Remember the old television series “Little House on the Prairie”? Harriet and Nels Oleson owned the local general store, a classic white clapboard building where they worked on the ground floor and lived upstairs with their children. I often think about “Mom and Pop” businesses like this, where the kids grow up running around their parents’ place of work. Such childhoods used to be common, but are disappearing from modern life.
My kids grew up in my veterinary clinic, which is attached to our home. As infants, we had bassinets in the exam room, bouncy chairs on the counter, coloring books in the waiting room. As toddlers, they were kept out of the office unless closely supervised, but by the time each was 5 or 6, they would often hang out with me and interact with my patients, especially the puppies and kittens. As preteens they liked to freak out their friends at our annual Halloween bash by saying we had a freezer full of bodies in the basement. (Sad, but true. One develops a certain level of black sense of humor as the child of a veterinarian.)
When my younger daughter, Sydney, moved away from home, it was not uncommon for her to call me with veterinary questions. At college, it generally involved horses. I would have to consult textbooks or equine veterinarians I know for help, since I no longer do any large animal practice. Now Syd has graduated, and works as a pro rider in upstate New York; she still occasionally has questions for me about the horses in her care, but mostly she calls about the dogs. Yup. Plural. Dogs. Sydney and her girlfriend Xenia share their home with two long-haired mini dachshunds. Ozzy is a 12-year-old senior who has had some significant back problems, but it’s Ziggy, the puppy, who generates most of Sydney’s calls home.
“He’s just an idiot,” Sydney tells me on the phone. “He’s very cute, but so stupid.” She says this fondly, but I understand. Ziggy is a year and a half old. His nicknames are Piggy or Hoover. Because he will eat anything that falls on the floor. Anything. The first late night call was last October. Xenia had been making felt leaves for a DIY Poison Ivy Halloween costume, using an extra felt piece as a makeshift needle holder. She must have knocked it onto the floor without noticing. Later that evening, they found the felt piece in Ziggy’s crate. Without the needle.
“Could he have swallowed the needle?” Syd called me, concerned. I have seen several cats swallow needles. Usually it is because they are playing with the attached thread. I have surgically removed one needle from a cat’s intestines, one from where it migrated through the cat’s esophagus to poke out behind the shoulder, one that was deeply embedded in the roof of the cat’s mouth. I also saw one that surprisingly passed all the way through the cat’s digestive tract uneventfully, coming out in the feces. I have seen a boxer puppy who swallowed a closed box of pins that opened in his stomach. He survived after his veterinarian surgically removed them all. I have seen dogs ingest safety razors, broken glass, popsicle sticks, rocks, toys, super balls — but never a needle.
“How is he acting?” I asked. Ziggy was feeling completely fine. Was it possible the needle had fallen out of the felt and was somewhere on the floor? Maybe, but search as they might, they couldn’t find it. I advised feeding him high-fiber foods like squishy white bread, or canned asparagus, which work well to wad up around sharp objects, then to call their local veterinarian in the morning. In my heart of hearts, I doubted the dog had swallowed the needle.
I was wrong. Two days later, after Ziggy began vomiting, he went to the veterinarian, where they were able to remove the needle from his stomach using an endoscope. Ziggy made a full recovery, and I felt remiss that I had not sent them to their veterinarian immediately.
Fast-forward to last Friday night. I was falling asleep in front of the television after a really long week. “Can I ask you a question?” Syd texts me. Hmmm. My kids know me well. After 44 years of fielding emergency calls, I hate being asked veterinary stuff after hours. But it’s my kid. And she lives hundreds of miles away. “What’s up?” I texted back. “Ziggy ate a single coffee bean that I accidentally dropped when pouring beans into the grinder. I looked it up and it said he could get caffeine toxicity. Is this true, and do I need to take him to the emergency vet?”
First, I was proud of her for looking it up before calling me. Next I wondered why she was making coffee at 10 o’clock at night. Finally I realized I had never seen a case of coffee bean ingestion. They didn’t have anything at their house to induce vomiting, so I needed to determine the risk. A quick online search of my veterinary database confirmed that dogs can get seriously ill, even die, from coffee ingestion. Since in toxicology “the dose makes the poison,” it was time to do the math.
Syd confirmed the maximum number of beans eaten was two. I googled to learn the average coffee bean weighs 0.12 to 0.17 grams. I consulted texts to find that one coffee bean typically has 6 mg of caffeine. What I couldn’t find was the minimum dose that would be cause for concern in a 10-pound dog. I decided to call the Pet Poison Hotline for a consultation. I didn’t want to make another faux pas like my “he probably didn’t eat the needle” advice. The toxicologist responded promptly. Ten coffee beans would be the lowest cause for concern for Ziggy. “I’m going to bed,” I told them. “You can too.” That’s life with a puppy, or a “vacuum-cleaner dog,” as Sydney calls him. Cute, but stupid.
