High Dollar Green Plastic

Gromit had surgery and I couldn’t be more livid.

When the vet called to tell me all went well, he tried to describe what he’d pulled out. He made it sound like he’d found two very large chunks of plastic. He didn’t know what it was, though he thought it looked like part of a kid’s toy, and he thought that there was no way he would have ever passed it or gotten it back up. He said he didn't even understand how he could have swallowed something so large. From his description, I was thinking the pieces must have been the size of a spool of thread with weird indentations on them.

I was freaking out a bit, looking around the house trying to figure out what he could have eaten. I was really curious, so I packed up both kids and drove over there just to retrieve the pieces so I could examine them. (Gromit can’t come home for two more days.)

Once I saw them, I knew exactly what they were from (a dog toy, more specifically, a hollow ball made of hard plastic, and one that was never owned by us) and I knew if we’d given him more time, he would have passed them one way or the other. He’d eaten far worse in the past (think large chunks of a hard plastic watering can) and had gotten rid of it.

The folks at doggy daycare were great yesterday, telling me that there are no toys in the yard, lest a dog decides to chew them up and ingest them, nobody caught Gromit eating anything, and nothing obvious was missing. My theory is that Gromit feasted on dog poo at doggy daycare (nothing new) and in one of the piles, a dog had excreted these pieces because that dog had chewed up a toy a few days prior. I think Gromit was sick yesterday morning, not from the plastic pieces, but from eating all that excrement (hope you’re not reading this at the dining table).

So it seems, at least to us, we’ve put Gromit through an unnecessary surgery and spent a whole lot of money on medical care that probably wasn't needed.


Above is a picture of what was in Gromit's stomach (well, minus the ruler). The two brown pieces on the left are what the vet removed. The green piece on the right, obviously not from the same item as the other two, is what we found when we were cleaning up his mess on Wednesday morning. If it hadn't been for that darn green piece, we would have never done the x-rays, seen more foreign matter, and done the surgery.