Partial Obstruction
Japhy's ongoing story of resilience (and mine!)
Of all the dogs I’ve had, even as a child, Japhy is the first to swallow toys. He quickly learned that “leave it” means “swallow it fast, before mama takes it away.” I stopped giving him inedible toys a long time ago, replacing them with natural, edible chews. Unfortunately, not allowing him to have toys made him even more obsessive about them when he finds them.
We arrived at a friend’s house outside of Lubbock in April, just before the Lubbock Arts Festival. During the show, I kenneled Japhy and Hazel in my friend’s basement, which is where her three cats typically hang out when we aren’t there. One morning when I let Japhy out of his kennel to eat breakfast, he found a cat toy in the basement that I somehow missed during my initial walk-through of the space. Before I could get to the treats and offer him a trade, he’d swallowed it whole. All I remember is seeing a bit of pink fluff sticking out of his mouth. Then it was gone.
I don’t recall if I wrote about it, but last summer Japhy swallowed a plastic spoon. My dad was distracting him with a spoonful of peanut butter while I removed a tick. Dad lost his grip on the handle (he felt terrible), and Japhy took off with it. Within seconds, it was down the hatch. He passed that plastic spoon whole without issue. Though I certainly wouldn’t recommend any repeat attempts, to this day it remains one of Japhy’s most amazing feats. Honestly, it may qualify as the single most unbelievable thing I’ve experienced in all of my years with dogs.
So I was hopeful the cat toy would pass, too. It’s softer and more flexible than a plastic spoon, I thought. Surely it will pass without issue.
It did not.
I religiously checked his poo for the next few days, and there was nothing in it. He continued eating and drinking and acting just fine, so I waited. It was a Friday evening when he got sick. Each attempt to puke (which occurred every few hours that long night) was followed by a few seconds of what I can only describe as a choking sound. It was horrible. I didn’t sleep that night.
Fortunately, my vet clinic has a location that is open on Saturdays. We were in the parking lot a half hour before they opened that next morning, watching and waiting for someone to unlock the front door so that we could make a mad dash for it. Because it’s one of only a couple of regular clinics that are open on Saturdays (vs the one emergency vet, which is at least three times the cost), it gets busy fast.
We were among the first people to be seen that morning. After explaining to Dr. Henderson what happened, he told me he would send in a tech to sedate Japhy for x-rays. Since it was the first time Japhy had been to this particular location and they were unaware of our challenges, I chuckled and said, “Please send your very best one.” I explained that Japhy does not like shots, and that we typically have a pre-visit Trazodone-Gabapentin routine that starts the morning prior to a visit. Since this was an emergency visit, that prep didn’t happen. I was worried about how Japhy was going to handle the injection. He was muzzled, of course, but it’s still an ordeal.
The vet tech came in the waiting room and asked me how best to approach him. I told her that I would distract him with the can of cheese while she gave the shot, but that she would need to be quick, because once he sees or even suspects the needle, it’s over. He won’t let her near him.
With a nod, I started spraying cheese into Japhy’s mouth, letting him lick the nozzle of the can while trying not to give away its purpose. I turned to see if the vet tech was ready, and she took a step back. “Done!” she said.
Japhy is not an easy dog, and she made giving him a shot look like a piece of cake.Though much of the ease in this situation was likely due to the fact that Japhy didn’t know her, and therefore wasn’t expecting her to give him a shot (Dr. Clark doesn’t have that luxury), I’m still incredibly impressed. And grateful. Anyone with a reactive/difficult dog understands how these “smaller” stresses that ordinarily feel manageable can feel overwhelming when paired with a larger life-threatening situation. This vet tech made an already enormously stressful visit a little less stressful with her skill and attention.
When Dr. Henderson showed me the x-rays, he pointed out the cat toy at the bottom of Japhy’s stomach, near the pylorus. It was a partial obstruction, he explained. The least invasive (and least expensive) option to start with was an endoscopy, a procedure that involves inserting a scope via the mouth with a light, a camera, and various grabby tools to attempt to remove foreign objects that haven’t yet passed into the intestines. There was a fifty-fifty chance that he could remove the cat toy with the scope. If not successful, surgery would be necessary.
Time seemed to drastically slow down during the procedure. A friend (the one whose house we were parked at) had met me at the clinic and was able to mostly keep me calm in that freezing-cold waiting room with her presence and support. It seemed like hours before Dr. Henderson returned. While waiting, I had played out various scenarios in my head. What would I do if surgery was required? How on earth would I pay for it? I’d Googled pricing for such surgeries and read that it could cost up to $8,000! My friend assured me that we would, together, do whatever was necessary to make sure Japhy was okay. [Side note: if you ever find yourself in a position to sit with a friend during something like this, and you wonder what you can possibly say to help ease the worry, this certainly did it for me.]
Finally, Dr. Henderson returned to the waiting room and tossed a ziplock baggie on the table. With an enormous sigh of relief, I picked up the baggie and moved the bits of soaked-through toy around the plastic with my fingers. It was so big! Holy crap! I thought he’d swallowed a small-ish toy, and this was not a small-ish toy. I asked Dr. Henderson if I could hug him, and he obliged. I cannot tell you what it felt like to know that my boy would be okay and that I wouldn’t be faced with an $8,000 vet bill that I couldn’t pay. In fact, my friend put the ~$800 endoscopy bill on her credit card and told me to pay her back as I could. I am so very grateful for great friends, great vet techs, and great doctors. Sometimes it takes a village, and boy do my dogs and I have the best village in the universe!
I was able to leave the clinic for a couple of hours while Japhy came out of sedation, so I walked across the street to a Starbucks and bought food (the first I’d eaten all day) and sat down at a table for a bit. I could breathe again. My Boy was going to be okay.
When I picked him up, he was still groggy. We walked out to the van, I picked him up and put him inside, and he walked straight to his [newly built] room and collapsed. Recently I re-built the interior of the van to accommodate a built-in kennel under my bed. “Japhy’s Room” is what I call it, though Hazel uses it sometimes, too. To say it came in handy during this time of Japhy’s recovery is an understatement. I was able to close the door and keep Hazel from bothering him as he rested.
Hazel didn’t like being kept away from her BooBoo, but it was for the best. Once we were back at my friend’s house, I went inside to decompress with my friend, pulling up my security camera app every few minutes to check on the dogs. I smiled when I saw Hazel sitting outside Japhy’s door. This girl is so deeply connected to her pack members, and she sure does love her Japhy Boo.
If there’s a lesson to be learned from this story, it’s that no matter how careful we are, accidents happen. It’s a lesson I continue to learn with Japhy, and it certainly keeps me humble. No one is perfect, and spicy dogs in particular will keep us on our toes if we start to get too comfortable.
But this incident also taught me, yet again, to leave space for the possibility that things might actually go right. Like when a skilled vet tech gives a reactive dog an injection without a single bit of drama. Or when an experienced veterinarian removes a cat toy from a dog’s stomach using a procedure that offers only a 50/50 chance of success. Or when an amazing friend covers your $800 vet bill and tells you to pay her back $10 at a time if necessary. Or when other thoughtful friends contribute $300 of the total you need to pay back. Every single one of these people are love dogs in their own right. And we love them very much.
“There are love dogs no one knows the names of. Give your life to be one of them.” (Rumi) ♡