Foreign Object
Jul. 20th, 2008 12:43 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
saavedra77About a week ago, my two-year-old cat Ozzy abruptly stopped eating. He'd half-heartedly sniff his food, then shamble away. Kibble was disappearing from the dish, but at a much slower rate than usual, it would seem entirely due to the younger cat's appetite. After a couple of days of this, Ozzy started getting weak and wobbly, and it was clearly time to see the vet.
The problem wasn't immediately clear, based on the first round of tests: everything looked normal, healthy even ... except for a kind of smudge-looking thing on one x-ray, something that didn't look like it should be there. A second round of X-rays confirmed the presence of a "foreign object" in his belly, an obstruction that the vet concluded was inducing a kind of anorexia. And the only sure way of getting it out of there was going to be surgery.
The procedure was completed the following day, successfully extracting a 1.25-inch-long, 0.5-inch wide piece of flat, green plastic or rubber with most of the letters of "MADE IN CHINA" stamped on it:
So, yeah, my cat apparently likes to eat random chewy plastic stuff. I'd already encountered this with plastic bags and the shower curtain. But seriously, a barely-masticated hunk of medium-hard plastic the size of a stick of gum? Hell, I still can't identify the thing, or say where it came from.
In the days since, Ozzy has returned from the vet clinic, slept a lot, tolerated the frequent pillings and syringes with relative docility, started regaining his appetite, and seems to be more or less on the mend. This is him just two days after surgery:
But I'm now feeling extra-paranoid about anything and everything plastic and chewable and/or bite-sized that finds its way into the apartment--in short, frantically working to further "child-proof" the place. Because we are so not going through this again ...
The problem wasn't immediately clear, based on the first round of tests: everything looked normal, healthy even ... except for a kind of smudge-looking thing on one x-ray, something that didn't look like it should be there. A second round of X-rays confirmed the presence of a "foreign object" in his belly, an obstruction that the vet concluded was inducing a kind of anorexia. And the only sure way of getting it out of there was going to be surgery.
The procedure was completed the following day, successfully extracting a 1.25-inch-long, 0.5-inch wide piece of flat, green plastic or rubber with most of the letters of "MADE IN CHINA" stamped on it:
So, yeah, my cat apparently likes to eat random chewy plastic stuff. I'd already encountered this with plastic bags and the shower curtain. But seriously, a barely-masticated hunk of medium-hard plastic the size of a stick of gum? Hell, I still can't identify the thing, or say where it came from.
In the days since, Ozzy has returned from the vet clinic, slept a lot, tolerated the frequent pillings and syringes with relative docility, started regaining his appetite, and seems to be more or less on the mend. This is him just two days after surgery:
But I'm now feeling extra-paranoid about anything and everything plastic and chewable and/or bite-sized that finds its way into the apartment--in short, frantically working to further "child-proof" the place. Because we are so not going through this again ...
