The Exam Story

Dr Ferox's family dog incognito

In the last week of my final veterinary exams, the ones that decide whether or not I deserve to be a veterinarian, I knew there was going to be trouble. For one tihng I had been scheduled the very hardest exam at the last possible timeslot on the last day. Everyone else would be partying long before me, and I would be stressing out for several hours more than everyone else.

That was scheduled for Thursday afternoon. However, it was on the Monday, not fifteen minutes after my previous exam, that I got a phone call from home.

“Oh, the dog looks quite sick. We were out at an open day yesterday and he wouldn’t drink then. He had a vomit last night, and this morning but we’re not sure what we should do.”

This wasn’t such an unusualy phone call for me. Parents have a habit of expecting free veterinary advice over the phone from their kids, and usually it’s a reasonable situation. I’ve been woken from my slumber with calls about the dog coughing after being in kennels, and mild bouts of diarrhoea, but hte important thing was that the dog had never looked sick before, he’d always been bright and happy.

The only real response to give when an animal looks empathically unwell is to send them to the vet for an exam. However, my parents wouldn’t take such direct advice, and it took them until the next day to take our sick dog to the vet. So on Tuesday the dog was finally seen by a vet, put on fluids, and had an Xray.

That afternoon I got a phone call. The dog was being sent to the vet clinic at uni, all the way across town, for intensive care.

Damn it family! Less than 48 hours to my most terrifying exam and you’re sending an apparently critical dog across town so that I can keep you informed. Why didn’t he go to the vet on Monday?

So on the night I should be intensively studying, I hang around intensive care waiting for the family dog to arrive. The family can’t tell me what’s wrong, so I have to wait. When he finally gets there, he does look miserable. Barely standing, head and tail drooping, hardly responsive when I call his name. He stretches out his body and lowers his head in the ‘prayer posture’, a common sign of abdominal pain. He looks a lot worse that I thought he would. The x-rays show a lot of gas in the intestines- seriously a lot of gas. This has us thinking there’s an obstruction of the intestines in there, even though we can’t see it for sure. Surgery is scheduled for tomorrow.

To put in another way, surgery is scheduled after my Wednessdy exam, in the precious little study time I will have left before the big, nasty, final exam of doom. But I scrub in anway.

With one exam to go, I’ve got my hands full with my dogs guts. I know it’s not actually helping me study, but if I wasn’t there I’d be worried about him. Plus, there’s a strong tendancy for vets to treat foreign body removals as a kind of lucky dip, and bets are being placed on what the troublesome object is most likely to be.

We find the object two thirds of the way don his small intestine. There’s no food left in him (probably a main factor contributing to his misery) and his guts are full of gas. We removed the foreign object and as the surgeon stitched his guts back together the guessing game began. What was that mystery object our dog had eaten?

We cleaned it off to find a lumpy, rubery, slightly yellow…thing. I still don’t know what it is or where he got it, but you’re welcome to guess.

The object that Dr Ferox's Dog ate

The dog’s doing well, though the restricted diet made him deeply unhappy for a few days, he’s bounced back now. I did well enough in the exam of doom to be told “Good Job” as I left the room. So it’s a happy ending.