Icy's Saga

We had a week of unusual cases and weird diagnoses at work that culminated with my own sweet Icy. Friday night she became suddenly very ill-we returned from a few errands to find her acting painful and breathing hard, very lethargic, not eating, etc. Saturday morning she was no better so I brought her to work with me. I started her on pain medications and antibiotics and took an x-ray. The film showed a large gas-filled stomach similar to a dog with bloat. I tried to pass a tube to relieve the pressure but was not able. We gave her some Barium ( a liquid that shows up on x-rays to show movement through the GI tract) to see if she was just swallowing air secondary to another source of pain or if the stomach was somehow obstructed. No barium moved out of the stomach in an hour so we decided this was a surgical problem and the girls rescheduled some of my Saturday AM appointments so we could do surgery. I was still unable to pass a tube even when she was under anesthesia so we proceeded with an exploratory surgery where I made the surprising diagnosis of a diaphragmatic hernia (a hole in the muscle between the abdomen and chest cavity) and that her stomach was trapped in her chest! This is not a problem we are able to handle so I closed the incision, quickly saw my last two appointments and drove her directly to the Vet School in Columbia ( a place that consumed most of my life between 2000 and 2004!). The surgeon on call was actually one of my classmates who had returned for a surgery residency and she did a great job. She was also unable to pass a tube and so in addition to her abdominal incision she had to make a small incision into her chest to decompress the stomach. They then put all the abdominal contents back where they belonged and repaired the hole in the diaphragm. Part of her stomach and spleen had to be removed as they were too damaged to save. She also had eaten a large piece of hay (from the rabbits) that was looking like it might not pass through the intestines so they took it out just to be safe.

Icy is still in the ICU and in the oxygen cage just to be on the safe side, has a chest tube for drainage, a feeding tube in case she does not eat well, and an IV for fluids and medications. She is stable but still not out of the woods, although we have passed the biggest hurdles already.

How this happened is still a mystery-usually these are a result of a trauma but Jill seemed to think it was pretty recent and not related to her previous accident. So how a house cat managed to get that kind of injury is unknown. Leave it to Icy!