Diagnosis: Gluttony

Warning: There’s vomiting in this story. But it’s a neat story.


Last night, I treated an animal for ingestion of an insecticide. The dog is going to be fine, because the owners were on top of it and brought her in fast. We gave her a special medication that when administered in the eye causes vomiting (that drug seemed like magic to me the first time I saw it used when I was a kid working in a clinic). Once we got the insecticide out of the dog, the situation was much better.

Anyway, it started me thinking about one of my favorite “my dog ate something” stories.


One night, I got a call from a client that came home from work and found their dog in distress. They described him as tremendously bloated, lethargic, and unresponsive. I couldn’t get a good idea of what was up over the phone, but I was suspicious of stomach torsion.

Stomach torsion, also known as volvulus, is a condition in which the stomach rolls on its long axis and is twisted off. To better understand it, picture the way a Tootsie Roll is twisted in the wrapper, and you get a good idea. It’s a serious condition and has to be addressed quickly.

The owners arrived at the clinic, and the hugely bloated dog got out of the back seat of the car, barely able to support its massive midsection. It looked like he had swallowed a beach ball. I thought we were in real trouble. Then the owners said something that changed the whole game: “He threw up some ham in the back seat of the car on the way here.”

I knew that he shouldn’t be able to vomit if he was twisted.

After looking him over and finding him having trouble breathing from the sheer compression of his abdomen on his lungs, we took an approach similar to the dog I saw last night. We hit pay dirt.

The dog had eaten an ENTIRE spiral ham. The whole thing. It was absolutely amazing to see his belly shrink back to normal proportions. Seven and a half pounds of pork product later (Yeah… I weighed it after it came out. I just had to know.), the dog was breathing easier and feeling much better.

I have seen some impressive episodes of gluttony, but I doubt I’ll ever see a dog ingest something on the same scale again. …. But then again, you never know.