[Dailydrool] Sometimes vets don't know everything

[Pat Dill]

Our basset Sadie has been dealing with recurrent urinary tract infections 
for many months.  We finally took her to the internist in Pittsburgh because 
we wanted to rid her of the problem for once and for all.  (Our dearly 
departed Kelly passed away from a highly resistant kidney infection, and we 
always wondered if we waited too long to get her to a specialist.)  Anyway, 
when they get a new patient, the practice does an extremely thorough initial 
exam including a complete history of everything she's every taken, every 
condition she's ever had, etc.  We take our guys to the vet a lot (they're 
all elderly), so it was quite a long process.  Then they checked and tested 
everything you can think of:  blood, urine, stool, an abdominal ultrasound. 
Ka-ching, ka-ching, nothing's too good for our Sadie.  But it was the vet's 
description of the stool sample that gave us pause.

"The stool was soft and contained multiple, small, hard, orange-red objects 
(plastic?).

What?  Our Sadie's stool contained PLASTIC!!??  How could this be?

Then it dawned on us.  Sadie always gets a baby-cut carrot after every meal. 
It's good for her teeth, and she likes them.  As has been thoroughly 
documented previously in the Drool, carrots don't digest very well.  So what 
they observed were not stools laced with mysterious orange-red plastic 
objects but plain old carrot poop!

We're still laughing....

(PS:  Despite the mis-step on the stool analysis they determined that she 
had a highly resistant infection that was only sensitive to a VERY expensive 
antibiotic.  But it seems to have done the trick, and our Sadie appears to 
be as good as new.)