Lavonia Animal Hospital

12/01/2025

Our office will close early for the remainder of the day at noon on Wednesday, December 3, 2025, so that staff can attend the funeral for a dear member of our Lavonia Animal Hospital family.

In Loving Memory of Joe Addison
October 25, 1946 - December 1, 2025

Joe Wade Addison, age 79, of Canon, passed away on Monday, December 1, 2025, at Rainey Hospice House in Anderson, SC. A native of Franklin County, Joe was the son of the late Charles and Era Clark Addison. He attended Lavonia High School and dedicated over 39 years of his

11/30/2025

A new excerpt from my upcoming novel, A Company of Paws!

The Marvels of Modern Medicine

People sometimes ask outlandish questions when they call looking for information. At the root of their often reasonable but misguided queries is confusion that arises out of misconceptions about veterinary medicine.

“Is this the place where you turn boys into girls?” Cozy always got a huge laugh recounting this caller’s question.

Another favorite: “Do you artificially inseminate dogs? I have a female that I want to breed.”

“Yes, we can do that for you.”

“Do you guys provide the semen?” Cue the laugh track!

Once Cozy managed to compose herself, she answered with a more-or-less straight face. “No, you have to either own the male or find someone who offers their male for stud service.”

“Oh, I don’t have a male dog. I didn’t know you needed one. I just want my female to have one litter of puppies.”

What is the most diplomatic way to respond to that?!

Many dogs do need to be artificially inseminated in order to facilitate breeding. Some breeds, like the Bulldog, have a lot of accumulated genetic deformities that have become acceptable, even desirable traits. But these same sought-after characteristics that define the breed result in mismatched males and females that frequently are unable to copulate naturally. And the female usually requires a caesarian section to deliver the puppies.

Over the years, Dr. Hitchcock gained widespread prominence in our area for treating Bulldogs in general, and especially for breeding. I’ve even found him cited by lay people online, on popular social media sites, as a Bulldog “expert”, which isn’t a real professional designation or certification, but simply an honest reflection of how successful he was at helping owners with the medical and reproductive needs of this breed. We lived in an area directly adjacent to the University, and we were always loyal supporters of the Bulldog Nation.

Bulldogs were in my opinion one of the easiest breeds on which to perform artificial insemination. The males were characteristically enthusiastic about the whole semen collection process. They needed little incentive to participate, and after the first collection, when the clients returned on the following day to repeat the procedure, they often dragged their owners down the hall, beside themselves with excitement and joyfully searching for either Dr. Hitchcock or me. They knew exactly what we were going to do, and they couldn’t wait to see us!

Females, on the other hand, could be a little shy at first. After a semen sample was collected by ej*******ng the male, it was instilled into the reproductive tract of the female. This involved holding her upside down in a “wheelbarrow” position, elevating her hind limbs while her forelegs remained planted firmly on the ground. Once the semen sample was introduced, the female was held in this uncomfortable position for about ten minutes, as gravity facilitated the flow of the precious fluid down into the va**na until it eventually reached the uterus where it would hopefully fertilize her eggs. Females were understandably timid about this process until they had done it a few times.

Usually, artificial insemination involved a guestimate on the owner’s part, of how many days the female had been in “heat”. Normally, we inseminated on days 10, 11, and 12 of the estrous cycle. The average female neared ovulation at about 10 days, but this wasn’t always the case, because no dog is truly average. Typically, we would examine cytology from a va**nal smear when the owners first brought their female in. Using a swab, we scraped the epithelial lining of the va**na and then smeared the collected cells on a slide, where they were stained and observed under the microscope. The cells lining the va**na undergo a change in microscopic appearance as the estrous cycle in the dog progresses toward ovulation. Starting out as plump epithelial cells with large nuclei, the cells begin to undergo a process called cornification, where they change and start to resemble keratinized epithelial skin cells with sharp, angular contours, shrinking amounts of cytoplasm, and a nucleus that decreases in size to a small pinpoint before eventually disappearing altogether. At this point, the cells resemble nothing so much as dried up cornflakes under the microscope, and this guides us in determining the best time to breed. The lay term for va**nal cytology is the “cornflake test”.

Using va**nal cytology is rather subjective and doesn’t always work, and in later years we sometimes tested for rising blood progesterone levels to try to more precisely narrow down the time of ovulation. But we didn’t have the means to measure progesterone levels in-house. A blood sample had to be shipped to an outside lab, and that usually meant the time-sensitive results might not be received for two or three days. If the results indicated ovulation, then the time delay meant it might already be too late to breed by the time we learned the results. So there were drawbacks to both methods, and there were many reasons why a female might not “take” when bred artificially. Frequently it all boiled down to timing of estrus.

Nevertheless, over more than fifty years, Dr. Hitchcock successfully produced hundreds if not thousands of bulldog puppies, as well as pups of other breeds, using only timing and va**nal cytology, and we became well-known for our artificial insemination services. And Bulldog females that became pregnant then needed a caesarian section to deliver the pups. Most females were either too small (Bulldog pups were often large, asymmetrical puppies that might not fit through the birth canal), or the dam would grow weary and not be able to successfully deliver all the pups if the litter were large and the long birthing process were left to progress naturally.

From a young kid of twelve years, I helped Dr. Hitchcock with both artificial insemination and with caesarian sections, and by the time I graduated, I knew exactly how to do it all his way. And who could argue with success?

One morning, Tom Moran came in with one of his female mastiffs. He and his wife, Debbie, bred champion Bullmastiffs that were recognized nationally. The couple had discovered early on that even though the dogs usually bred naturally, without the need for artificial insemination, they still benefited from caesarian sections. The females normally had very large litters, and in their experience, some puppies would be lost simply because the prolonged period required to deliver every pup resulted in some babies dying before they could be born.

Tom and Debbie brought in a beautiful red female named Sadie on this particular visit. Sadie had recently gone into heat, and Tom wanted to inseminate her, but there was a unique twist. The show-winning male he had in mind was actually deceased and had been for twenty years! But the owners of the champion stud had stocked up and saved semen from the dog, and Tom was finally able to procure one of the last surviving frozen samples, at a great cost.

Dr. Hitchcock blew out a deep breath when Tom told him what he planned to do.

“That’s an awful lot of money to spend on such an old sample,” he said. “I don’t think I’ve ever heard of semen frozen for that long being used successfully. Do they provide any warranty or confirmation of its viability?”

Tom shook his head. “They attest to its viability and source, but they don’t offer any kind of guarantee that it will produce pups. Once I purchase it, I won’t be able to get a refund. The only way we can confirm viability is to check it here, right before we inseminate.”

“How many straws do you get?” Dr. Hitchcock asked.

Straws were long, thin plastic pipettes containing a diluted semen sample. If the source were far enough away, and in this case, Tom said the sample was being shipped from Virginia, the straws were packed in ice. For fresh, recently collected samples, the semen itself isn’t frozen, but rather shipped with ice packs or dry ice to keep it chilled until it arrives. If the sample, as in the case of Tom’s prospective sire, were frozen, it was usually overnighted in a nitrogen tank. Either way, the samples were carefully warmed in a liquid water bath just before insemination.

Tom shook his head at Dr. Hitchcock’s question. “I’m paying for one straw. We’ll have just one shot at it.”

“So even the drop we use to check semen viability will decrease the amount of semen available for insemination.”
“Yep, every drop will count.”

“If the quality is good, all you need is a single drop, but still, I know you’re paying an awful lot for the sample,” Dr. Hitchcock replied.

“It’s a gamble, but this dog was from an excellent bloodline, and I’d really like to add that to my gene pool,” Tom said. “I’ve wanted to produce a litter from this male for a long time. It’s been very difficult not to mention expensive to get my hands on a sample.”

We’d successfully inseminated dogs before using shipped semen, and it was almost always chilled. But of course, we’d never used a twenty-year old sample, and from a dead sire no less. Dr. Hitchcock had his doubts we’d be able to produce live pups, but Tom was determined to try.

We agreed to help, and Tom had us perform a cytology smear just to confirm where the dog was in her estrous cycle. Once he confirmed his order, the semen would be shipped overnight. When Dr. Hitchcock examined the stained cytology slide, most of the cells were partially to completely cornified, and it would likely be best to breed the very next day. With this information, the Morans went home and set up delivery for the following morning. The semen would ship directly to the clinic, and when we received it, we’d call Tom to bring Sadie in immediately.

The next morning, the semen sample was delivered right on time. Tom and Debbie lived nearby, a little ways beyond the state border over in Walhalla, South Carolina, and they brought Sadie right over.

We were all excited over the prospect of producing puppies from a sire that had been dead for the last twenty years. If this worked, it would surely constitute some kind of record! At least in our minds it would.

The package contained detailed instructions for how to slowly thaw and warm the sample along with the specialized media it would be mixed with in a water bath of an exact temperature, for a specific length of time. Dr. Hitchcock and I read and reread the instructions before beginning, and we carefully checked the temperature of our warming bath with one of our glass mercury thermometers that we ordinarily used for re**al temperatures. If the sample were allowed to become too hot or cool down below a certain temperature, the s***m cells would be shocked and die.

When the semen sample was ready, Dr. Hitchcock placed the smallest drop from the pipette on a new glass slide and positioned it on the stage of his now ancient microscope. His microscope had originally been purchased new, a lavish gift from his parents when he was accepted into vet school back in 1969. A German model, it was of the finest quality that could be had at the time, and he had taken exceptional care of it over the years. It remained our only clinical microscope, and it had continued to work well with daily use over the last several decades. Only rarely did the lightbulb need replacing.

As Dr. Hitchcock studied the slide, moving it back and forth across the stage, up and down, varying the depth of field, he let out a frustrated sigh. After several minutes, he looked up, shaking his head.

“Tom, I don’t see a single s***m cell in this sample, let alone one that is alive and moving.”

He continued to examine the slide for a few more minutes, hoping to see something. Normally we judged the overall quality of semen samples based on the relative numbers of individual s***m cells, their degree of motility, and the morphology, or shape, of each cell. We wanted to see a slide teeming with uncountable numbers of s***matozoa that moved rapidly across the slide, and we wanted to see few, if any, abnormally shaped heads and tails. But in this case, the shipped sample seemed to be devoid of any s***m cells.

Tom was understandably disappointed at the news. “Well, I’ve paid for the sample, and I don’t have to breed Sadie, so it won’t be the end of the world if she doesn’t take,” he said, rather dejectedly. “Let’s go ahead with it and inseminate the sample. We don’t have anything to lose.”

Sadie was a very large dog, weighing over 125 pounds, and she’d been inseminated before, so she didn’t object when we lifted her backend up off the ground. I sat in a cushioned office chair that was raised as high as possible, then held her rear limbs to either side of my waist, resting most of her weight on my lap. Dr. Hitchcock attached an empty syringe to the flared end of the pipette. Then, after applying copious amounts of lubricating fluid to the v***a and the other end of the pipette, he threaded the opposite end through the lips of the v***a and advanced the tube deep into the va**na. Once the sample was deposited, he withdrew the pipette and held the v***ar lips closed for a few minutes.

I held Sadie upside down in the wheelbarrow position for the next ten minutes, and then Tom and Debbie took her home. They’d return in about seven weeks for a radiograph to see if there were any puppies, but we all had our doubts. The rest of the morning was depressing to say the least. I don’t think either Tom or Debbie had much hope, either.

We didn’t hear from the Morans for several weeks, and I had pretty much forgotten the whole episode. Deep down, I didn’t anticipate we’d have any puppies. It had all seemed a disappointing waste of time and money. But then one morning, rather unexpectedly, Tom and Debbie came breezing through the front door, pulling a very large and very obviously pregnant Sadie on a long leash behind them!

We gathered around in amazement. Sadie’s abdomen was greatly distended, even for a dog her size, and her mammary glands had begun to swell with milk production.

“Has it already been seven weeks, Tom?” Dr. Hitchcock asked in surprise. “Time sure does fly!”

“Yep, seven weeks as of today. I’m positive she’s pregnant, but I wanted to get an idea of how many pups to expect.”

Dr. Hitchcock and I knelt to palpate Sadie’s tremendous abdomen. An enlarged belly doesn’t always mean pregnancy. All female dogs that are not bred during an estrous, or heat cycle, technically go through a false pregnancy. Most females show no evidence of this condition, but some develop a swollen abdomen, produce milk, and will even act out labor and find objects like toys or shoes to “nurse”. But in Sadie’s case, I felt like I could palpate more than one puppy.

We continued to stare at our patient in fascination as Cozy set up the machine for an x-ray and brought a large cassette from the dark room.

“It’s hard to believe she could have that many puppies,” Dr. Hitchcock said. “Especially with such a poor semen sample. But apparently there were a few live s***m cells in there!”

Tom and Debbie heartily agreed, glowing with pleasure at the apparent success of the insemination. All of us couldn’t wait to see the radiograph. The skeletons of canine fetuses start to mineralize and thus show up on x-rays at around 45-49 days of gestation. The total length of pregnancy in dogs is about 63 days on average, so the pups can usually be first detected radiographically at about two weeks prior to birth.

Tom and I helped Dr. Hitchcock lift the giant dog up onto the treatment table and then coax her to lie on her side for a lateral view of her abdomen. Dr. Hitchcock adjusted the collimator light on the x-ray unit, centering the beam on the distended belly rising before us like a massive mountain. After measuring the height of Sadie’s abdomen, he calculated the exposure settings and adjusted the dials on the mobile x-ray unit we used.

About fifteen minutes later, I removed the developed film from the darkroom, still dripping water from the last rinse, and brought it out to the view box where everyone waited impatiently.

There, plain to see, were a great many number of rather large puppies, their fish-like backbones all tangled together in the enormous abdominal cavity, resembling nothing so much as a platter of fish served up on the comic strip Garfield. We usually counted the rounded skulls in order to estimate the number of pups, but an exact count wasn’t really needed as we planned a caesarian section anyway.

“Phew, Tom! That is a large litter. How many pups do you count, Jason?” Dr. Hitchcock asked.

“I see at least eleven heads,” I replied.

“That’s how many I see, too!” he agreed.

Tom and Debbie grinned with pride, and Sadie, glad to finally be back on the solid tiled floor, wagged her head and joined in the general merriment. It was hard to believe the dog was pregnant, let alone with eleven pups! And from a twenty-year-old semen sample that didn’t seem to have had any viable s***m at all!

We scheduled Sadie’s surgery for two weeks later, and when the day arrived, the Morans pulled up to the clinic early that morning, pregnant dog in tow. Her protruding abdomen, impossibly larger by now, sagged close to the ground. Tom led Sadie in, the reluctant animal moving decidedly slower today, while Debbie brought up the rear with an oversized basket filled with towels and a heating pad. The couple had helped with many caesarian sections over the years and were old hands at the procedure.

Dr. Hitchcock administered a preanesthetic, although for caesarian sections, we always omitted the use of a tranquilizer. With general anesthesia, the newborns would already be somewhat depressed when they were delivered, and we avoided any sedation to try to minimize the additional depressive effects on the babies.

From years of experience, we had perfected our process for the surgery. We employed a long-tested, tried and true team effort, and in no time, Sadie was up on the table, anesthetized, and positioned on her back. Dr. Hitchcock quickly shaved the hair and prepped the abdomen with surgical scrub, coating it with a final layer of the dark brown povidone iodine antiseptic solution. The surgery pack was opened and positioned on the instrument tray at the foot of the surgery table, with sterile packs of suture and scalpel dumped out onto the drape of the pack. He and I gloved up and draped off the abdomen, and literally within minutes of inducing anesthesia, the dog’s abdomen was opened, the large, bicornuate uterus carefully lifted from the abdomen, one horn at a time, and splayed open on the sterile drape like a lumpy oversized letter “Y”. The massive organ required several additional hands under the drape to support each arm of the uterus while we extracted the pups one by one. Time was of the essence; the longer it took to get the puppies out, the more depressed they could be, and the longer it would take to revive them.

Making an incision near the confluence of the two horns of the uterus, we removed the first pup and handed it off to Cozy. Standing at the nearby sink, she deftly stripped away the placental membranes, clamped and severed the umbilical cord, then handed the damp newborn off to one of our assistants. By the time she had finished with the first pup, we had pushed the next pup along one horn of the uterus and out of the incision. One by one, each pup was delivered and the uterus, deprived of its precious cargo, slowly shrunk dramatically in size. The timing for delivery had been precise, since we knew the exact and only date of insemination. Each pup was already wriggling before it could be liberated from the fluid-filled amniotic sacs surrounding it, and in no time the raucous sound of crying puppies filled the air. These puppies needed little stimulation to begin to breathe, and as they filled their lungs with new air, their faces and feet rapidly turned a brilliant pink color from oxygenation.

Once each of the eleven pups were delivered, the crew assisting in the room next door wiped it down, aspirating the mouth and nostrils with a bulb syringe and slinging the puppy upside down through the air in a wide arc while supported to clear any remaining fluid from the airway. Finally, after drying the baby off, the umbilical cord was tied with a length of suture and a healthy dose of antiseptic applied to the raw end. Each puppy then joined its siblings in Debbie’s large cozy basket. The growing mound of squealing newborns thrashed about under the heated towels, with additional warmth provided by a heating pad set on low underneath the basket.

Meanwhile, back in the surgery room, I assisted Dr. Hitchcock with closing the incision in the uterus. Using absorbable suture, he drew the edges of the defect together with a simple continuous pattern. Once he reached the end of the incision, he doubled back and inverted the original incision to reduce the possibility of adhesions. We replaced the uterus in the abdominal cavity, and Dr. Hitchcock quickly closed the abdomen by suturing together the linea alba, followed by the subcutaneous tissue. Using a Ford interlocking pattern, he neatly apposed the skin, and then we turned Sadie onto her side. We were done in record time, and the healthy screams of the vigorous litter of puppies next door punctuated the end of the surgery. I turned the gas anesthesia vaporizer off, and within minutes, Sadie was already swallowing and chewing at her endotracheal tube. We extubated her, and with Tom’s help lifted her onto a blanket on the floor. Soon, our recently anesthetized patient was already trying to stand to her feet. Wobbling, she began to make her way toward the chorus of cries from her newly born litter of puppies.

Tom and Debbie were more than happy with the results. Despite the low chance of success, Tom’s gamble had improved an already excellent mastiff bloodline, all with a progenitor that no longer lived. I’d never seen pups born to a dead sire, let alone one that had died twenty years before! As I thought about it, the father of this litter of pups died when I was still a young boy! Although a fairly common procedure now, artificial insemination and the use of frozen semen in dogs had still been a relatively newer development, rarely done, back when our sire was collected two decades before. In fact, Tom told us that the semen samples were obtained and stored at the veterinary school at Virginia Tech. And yet, somehow that semen had remained viable today, all these years later. What a miracle of modern medicine indeed! It was all very impressive, even if I’d helped just a little bit!

We never forgot the unbelievable story of the twenty-years deceased s***m donor that fathered a beautiful litter of thriving Bullmastiffs, and we’ve told this tale many times over the years. There have been other instances, too, where we inseminated dogs with frozen or chilled semen samples that seemed to be of poor quality, and yet the females went on to have rather large litters. The lesson learned here was to never underestimate the power of a single s***m cell. A normal sample may have hundreds of millions of individual s***m cells, so even a poor sample can’t be discounted! Anything is possible and against all odds, life usually finds a way!

Excerpt from A Company of Paws © 2025 Jason K. Macomson All Rights Reserved

A Company of Paws is expected to be released next summer. In the meantime, if you haven't read it yet, look for my first novel about veterinary medicine, Red Barn Tales, available on Amazon or many other online retailers!

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11/30/2025

Everyone knows the holiday season revolves around food and family, four-legged members included.

11/23/2025

A. new excerpt from my upcoming novel, A Company of Paws.

Thanksgiving

Lavonia Animal Hospital is a small animal rural practice, and for many years, emergency clinics did not exist this far out in the country. There were no area hospitals close by that provided emergency veterinary care at night, and solo practitioners had to fill this gap. Our life revolved around working all day long and then answering emergencies each evening. The telephone began to ring the moment we reached home, or sat down to eat supper, and the calls continued all through the evening. Some nights were better than others, but we were always on call, and we tried our best to follow the sacred rule: “you must attend.” Many nights, I envied my human counterparts who I assumed were able to leave work each day and have their evenings free from emergency calls. And maybe they worked more in hospitals outside their daily office schedule than I realized. But it would be many years before veterinary medicine caught up with human medicine in this respect and adopted the model where patients would see their doctor during regular hours and go to emergency clinics for afterhours emergencies. And this change was even later in coming to our area, because cost was always a huge factor for clients.

As winter loomed that first year, so, too, came the holiday season in full force. After Halloween, Thanksgiving rapidly approached, and it was one of the most cherished seasons of the year where people were off work and celebrated extended time with their families. This first year out in practice had been extremely busy, and I was exhausted by the time Thanksgiving rolled around, glad to finally anticipate some extra time off. At the clinic, we always closed for Thanksgiving Day along with the following Friday and Saturday. Since we closed at noon on Wednesdays, this gave us a very long weekend to rest. However, the extra time off meant I’d also have to man the phone (or in my case, the pager) and answer any emergencies that might arise.

Thanksgiving and Christmas can be challenging times for veterinarians. It is all too common for humans to feed their beloved pets holiday foods and special treats that may not be the best for their furry children. Dogs will also get into garbage cans loaded with leftover food from the Thanksgiving and Christmas dinner table. Vomiting and diarrhea, often due to pancreatitis, is a very common ailment, as is toxicity from certain table foods that are nontoxic to humans but can make animals very sick, such as onions, grapes, garlic and other seasonings. Holiday food is heavily laden with fats. The grease from grilled or fried chicken, steak, and pork products in general, all combine to form a recipe for stomach upset and are best avoided. And then there are all the desserts, loaded with sugars and other sweet ingredients. We always field a lot of calls about chocolate ingestion during this time of year. Despite the intense media focus on chocolate, it is often less of a problem than some of the other seasonal foods and treats. The rich baker’s chocolate and cocoa powder pose the greatest threat to dogs due to the high content of theobromine and caffeine, but it all depends on what kind and how much chocolate a dog has ingested, as well as the size of the animal.

The holidays can be tough on older dogs and cats with chronic illnesses, too. There is something about Thanksgiving and Christmas that pushes people to make a decision, on the day of the holiday, that it is finally time for humane euthanasia for their elderly, chronically ill pet. I think during the holidays when routines are altered and people are at home for lengthy periods with their pets, they really observe their companions closely and focus more on the animal’s deteriorating quality of life. So there are frequent calls and requests for euthanasia on Thanksgiving Day and on Christmas Day in particular.

In the end, except for three calls, my Thanksgiving weekend that first year turned out to be rather slow. Two out of the three emergencies, amazingly enough, involved choking animals. In practice, I have only seen a few cases where an animal was actually choking with a blocked airway, although it was a common presenting complaint. Many pet owners mistakenly believed their animal was choking, but when examined, it often turned out to be something else. Maybe a harsh cough or a sore throat, or inflammation caused by something the animal attempted to ingest or even managed to swallow, but that caused irritation on the way down the throat and esophagus.

A hallmark of actual choking usually involves a frantic animal that is clawing at its mouth. The mouth may hang open, accompanied by heavy drool, and rarely a visual bulge in the throat area might be present where something is lodged. When owners call to say that their pet is choking, a few questions can help ascertain whether or not this is truly the case.

“Did you see your pet ingest something?”

“Is he coughing?”

“Is the animal pawing at the mouth?”

“Is there any vomiting?”

“Is your pet eating and drinking?”

I don’t know how many times an owner has called, worried their animal is choking. They are usually referring to an obstruction of the glottis, the opening to the airway, but most “choking” episodes I’ve dealt with involved an esophageal choke, where something was lodged in the throat and esophagus. Regardless, the frazzled client is almost certain that their pet tried to swallow something that is now stuck in its airway. But when questioned closely, although there is a terrible cough, the dog isn’t necessarily having trouble breathing, isn’t pawing at its mouth, and is actually eating and drinking. An animal that can swallow food and water and isn’t struggling to breath likely isn’t choking on anything. Clients, consumed with worry, often jump to the worst possible conclusion about the condition of their beloved companion, and thankfully many cases are not as serious as the owner first feared, at least in regard to an airway obstruction.

When presented with a possible choking scenario, I often thought back to a case I observed during my senior year of vet school. A veterinarian out in neighboring Bogart west of Athens had referred a patient to the teaching hospital for choking. The dog had initially presented to the referral vet with dyspnea, or difficulty breathing. Convinced the dog was choking, she’d radiographed the neck. She advised us that the dog had swallowed a squirrel, and she could see the bones of the animal on the x-ray where it was stuck in the throat. When the dog came in, the attending clinician and resident examined the radiographs that were sent over carefully, but the referral vet had mistakenly identified the bones of the hyoid apparatus as the “squirrel”. The hyoid apparatus is a group of small bones that support the tongue and suspend the larynx, the voice box which surrounds and forms the opening to the windpipe. There was no squirrel and the patient was not choking. Rather, it was dyspneic because it had congestive heart failure. After that case, I was always conscious of not ever mistaking the hyoid apparatus on radiographs for something else!

The Wednesday evening before Thanksgiving, I received a call about a choking dog. The lady on the telephone was surprisingly calm about the whole thing.

“I gave my dog a large rawhide chew, and he’s choking on it.”

“Did you see him actually swallow, or try to swallow, the piece of rawhide?” I asked.

“Yes, it was a rather large chunk. He gobbled it down fast to try to keep my other dog from stealing it from him.”

“Is he pawing at his mouth or acting visibly disturbed?” This follow-up question is often answered negatively. But not tonight.

“Yes. He’s a little Dachshund, and I can see a huge bulge in his neck. It’s stuck fast there and he’s frantic, digging at his mouth nonstop.”

Hmm, I thought to myself. Maybe he really has something stuck in his throat.

“Is he having any trouble breathing?”

“No, he seems like he can breathe okay, but that lump is huge. And he’s just sitting with his mouth slightly hanging open and drooling. Can you look at him tonight?”

From her description, it sounded like her dog was affected with an esophageal choke of sorts. The object in question was caught in the throat and maybe extending down into the esophagus. Had it been an obstructed windpipe, he’d have been in dire straits and unable to breath.

“Sure, I can look at him. Can you come on down? Where are you coming from?”

“I’m in Martin, I can be there in about 20 minutes.” Martin was a small community just north of Lavonia, a collection of historic homes and businesses huddled together along the flanks of Highway 17 as it meandered north toward the much larger city of Toccoa.

Half an hour later, the lady carried her little black dog into the clinic and deposited him on the exam table. I stared in fascination at the noticeable swelling in his neck. I’d never seen that happen before.

She smiled nervously as I stepped up to examine her dog. “This is Boscoe. Be careful, he’s a rascal, and he’ll bite you in a heartbeat.”

I laughed in response to her no-nonsense warning. “I appreciate the heads-up!”

While she positioned his head and used her fingers as a makeshift muzzle of sorts, I carefully palpated the mass on the ventral surface, or underside of the dog’s neck. It was firm and unyielding, and Boscoe grimaced a little as I pressed the irregular folds of skin stretched over the object. I could almost imagine the soggy ball of rawhide, crumpled up and compressed in his pharynx. I would have loved to open his mouth for a better look, but that was out of the question. Boscoe flicked his eyes nervously from me to his owner, and he lifted his lips in a snarl. Without a doubt, he’d bite if I attempted an oral exam.

Some rawhide is processed into chews by extruding ground up, liquified pieces of skin that are then formed and baked into a hard shape. If swallowed successfully, the substance melts into a liquid once again when it reaches the stomach. I don’t think I ever saw an intestinal obstruction from ingestion of rawhide because of liquification. But in this case, the dog had greedily tried to swallow such a large piece that it was wedged tightly in the pharynx, or throat. It would have to be removed under anesthesia.

I explained to the client what needed to be done. We would give Boscoe a preanesthetic, followed a few minutes later by a short-acting induction agent. The second drug would not last very long, but it might give me enough time to reach in with a pair of forceps and extract the glob stuck within the throat.

Boscoe growled and tried to lunge at me when I gave him a subcutaneous injection of preanesthetic, but luckily his owner was holding him tightly. The sedative succeeded in slowing him down, and after about ten minutes, his head was hanging low, a dazed expression on his face.

Now that he was much quieter, Boscoe’s owner easily held him while I administered an intravenous dose of anesthesia. He stared wild-eyed for a moment before collapsing on the table, unmoving and unconscious.

I quickly taped the syringe of anesthetic to his foreleg and then opened his mouth wide. Boscoe lay unresisting, and there, just beyond the base of the tongue, I could see the huge lump of rawhide rising into view. I passed the blades of a long pair of forceps into his narrow mouth and clamped the sturdy tips down onto a piece of the stuck rawhide. Then I applied steady tension. At first, nothing happened, and I was apprehensive that the jaws of my forceps would just tear away from the main chunk of rawhide. But I needn’t have worried, because after a slow, anguished moment of doubt, the whole gooey mass began to slide inexorably back toward the opening of his mouth.

Alternately stunned and amazed, his owner and I watched as an impossibly large hunk of mushy, wet rawhide glided backwards out of Boscoe’s mouth. The piece of rawhide was soggy and already partially dissolving from the dog’s saliva, which coated its surface and helped lubricate its reverse passage. I dropped the sopping wet ball on the tabletop with a loud “plop”, and Boscoe’s owner breathed a huge sigh of relief. Like a pregnant belly suddenly relieved of its burden, the neck quickly deflated to its normal size.

I smiled at my client; this was yet another first, but at least it had been a problem that was easily solved.

She smiled back in return, full of gratitude. “I promise I’ll never give him a piece of rawhide again.”

“I wholeheartedly agree with you. And this could have been much worse, if the rawhide had caught in his windpipe. It might have interfered with breathing, and he could have died. Or it could have become stuck much farther down in the esophagus, making it even harder to retrieve.”

We watched Boscoe for several minutes and waited until he was able to sit in a sternal position and hold up his head, and then I let his owner take him home with instructions on how to care for him that evening as he gradually awakened.

Thanksgiving Day was uneventful. I enjoyed celebrating the holiday both over at the lake with the Hitchcocks and then later with my sisters and my dad and his new wife and stepchildren. My stepmother prepared a large meal at the old white house on Luckie Street where the large group gathered for dinner. My mother had moved to California a few years back, and although my sisters and I could not see her, we did talk with her on the telephone.

Surprisingly, there were no calls on Thursday. On Friday, I attended a vomiting Labrador. The retriever had gobbled up a large volume of grease that dripped from the owner’s grill on Thursday afternoon following their Thanksgiving meal. By Friday, the already obese animal was vomiting and had developed a severe case of diarrhea. Pancreatitis posed a significant risk for such cases, but when I examined her, she was bright and alert and seemed to be in an overall stable condition. I treated her symptomatically with medications to control the vomiting and nausea, along with an antidiarrheal paste. I recommended the clients feed a bland diet for a few days, and hopefully she’d be feeling much better within a day or so.

Late Saturday evening, I received another emergency page. When I called the owner back, it was yet another choking case. This time, the owner was frantic.

“I threw out the leftovers from Thanksgiving dinner, along with a turkey neck. Before I could stop them, all four of my dogs rushed out the door and onto the back deck. They began to fight over the food, and my Dachshund swallowed the whole piece of the neck. I’m pretty sure it’s stuck in his throat.”

Without even having to ask, she described the choking dog perfectly. “He’s pawing wildly at his mouth, it’s hanging wide open, and I can just see the end of the bone in the back of his throat. He’s breathing, but it’s very rapid. I’m not sure he’s getting enough air.”

Fortunately, she lived only a short distance from Lavonia, and she met me at the clinic a little while later. The dog, for his condition, was in surprisingly good shape. He was occasionally pawing at his mouth, trying in vain to get at something that was just beyond his reach. I could see his oral mucous membranes, which were still pink, so his perfusion was good, and he was receiving sufficient oxygen.

With a sense of déjà vu, the owner held the dog’s head while I gently palpated his neck. Unlike my case a few days earlier, there was not a large visible mass in his neck externally, as with the patient who’d swallowed the piece of rawhide. But I could palpate part of the turkey neck in the esophagus behind the trachea.

I turned back to my client. “I’m afraid we’ll have to anesthetize him to try to remove it. But it could be difficult to remove,” I warned her. “There are boney projections extending off each vertebral body that might be oriented so that they point backward, like the spines of a grass awn seed. The points will dig into the walls of the throat as I pull it backwards. There might be tearing, which could lead to severe complications. But it has to be removed somehow.”

She nodded in agreement, and I excused myself to get a sedative. Before I administered the drug, I auscultated the dog’s thorax. His heart rate was elevated, but there were no murmurs, and I could hear clear breath sounds on both sides.

Within a few minutes, the dog, this time named Stewart, was groggy. I had his owner carry him back to the surgery table, where the lighting was much better, and we laid him on a warm towel before inducing anesthesia with an intravenous injection. Stewart grew limp and relaxed as the anesthetic drug took hold, and I quickly opened his mouth and pulled his tongue forward for a better look.

The rough end of the turkey neck extended into the oral cavity near the pharyngeal opening. There wasn’t a lot of room in the crowded space, but from what I could tell, the object seemed to be lodged deep in the throat and into the esophagus. Just as I feared, I could see the spines of the vertebral processes extending from each individual vertebra, oriented in a reverse direction toward me. I would have to try to slide the whole thing backwards, in the same direction that the spines projected, and this would make it very challenging to extract the turkey neck. Each piece of bone would dig into the surrounding soft tissue, impeding its removal and possibly tearing the delicate tissue.

I used a large pair of ronjeurs, powerful bone cutting forceps with strong beak-like jaws, to reach in and grasp part of the last vertebral body. Gently pulling, I tried to remove the large piece of bone, while Stewart’s owner anxiously watched near the door.

The turkey neck barely budged, even as I carefully tried to rotate it slightly and wriggle it from side to side. Nothing seemed to dislodge it, and I glanced up at the lady in frustration. Mesmerized, her eyes wide, she stared from me to the handle of the forceps protruding from her dog’s mouth.

Somewhat concerned she might pass out, I gently suggested she go have a seat in one of the chairs near our x-ray table. She could still watch, but there was less danger of falling to the floor and injuring herself. We’d had several clients faint at the most inopportune times and fall to the floor. One evening, a man fell backwards and cracked his skull on the tiled floor as Dr. Hitchcock performed emergency surgery on his dog. Thankfully he was okay, but we were always watchful for the client that might become overwhelmed and pass out. And it could happen with little warning.

A little embarrassed, but still grateful, Stewart’s owner headed over to one of the rolling chairs I’d indicated and slid it near to the surgery room door. Here, even seated, she could continue to observe what was happening.

I turned back and studied Stewart’s open throat. I was hesitant to try to break up the bone into smaller fragments, out of fear the smaller pieces might either drop into his windpipe or slide further down the esophagus. His epiglottis, the protective flap of cartilage covering the entrance to his trachea, was squished back, leaving the unprotected glottal opening somewhat exposed. But removing the entire neck risked tearing the walls of the throat and the esophagus. I gently pulled some more, applying slow and steady tension, much as I had with the ball of rawhide a few days before. Slowly the whole piece began to ease backwards, but the projecting spines of bone grabbed at the surrounding walls of the throat, threatening to become embedded. I groaned inwardly. How was I going to get this thing out without causing major damage?

In the end, there was only one choice, and that was to gradually pull the whole thing backwards and hope for the best. Grabbing a larger chunk of the exposed bone, I took a deep breath and began to pull in earnest, applying slow, steady tension. After a few tense moments, it began to slide back, little by little. Occasionally I stopped and slid the long blades of a pair of Doyen intestinal clamps into the gaps between the bone and the pharynx, then opened and gently spread the jaws apart, trying to make more room. Amazingly enough, after a few tense minutes, the whole thing, lubricated somewhat by saliva, slid came out in one piece. I waved the turkey neck triumphantly in the air for the owner to see. The long, irregular length of bone was about four inches long, dripping with strings of saliva. Bug-eyed, she stared in shock before getting up to turn away.

“I’m going out front for some fresh air,” she said rather weakly as she stood and excused herself, heading back up the hall. I peeked my head around the corner of the surgery door to watch and be sure she made it up to the lobby without fainting. When the front door opened and close again as she went outside, I turned back to inspect the dog’s mouth and throat further.

From everything I could see, there were no tears in the pharynx and no sign of any blood. The esophagus would be a little more difficult to evaluate than the throat. We didn’t have an endoscope, which would have helped me examine the walls farther down along the length of the upper portion of the esophagus. But we did have a bright ophthalmoscope light that I used to supplement the overhead surgery light. Everything that was visible appeared to be in order, and when I eased the epiglottis back, there was no obstruction or damage to the airway. Stewart was already beginning to lift his head and chew, trying to close his mouth against my fingers. I decided that we’d just have to put him on a soft diet and monitor him carefully over the next week for signs of a torn esophagus. If his esophagus was compromised, he’d wind up in much more serious condition than he appeared to be right now.

After Stewart was more or less awake, I sent him home with instructions to feed a soft diet for the next few days and monitor for coughing (there was bound to be some) and for signs of swelling in the neck region. I wouldn’t be surprised if there weren’t ulcerations in the pharynx, and the soft diet would help ease any discomfort until healing could occur. I gave his owner a liquid antibiotic that would be easier to administer than a capsule or tablet, and I asked her to bring him back on the following Monday to recheck. We’d evaluate him for complications at that time.

Stewart had a rough end to his holiday that year, and I hoped his owner would be much more careful of how she disposed of turkey leftovers in the future. She brought Stewart back early the next week, and he was totally normal. Typical of temperamental Dachshunds, he lunged at me the second I approached the exam table, showing all of his teeth and daring me to get any closer. He must have retained some memory of his prior traumatic evening at the clinic, because he was nursing a heavy grudge against me! Still, there was no swelling or pain in his neck, his owner reported that he was swallowing food normally, and his temperature wasn’t elevated. In short, Stewart made a full recovery, and for that, I was very thankful. But he and his fellow patient, Boscoe, had made for a very interesting and memorable first Thanksgiving as a practicing veterinarian. I don’t think I’ll ever forget those two dogs, but I’m sure they forgot me in no time flat!

Excerpt from A Company of Paws © 2025 Jason K. Macomson All Rights Reserved

A Company of Paws is expected to be released next summer. In the meantime, if you haven't read it yet, look for my first novel about veterinary medicine, Red Barn Tales, available on Amazon or at many other online retailers.

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