Today I took our little blind-and-deaf Cocker Spaniel, Ellie May, to see our internal medicine specialist in Missoula, Dr. Dave Bostwick. For the past couple of weeks, Ellie May has had blood in her stools. At first we thought it was colitis or some kind of other intestinal bug, but she didn’t respond to antibiotics. So last Friday, Dave ultrasounded Ellie May’s GI tract and other organs but didn’t find anything suspicious. The next step was a colonoscopy, which is what we did today.
In the photo above, Dave is looking through the endoscope into her colon, while his vet tech Tracy holds Ellie May and keeps an eye on her vital signs during anesthesia.
Dave said her large intestine looked visually normal — there were no masses or growths. However … a big however … some cancers (like lymphoma) can still be present, so Dave took biopsies of Ellie May’s intestine. We should have those results back by Friday. It could turn out she has a form of inflammatory bowel disease, but we want to be able to rule out cancer first.
Here’s another shot of Ellie May under anesthesia. She did really well, and came out of it just fine:
Incidentally, I exercised sound judgment and decided not to post photos of the colonoscopy taken at the other end of Ellie May.
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