Enteritis after transiting foreign body in a dog
Some things just never make it into textbooks! Or at least it’s difficult to find a specific account of an actual case.
This is a 4 y.o. dog who lives in a house where a sock went missing and presented after a few days vomiting. He has no history of illness of prior gastrointestinal signs.
His stomach is empty apart from a little liquid in the lumen. The gastric mucosa is perhaps a bit diffusely hyperechoic.
There is a small, anechoic abdominal effusion and quite pronounced hyperechoic change in the mesentery through the mid-abdomen.
The ileal wall is mildly thickened.
Some areas of jejunum are corrugated and some loops have moderately increased liquid content in the lumen.
On closer inspection, there are some bits and pieces of linear ‘material’ in the jejunal lumen.
I’m pretty sure this particular one is a bit of grass. None of the various bits of linear stuff are really long enough to cause obstruction. There’s no plication and no evidence of anything anchored at the pylorus or ICCJ.
And finally…in the left colon, there’s a thing that looks a lot like a foreign body: a shadowing structure with suspiciously shaped contours.
This was too cranial to palpate per rectum.
I spent a lot of time looking at this dog’s abdomen and we decided there wasn’t a compelling indication for surgery and that we could continue to monitor him. 24 hours later he passed a cloth foreign body and went on to make a complete and prompt recovery.
It’s a nice example of the damage that a foreign body can inflict on the enteric wall even if it ends up eventually scraping through. We sometimes suspect dogs with this kind of thing associated with ingestion of smaller pieces of foreign material (sand, gravel, bark).
