I was told "don't buy an umbrella stroller"...

This thing is a hit!!!

What is it about hair bands?

Our youngest cat Miranda loves to eat ribbon.  It drives me nuts.  Are wrapped presents in the house?  Hide them before Miranda knows.  Does our daughter's stuffed lamb have a bow?  Cut it off.  We know Miranda loves to eat ribbon, yet somehow we find vomit with ribbon in the carpet every 4 months (and we only have 1 carpeted room!).  I'm also sure some of her poop has had it too, because we've pulled some from her rectum before. 

After a long day at work, I really don't want to look at a sick cat.  And I certainly don't want to drag one up to the clinic for a surgery in the middle of the night.  Luckily, this has yet to happen, but some of our clients have not been so lucky.

When a cat eats something that we have to surgically remove, we'll refer to that as a "foreign body surgery".  If your cat has eaten a piece of foam, that foam is now considered a foreign body - an object that is does not belong in the cat. 

Foreign body cases usually present as a young cat who cannot stop vomiting and now refuses to eat.  Sometimes we can touch the belly and know that it's there.  If the object if very small, we may not feel it but we might feel air accumulating behind it.  If the object is very dense, it may be detected by shooting x-rays at the belly to develop an image known as a radiograph.  Some foreign body cases are very tricky and evade detection on exam and radiographs.  In those instances, a vet may order a barium study or perhaps an ultrasound that will find the item.

When I get the sense that I might be dealing with a foreign body, I usually ask if the cat likes to play with hair bands.  It would seem that 1/3 of the time, I will remove hair bands during these surgeries.  Recently I achieved a personal best in most hair bands removed in one surgery.  The first image shows a bulging stomach that I've exposed through an incision on the belly.  The stomach was very hard, and perhaps the size of a  robust grapefruit.  In this picture, I have cut into the stomach and have started to pull out some black hair bands. 

This is a emesis tray with the hair bands. 

How many bands are in that tray?  I started to count, flung some stomach fluid in my face, and decided the picture was good enough.