Joey’s Pet of the Week

By Scott Lackenby | Dated September 19, 2013

Aarrrgh me hearties! How be ye? Today is International talk like a Pirate Day. How did I do? We were out of pirate hats to dress up in, so the Nurses made do with putting me in a baby beanie that Nurse Katrina had. I was very patient with them while they embarressed me and I didn’t bite anyone! But you can tell by my face that I was less than impressed. Guess what I’ll be doing next week?? I’m going to a photography studio to have some professional pics taken!! The good people at Uber Photography in Killara have invited me to come and have some pics taken for us to use on some clinic stuff as well as some prints to have up in the Reception area. How exciting is that! Nurse Layne and Nurse Katrina are a little bit worried about getting me up to them. It’s only a quick 5minute drive, but I have never been for a car ride before. And I’ve never been locked up in a carry cage. So this week I have been spending some time in a carry cage to get used to it. I’ve been really good about it, but probably because they have been bribing me with food. The big test will be tomorrow when I go for my first car ride…!!! I’ll let you know next week how many offers I get to become a full time model.

I know it has been mentioned a bit lately, but please make sure you have your 4legged friends on tick prevention. We’ve had quite a few animals in this week suffering from tick paralysis and sadly we were unable to save one of them. They are nasty little critters these ticks, so it is REALLY important that you are using appropriate preventative measure. For the puppy dogs we recommend Advantix fortnightly and for the puss cats either the Frontline top spot fortnightly or the Frontline spray every 3weeks. I’ll be having my Frontline spray tomorrow, which I always look forward to having….

My Pet this week is the handsome Oscar, an 8year old Schnauzer. Oscar has lost almost 1.6kg since the end of August, which is a lot of weight to lose in a short space of time. Dr David ran some blood tests which were unremarkable, so the next step was an Xray. There was some shadowing in Oscar’s abdomen which we thought could possibly be a foreign body, so we repeated the Xray the next day and it looked like the shadow had moved into the bowel. This pointed to it being some faeces moving through rather than something that needed to be surgically removed. Oscar had been eating well while he was losing weight but he had been vomiting, particularly after meals. We started him on a hypo allergenic food and also some medications to help settle his tummy. He seemed to do ok on these for a while but then he got worse. Dr David admitted him to have an endoscope, where we put a special gadget down Oscar’s throat to have a look inside his tummy. Dr David found that the stomach mucosa was quite inflamed and there was also what looked like a nasty gastric ulcer. Dr David took some samples of this to send off to the lab. Like in humans, ulcers are usually the result of long term use of certain drugs, but Oscar hasn’t been on any of these drugs, so it will be interesting to see what the results come back as. Unfortunately we didn’t get any pictures of the scope being performed. Nurse Katrina has been a little forgetful of late, and forgot to remind the Surgery Nurses to take some pictures so you could see how it’s done. She did remember to get a picture of Oscar, so be sure to check out my Pet of the Week album so you can see just how handsome Oscar is.

Well, I have to go and practice my poses for my photo shoot next week.  Hope you all have a great week. Meows from Joey xoxo