Saturday, January 31, 2009

Little Miss Trouble

So it is Saturday January 31st. I haven't been running since January 22nd. Before you get on my case about not running, I have a very valid reason: Little Miss.

So Friday when I came home from school, I found Little Miss (my 7 month old kitten in case you didn't know) batting around a bobbin of thread. Turns out she got into my closet and knocked down my sewing kit. I worried that she ate a needle, but I didn't see any thread unwound like she had been playing with it.

The next day I was working when Davey called me letting me know that Little Miss was vomiting and that she vomited up some yarn (the yarn was next to the sewing kit in the closet). I had him bring her in right away to make sure there wasn't a needle in her stomach. Good thing there wasn't, but she was probably obstructed with string. Long story short (too late), we did an abdominal explore on her on Sunday and removed over 64 inches of string and yarn from her GI tract, all the way from her mouth where some was trapped under her tongue, all the way to her colon.

Everything seemed to be going well until Monday afternoon when Davey noticed that she was struggling to breath when he came to visit her at the clinic. The doctors agreed and we took a radiograph which showed fluid and air in the space between the lungs and the thorax (called the pleural space, she had a pleural effusion and pneumothorax). We tapped her chest and found fluid and air. The fluid had bacteria and white blood cells in it (also called a pyothorax, which is no beuno).

From there we transfered her to the CSU Veterinary Teaching Hospital where she got cared for in the CCU until. The next morning she got two chest tubes put in to drain the fluid and to help clear the infection. We then did endoscopy down her esophagus to see if there was a perferation (tear) in her esophagus, which was the most likely cause fo the pyothorax. In fact, she did have a small lesion in her esophagus. Appartently this is a very rare complication from string foreign bodies, but of course it would happen to my kitten. She then got a feeding tube put in her stomach so she could be fed while allowing her esophagus to heal on its own. Luckly the tear was small and we didn't have to do thoracic surgery to repair it.

She spent the rest of the week in CCU getting her chest drained and being tube fed. I just got her back home this afternoon. I will be tube feeding her here for the next 7-10 days so her esophagus can keep healing.

Needless to say with all of this craziness, I haven't had enough time or energy to go running. I have been beyond exhausted with the lack of sleep and the stress. I plan to do a short run tomorrow and slowly work back up to the 2 hours runs. It feels like forever since the last time I ran, but hopefully it won't take me too long to get back to where I started.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Oh how scary! I wouldn't have gone running either!
You'll catch right back up to where you were in no time.