I volunteered at our small animal clinic yesterday afternoon. Although we didn't see any emergencies, we certainly had a full house! Several of our patients were just hanging out after having limb fractures repaired (unfortunately we see a lot of hit by car animals here), but two had a very surprising differential diagnosis-botulism toxicity.
Both dogs turned out to be housemates who had initially presented for care after the owner noticed all her dogs were flat out and foaming at the mouth. Sadly, one died at home before the other two made it in for treatment. One of the dogs was doing so well yesterday that he was discharged to go home, the other is stable but still in fairly critical condition. So how does one suspect botulism toxicity in a dog? Well, mainly be reviewing the symptoms. The hallmark symptom for botulism is flaccid paralysis (aka "floppy" paralysis). This dog is completely flaccid, apart from being able to open its eyes and lick with its tongue (which are good signs!). As far as I know, treatment is basically just supportive care and time. Apparently in humans they have antitoxin, but I haven't heard of any for animals. Which makes sense, this isn't very common in people and has to be even rarer in animals (except for maybe horses eating from big round bales of hay, but that's another story!).
Our anatomy exam was tough! Fortunately everyone seemed to feel the same way and murmurings from the professor indicated that the class average was extremely low. The questions were very nit-picky and I felt a little bit mislead on what the areas of focus where. Oh well. Exam #7 is now complete. Next up? Midterms! Let the stress and major studying begin tomorrow!
Sleep? I got 5 hours of sleep last night because I stayed up extra to study. Turns out that was a waste of time! Oh well. I took a 4 hour nap today to compensate haha.
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