Just after the Christmas break I had a patient called Boris- an 18month old cat. He was presented with vomiting and a reluctance to eat and he was lethargic. Boris was obviously dehydrated and when I opened his mouth I could see some purple cotton-like string stuck around the base of his tongue. He had a painful abdomen and a slight fever. I admitted Boris to remove the string I knew was anchored around his tongue and going all the way through his stomach and into his intestines. Boris had been sick for four days since Christmas Eve.

Where was the string from?- It had been used to tie the Christmas cards together to hang them as Christmas decorations. Boris’s owners had seen him playing with the string and just thought it was cute- they didn’t realise what a disaster was happening.

Boris was immediately put on an intravenous drip to start correcting his dehydration. When I anaesthetised him I could see the string from around his tongue going down his oesophagus- there was a large knot of it. As I cut the string away from his tongue it disappeared down to his stomach.

We prepared Boris for surgery and I made an abdominal incision to have a look….

All the lymph nodes in his abdomen were enlarged and inflamed and his stomach and intestines appeared inflamed. His intestines were thickened along one edge and had lost their natural ‘flexibility’, instead they felt rigid.

It took me a total of two hours and multiple incisions in his intestines and one incision in his stomach to remove all the string. The string was deeply embedded into the tissue of his intestinal wall and you can’t just pull it out through one incision because it causes a ‘consitina’ effect.

Boris stayed in the hospital for three days in total. He wasn’t allowed anything to eat or drink for the first 24 hours. His dehydration was corrected with the intravenous drip which was continued for another two days.

He was obviously given plenty of pain-killers!

On the second day he was started on liquid food and I knew he was feeling better because he was really hungry!

Boris didn’t get back onto solid food for a whole week.

He is back to normal now, eating well and playing again, he hasn’t been sick at all and is passing normal motions. His abdominal wound has healed well and now he just needs his hair to grow back!

In total his owners spent in the region of £700- string-tied cards proved to be a very expensive Christmas decoration!

Boris could have died from this. At least I got to him before his intestines perforated.

Unfortunately Boris will now have scars in his intestines, causing narrowing, where I made the incisions and he will have scarring throughout his abdomen from the intervention. I hope this doesn’t cause problems in his future but this is a recognised potential complication from any intestinal surgery.

So this mishap was a welfare issue for Boris and a stressful, upsetting and expensive incident for his owners. Please protect your cats from this potential hazard…

The moral of the story is DON’T GIVE ANY STRING-LIKE OBJECTS TO YOUR CAT!!!

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