Deanna Sebion, CVT, and I just got done performing stomach gavage (flushing) on a mallard duck and a trumpeter swan with lead poisoning.

The procedure consists of anesthetizing the patient with a tube down its trachea (to administer gas anesthesia), then gently placing a hollow tube into its stomach. We then flush copious amounts of water into the stomach and allow gravity to work its magic and let all the water flush back out of the animal’s mouth (hopefully with pieces of lead in it!).

While somebody is flushing the water in via syringes, a second person is gently massaging the birds stomach and gently shaking them to encourage the water to pass back out of the animal’s mouth. We then take an xray to determine if all the lead was successfully removed or not (lead particles show up bright white on xrays).

Today, our flushings of both the mallard and swan were a success!! Now that the lead is out (which is the hard part), we will keep them on therapy with daily CaEDTA injections (a medication that binds to the lead in the bloodstream making it inactive). The recovery process can take many weeks, so only time will tell at this point. Hopefully they both make a full recovery!

Have to run now…a white breasted nuthatch just arrived!

This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 17th, 2010 at 4:51 pm and is filed under Medical News, Vet Leslie's Posts. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.