The Mystery of the Missing Wedding Ring
GRAND RAPIDS, Mich. – When Cindy McCombs couldn’t find her wedding ring, one member of the household immediately came under suspicion.
It was Bella, a lively puppy who loves to grab things like dish towels and hide them in the backyard.
The mystery was soon solved, but only after a trip to the BluePearl Pet Hospital in Grand Rapids and the Thornwood Veterinary Clinic & Kennel in Ada.
After a long day last Saturday, Cindy had switched her custom-designed wedding ring to her pinky finger and woke up to discover it missing.
So Cindy’s husband Dan borrowed a metal detector and went through the house and yard. He was fully expecting to find the ring, a combination wedding and engagement ring which is made of rose gold and contains a pink morganite stone. Bella, a 10-month-old goldendoodle, loves to hide all sorts of things and often prances around happily as she does so.
McCombs searched and searched, but had no luck. Until he held the metal detector up to Bella’s furry belly.
Dan was suddenly sure he had found the ring – but clearly, there was more work to do. He drove Bella to Thornwood Veterinary Clinic, where an X-ray quickly confirmed that she had in fact swallowed the ring.
Thornwood recommended taking Bella to BluePearl Pet Hospital in Grand Rapids, which employs veterinarians who have taken years of advanced training to become specialists in internal medicine, oncology, surgery and more. BluePearl works closely with primary care veterinarians to provide the best possible care.
At BluePearl, Bella was examined by Dr. Kristopher Sharpe, who is board-certified in internal medicine. He and a team of skilled veterinary technicians placed Bella under anesthesia. Additional X-rays confirmed the ring was in Bella’s stomach.
An attempt to induce vomiting to get Bella to cough up the ring was not successful.
So Sharpe used an endoscope, a device with a camera on one end that Sharpe hoped would allow him to remove the ring without surgery.
“This is a flexible scope that goes in through the mouth and through the esophagus and into the stomach, where we can visualize the object itself,” Sharpe said.
He attached a tiny snare to the end of the endoscope, but it failed to snag the ring. Next he used a tiny claw, which allowed him to clasp the ring and bring it back up through the esophagus. Twenty minutes after waking from the anesthesia, Bella was romping around playfully again.
Items Dangerous for Dogs to Swallow
Cloth items. Dogs like the odor of their owners, so it’s no surprise that some end up mouthing dirty laundry that has people’s scent on it — socks, underwear, pantyhose, and the like. Some of those dogs then get carried away and swallow such undergarments whole, gulping them down and causing obstructions either in their stomach or intestines. “Owners of new puppies in particular should be very careful about leaving that stuff around the house until they know their dog doesn’t have the inclination to try to swallow everything he comes into contact with,” Dr. Berg says. In other words, use a hamper with a secure lid, or keep undone laundry locked away.
Plastic wrap that meat came in. “Dogs will fish this out of the trash,” Dr. Berg cautions. “It’s one of the biggies” in terms of what dogs swallow, and like cloth material, it can cause GI obstructions. “Don’t allow access to the garbage can,” he advises.
Discrete objects. These include everything from the aforementioned corn cob segments to the nipples on baby bottles, the pits of stone fruits, and plastic items such as little squeaky toys. Larger items, like a wad of fabric, tend to remain in the stomach. Smaller ones, like little rocks, often pass out of the stomach and then get stuck in the small intestine.
String-like objects. Called linear foreign bodies by veterinarians, these include string that was used to wrap meat and was then discarded. “Strings tend to be more of a cat problem,” Dr. Berg points out. Cats like to play with string-like objects and will swallow cassette tape, ribbon, yarn, and the like whereas dogs tend to go for big pieces of fabric or toys. “But the rules for species are not hard and fast,” he says. Dogs do end up in string trouble, too. The reason it’s so bad is that one end of the piece of string often gets stuck under the tongue or inside the stomach, and the rest of the string passes into the intestine. Because one end of the string is anchored in place, the intestine can’t pass the string, so the “intestine crawls up the string instead” to try to digest it, Dr. Berg explains. “The string can then literally saw through the intestine and cause a perforation.”
String also comes attached to fabric. A wad of fabric will get stuck in the stomach, but a string of the fabric unraveling at the edge will make its way down into the intestine and can also cause slicing into the intestinal wall.
Wood glue. “Don’t freak if your dog licks up a little glue,” says Dr. Berg. “But if a dog swallows a large quantity of white-colored wood glue, it can swell in the stomach as it hardens, up to the size of a softball, or even a cantaloupe. At that point, surgery is required to remove it.”
Uncooked cous cous. This expands in the stomach “big time,” Dr. Berg says, causing painful gastric distention. Other types of uncooked food that are hydrated during the cooking process are not as dangerous, but keeping them out of paw’s reach is still a good idea.
Post-1982 pennies. In 1982, the federal government, to save money in minting costs, decided to stop making pennies purely out of copper and instead use a combination of copper and zinc. Now, pennies have a central core composed of zinc with a ring of copper on the outside and a copper coating all around. “But zinc corrodes in stomach acid,” Dr. Berg points out, “so a dog can get zinc toxicity. That can lead to gastric ulcer, not to mention kidney failure.”
Note: Because pennies are small, it would be reasonable to assume they pass from the stomach into the small intestine and then into the large one before being passed from the body. But because pennies are heavy and dense, they tend to float to the bottom of the stomach, as if they fell to the bottom of a pool, and stay there.
Small magnets. “There’s a particularly notorious kind for dogs called Bucky Balls,” Dr. Berg says. They’re little round magnets that people will use as a desk ornament, stacking them into a pyramid shape or something like that. Another culrprit is children’s toys that have little magnets in them. If a dog swallows multiple magnets, which does happen, they can attract one another across intestinal wall sections, pinching pieces of the intestinal wall between them. That may then cause the wall to perforate. It’s rare, but we have seen it.
Teriyaki sticks. This one can be truly life-threatening. A dog can swallow a teriyaki stick whole (dogs really like them since they tend to have the odor of meat on them.) It will often pass through the esophagus just fine but end up crosswise in the stomach. “From there it pokes its way through the stomach wall and can then migrate through the body,” Dr. Berg says. “We’ve seen dogs with nasty infections in the chest cavity or abdomen. We’ve seen teriyaki sticks perforate the liver, too, and cause infections in the area of the kidneys.”
Sticks in general. A dog can easily crush a stick, which then breaks off into little splinters. And sometimes, one or more splinters can make it into the lining of the mouth and migrate from there into the neck or somewhere else in the head or face and cause an infection serious enough to require surgery. “The splinter dissolves,” Dr. Berg says, “but leaves behind an infection with an abscess — literally, a ‘pool’ of infection that becomes trapped in the tissues. We have to open up the abscess, drain it, and then put the dog on antibiotics. Most often the abscesses occur in the neck.”
Granted, Dr. Berg concedes, “many dogs can chew sticks their whole lives and never have a problem, but we see dogs here in New England pretty commonly who get infections from stick chewing. This is not just a puppy thing. Some older dogs never lose the desire to chew sticks.”
Dog owners are often told never to let their pet eat chicken bones. The fear is that a dog can easily crush a chicken bone with his teeth, causing it to splinter and then perforate the intestine. “But it’s largely an urban myth,” Dr. Berg says. “Chicken bone will almost inevitably dissolve in the stomach.
“Still, I would not make a point of letting a dog chew chicken bones,” he says. “I have had maybe two dogs in my career who swallowed pieces of chicken bone that then perforated the lining of their mouth or esophagus. So why take a chance? But don’t get hysterical if your dog gets some chicken bone before you have a chance to take it out of reach. Probably nothing’s going to happen.”
That said, there are bones that can cause dogs serious GI problems. See the box at the top right of this page.
It is always worth X-raying before any interventions, as it may be that the wedding ring is still somewhere at home – your dog having spat it out on realising it was not very tasty!
All is not lost, hopefully. If this happened in the last few minutes, then ring your veterinary practice, explain the situation and head straight over there so that your dog can be given a drug to make him sick. It should then be possible to retrieve your wedding ring from the vomit (yuk!).
In what I thought was a sensible move, I took off my wedding ring to bathe my dog. To my horror, when I turned around to pick up the sponge, my dog licked up my ring and swallowed it! What should I do?
If, however, it was a few hours ago, then I would still take your dog to the practice for an X-ray. If your ring is still in the stomach, causing vomiting is still a viable option as before. If the ring has moved into the intestines, then one can only hope that it will have a smooth passage through and it will be a matter of checking through your dog’s faeces to retrieve your ring (double yuk!). Any signs of obstruction, such as vomiting, anorexia or abdominal pain will be an indication that the ring has become stuck and surgery will be needed to remove it.
Dr Mark Swallowing Small Objects
Pantyhose, golf balls, socks, rocks, underwear, baby bottle nipples, peach pits, plastic gadgets, wood glue, magnets. No, it’s not leftover refuse found in a pile at the town dump. It’s just some of the items swallowed by dogs and then retrieved from their GI tracts by Tufts veterinarians — on a regular basis!
“Dogs will literally swallow almost anything,” says Cummings School surgeon John Berg, DVM. “I had one dog whose owners had decorative pea gravel rocks around their pool. The dog swallowed, like, 1,500 of them. We had to perform an operation to takethem out.
“Corn cobs are another one,” Dr. Berg says. “Usually it’s not a whole cob. It’s after someone has cut it into segments.
“Those dogs most inclined to swallow things are young,” notes Dr. Berg. “Be most alert to this possibility early in a dog’s life. They like playing with things, are curious about the world, and investigate with their mouths. That’s when they get into trouble.
“We do occasionally see older dogs swallow foreign objects, too,” Dr. Berg says. “And some dogs are chronic repeaters. Don’t think a dog will learn from his experience and not do it again. We’ve seen dogs go back to surgery multiple times for foreign object removal.”
Following, a list of objects that are dangerous to swallow, very dangerous, and — contrary to popular opinion — safe.