Oklahoma State University(OSU) veterinarians save six-month old puppy.

Oklahoma State University veterinarians needed to perform a life-saving procedure on six-month old puppy.The procedure had never been done before at OSU’s Veterinary Medical Hospital but Marley’s owners, Marcene and Fred Warford of Muskogee, Oklahoma, had faith the veterinarians would be able to help their golden retriever puppy.The dog was vomiting, had diarrhea and would go into stupors, just really zone out(oblivious) of environment. When the dog was examined and they found a shunt, a diversion of blood, in Marley’s liver that wasn’t operable by a traditional laparotomy, where they go in through the belly and try to put a constriction device on that. The shunt was inside of the liver so they gave us a call. They knew we had the equipment to do the procedure,but had not done it before. Baumwart and his colleague, Dr. Andrew Hanzlicek, a small animal internal medicine specialist, invited a professor from Purdue University to help out. The doctors carried out the surgery and the prognosis is positive ,they made a very small incision in the neck to put a catheter in that allowed us to inject dye to outline the abnormal blood vessel that we needed to try to decrease the amount of blood flow. Once we did that, we were able to size a stent that went into the vena cava. The stent held the device in place that we needed to put into the abnormal blood vessel,they also had a plugging device outside of the stent. The idea was to decrease the amount of blood flow through this vessel that was a shunt around the liver. The liver is the detoxification center of the body and blood was actually getting bypassed around the liver, so by closing this shunt, blood can be put back into the liver and allow the dog to act more normally once the detoxification occurs in the blood. The procedure was a minimally invasive procedure : the dog had two very small incisions in his neck,instead of a large abdominal incision . The entire procedure was done through the vein This is to allow the dog recovers more quickly and with minimal pain. Source; NEWSOK