PETE WEDDERBURN Animal Doctor

the lump had begun to shrink down. After a week, it had almost vanished. If an infection had been the entire cause of the swelling, this would be the end of the saga. However it’s common for infection to gather around a foreign body, in which case antibiotics make the swelling shrink initially, but when the course is finished, the swelling gets bigger again. There was an anxious few days after the antibiotics stopped: what would happen next?

I was not hugely surprised when the lump swelled up again: this confirmed, that yes, there probably was a foreign body in there. But the big question was: how could I find it and remove it? In theory, surgery is the answer, but in practice, it can be like looking for a needle in a haystack. A tiny foreign body can be very difficult to locate. The safest answer was to get an MRI scan done: this would give me a three dimensional image of the lump, and it would show up objects – like pieces of wood – that do not show up on xrays.

Yuki was scheduled for her MRI scan, but while we were waiting for this to happen, something dramatic happened. Her owner noticed something hard beginning to protrude from the side of the lump, and then the skin of the surface of the lump burst open, and there was something small protruding from it. She bravely grasped this and tugged: and it turned out to be a small piece of wicker-type wood, measuring just 2cm long.

Now the pieces of the puzzle could be fitted together. Yuki had chewed a wicker basket, and she must have swallowed bits of wood, causing the initial episode of vomiting. Her stomach must have contracted hard against a sharp piece of the wood during a vomiting session, and this had then penetrated her stomach wall, moving into her abdomen.

And that’s where her clever immune system had come into play: her body had naturally “pushed” the piece of wood towards the outside world. As it moved towards the outer surface of the skin on her left flank, a firm swelling of inflammatory tissue had grown around it, causing the lump which had been worrying us. Eventually, the immune system had succeeded: it had pushed the wood right out of the body.

Yuki didn’t need any further treatment: her immune system had managed to carry out a complete cure. The lump vanished, and this time, it was gone forever.