Cleanup job
RETRIEVED:
TECHNIQUE:
veterinarian had seen,” says Turner.
“And that didn’t take long. Within a
few minutes we could see two distinct
objects, one very round and the other
irregularly shaped.” Turner then care-
fully felt Delia’s cervix and confirmed it
was a mass of tight scar tissue.
“At that point, I tried to open the
cervix manually, but that was very
uncomfortable for the mare,” says
Turner. “So we stopped and sedated her
so we could continue.” The veterinary
team also numbed the cervical area
with a local anesthetic.
With Delia more comfortable, Turner
began to manually break down the scar
tissue at the cervix. “The goal was to get
it open enough to insert an endoscope
and get a direct look into the uterus. To
break down the scar tissue, you have
to stretch things very cautiously. It was
a very slow process.” Even working
carefully, there was tissue tearing and
bleeding. Delia, however, did not appear
to be in any pain.
Eventually, Delia’s cervix was dilated
enough to allow the insertion of a thin
endoscope, a flexible tube with a light
and a camera that relays an image back
to a computer screen. “We inflated the
uterus with air to get a good view, and
almost instantly we saw it---a large, blue
marble,” Turner says.
Turner also saw the remains of a
second tan marble: “It was broken
in two larger pieces and we could
see smaller shards of tan glass
throughout the uterus.”
it worked.”
The plan was to remove the
intact marble and large glass
pieces using an endoscopic
snare, an instrument with a
wire loop that can be pulled
tight through a long handle.
Guided by the endoscopic
images, Turner and her col-
leagues snared and removed
the larger pieces of the tan
marble. The blue marble,
however, presented a problem.
“The sides were so smooth
that the snare just slipped off as
it was tightened,” she says. Turner
decided to try another approach; she in-
serted one hand into the mare’s rectum
and kept the other at the opening of the
cervix. She felt for the marble through
the rectum wall, and once she located
it, she pushed it along carefully to the
waiting fingers of her other hand.
“It was tricky,” she says. “But ultimately,
The job wasn’t done yet. By now,