June - A Sticky Problem
Every now and then a patient comes in the door with an injury which leaves you wondering what on earth they have been up to! Of course, in our job they don't tend to tell us! In early June a lovely wee tabby cat came into the clinic with a large piece of stick protruding from her chest wall. None of us had ever seen anything quite like it.
We anaesthetised her and upon clipping the hair from over the area it became apparent that the stick was much larger than we initially thought. Luckily the stick had not penetrated through the chest wall and into the thoracic cavity, although it was still a little tricky to remove and in the end came out in two pieces.You can see from the picture that one end was sharp and the other quite blunt. The mystery continues.... why is the sharp end sticking out?
After the surgery puss did well and is back to her normal antics.
May- Moki has Cushings Disease
Cushings disease is a disease which we see uncommonly in veterinary practice. When it does present dogs usually have fairly classical symptoms of being ravenously hungry, drinking a lot, having a distended, "pot bellied" abdomen and often they also have poor skin and hair coat.
However not all dogs read the text book and our nurse, Lynn Cameron's dog is one of them! Moki's only real syptom of Cushing's disease was being very hungry all the time. Now those of you who own Schnauzers will know that even a normal Schnauzer thinks its hungry all the time but Moki took this to a whole new level. A special test called an ACTH stimulation test was performed and this confirmed that, despite not showing all the other signs of Cushing's Disease, Moki had early stage Cushing's Disease.
Cushing's Disease of Hyperadrenocorticism as it is also known, occurs when either the pituitary or adrenal gland oversecretes the steroid hormone cortisol. In 75% of cases the pituitary is to blame and it can be controlled with a drug called Lysodren which acts like a chemother
apeutic agent to reduce the cortisol production by the gland. The adrenal glands are to blame in the other 25% of cases and they too can be suppressed by administration of Lysodren although in a small percentage of cases they can contain a nasty tumour which needs to be surgically removed.
Moki has been on Lysodren for a few months now and is doing well. Her obsessive hunger is slowly abating and she is handling the multitude of blood tests that she has had very well. As you can see from the photo below not a pot belly in sight!
April- Meet Gary The Gannet
We really enjoy working with wildlife and are often presented with injured native birds such as Kereru and Tui. But we were somewhat taken aback when DOC arrived one day with Gary!
Gary is a juvenile Australasian Gannet. He was found exhausted on the beach, his mates already having left for some R&R in Australia. Gary had no injuries and just needed a little tender loving care and a few sardines before heading off to find his mates. He stayed with us for about a week and it did not take him long to work his way into our hearts. Staying in our isolation area his routine quickly began to revolve around food, water and cage cleaning. He was hand fed canned sardines and syringed with 60 ml of water a day. Despite a few finger injuries from the feeding process the staff grew to love Gary and we were a little sad to see him wing his way off to Australia, although Michelle was pleased that she no longer had to clean up his poop!
