopsies by passing a special needle under ultrasound guidance, into Rocky's chest taking care to avoid the heart, lungs and major blood vessels. Gently inserting the biopsy needle into the mass, JP was able to extract a few cells that showed it potentially to be a benign tumour.
Though this diagnosis improved Rocky's prognosis, making it unlikely that he would suffer from the effects of cancer spreading to other organs in his body, it still left us with the problem of his ever deteriorating cough.
This would inevitably continue to worsen as long as the tumour continued to grow until at some point the pressure placed on the unfortunate dog's trachea would making breathing impossible.
The only option was to try to remove it, though intra-thoracic surgery is not for the faint-hearted, if you pardon the pun.
To get to the lump, surgeon Daisy had to enter Rocky's chest by separating two of his ribs, forcing them apart to make as big a gap as possible.
As soon as the thoracic cavity was punctured, the vacuum surrounding the lungs was lost causing them to deflate, effectively disabling the normal breathing mechanism.
This made it necessary for Inge, one of the assisting nurses, to manually breathe for the patient throughout the procedure.
With the artificially inflating lungs gently held out of the way, Daisy was confronted with Rocky's beating heart at her fingertips.
She was soon able to visualise the tumour just in front of the pumping organ and after several hours of careful dissection was able to remove the offending tissue; any slip of her scalpel having potentially disastrous consequences.
