Of course, some conditions require a level of care that just can't be provided at home; from the practicality of just monitoring the administration of intravenous fluid therapy to the technical aspect of checking specific clinical parameters or takin
g samples around the clock. There is no getting around the fact that sometimes the best place to be is in the hospital.
This should come as no surprise. In the case of our own health care, the treatment of many conditions comes with an obligatory stay in hospital, the length of which is often criticised for being too short to ensure that the patient has sufficiently recovered to be discharged. In truth, relatively, the time spent in hospital by our animal patients for comparable conditions is significantly shorter than that by ourselves. For instance, the routine procedure of neutering a female cat or dog, a hysterectomy, is done on a day patient basis even though it is fairly major abdominal surgery.
Most of our hospitalised patients only spend a few days with us, with a week long stay being considered fairly long. However, an elderly Bichon Frise by the name of Alik has just been discharged from our Morpeth surgery following a fortnight of intensive care; his successful treatment a real credit to the combined effort of the veterinary team.
Initially presented because he was off his food, a rarity for him, Alik's initial clinical signs were fairly nondescript. His abdomen didn't quite feel right and a blood screen indicated that there was something wrong with his liver.
Vet Jean Paul Schmidt performed an ultrasound scan that revealed that Alik's liver was indeed swollen and perhaps more alarmingly this gall bladder was massively dilated and apparently filled with solid material rather than the usual liquid bile. The gall bladder, situated between the liver lobes, collects bile and then discharges it into the small intestine, via the bile duct, for excretion. Jean Paul was able to follow this tube on the scan and demonstrate that it was in fact blocked, presumably by the solid material seen in the gall bladder.
Our poor patient was literally turning yellow before our eyes, the jaundice caused by the bile pigments being absorbed back into the blood stream instead of being discharged into the bowel. With Alik's clinical signs deteriorating rapidly, the blocked bile duct represented a genuine surgical emergency.
Our medicine team having identified the problem, Alik's care was now in the hands of surgeon Daisy Newey. The ultrasound scan had been spot on and Daisy soon identified the gall bladder complete with solid material that was no longer functional. With extraordinarily delicate care, she was able to remove the redundant structure and then gently flush out the obstruction in the bile duct making the vessel patent again.
The surgery took several hours and unsurprisingly our patient was in a critical state following it.
