Interesting cases 2
Cats do the strangest things.....

Posted Tuesday, July 18, 2006

A cat was presented at the Oswestry surgery with a cough and difficulty breathing. When she was radiographed, a strange bullet shaped object was seen in her chest.

As there were no external wounds on the cat, it was extremely unlikely that it had been shot, and although it was bullet shaped, it was unlikely that the object was in fact a bullet!

Several x-rays were taken to try to determine where exactly in the chest this "bullet" was. These x-rays suggested that the object was in the trachea (windpipe), at the point where it divides into two smaller airways, close to the heart.

As the cat's airways are so small, it would be very difficult to find a tool small enough to pass down the airway, grab the object and pull it out. This procedure would also risk pushing the object further into the airway, blocking it completely and making it impossible for the cat to breathe.

Therefore, we had to perform an operation to open the cat's chest and cut into the windpipe just above the heart to remove the blockage. This is a very delicate operation as once the chest cavity is opened, the cat can't breathe for itself and it has to be artificially ventilated.

Artificial ventilation is normally performed by passing air into the lungs through an endo-tracheal (ET) tube which extends from the animal's mouth, through the vocal folds and down the airway.

As the blockage was so far down the windpipe, we had to operate further down the trachea than the standard ET tube would reach. Therefore we had to pass a second ET tube into the windpipe below the blockage to ventilate air directly into the lungs.

Once this second ET tube was in place, we were able to pass an instrument up the trachea behind the blockage, dislodge it, and push the "bullet" out of the windpipe, into the cat's mouth, where it was retrieved using forceps.

The incision into the windpipe was sutured and the chest cavity closed again. A chest drain was placed to remove any air that had built up within the chest cavity, outside the lungs, so that the cat was able to breathe on her own.

The cat made a remarkably quick recovery, having her chest drain removed 24 hours after surgery and her intravenous fluid drip removed once she started eating properly 48 hours post op.

The "bullet" turned out to be a piece of gravel, which the cat had somehow inhaled!

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