What are the risks if your dog has ingested sanitary napkins or tampons? And how to react if this mishap happens to you?
My dog ate sanitary napkins or tampons: what are the risks?
Some dogs, drawn to the smell of blood, may search the toilet or bathroom trash cans for used sanitary pads too. Gobble them up without further ado.
This behaviour – beyond the disgust it can inspire – is not without risk for the health of the dog. Whether your dog has swallowed sanitary napkins or tampons, the major risk he faces is digestive obstruction.
Swallowed protections can indeed remain blocked in the stomach or come “to clog & nbsp;” his intestines and cause his intestinal transit to stop. The clinical signs of this occlusion can appear within 24 to 72 hours after ingestion of the foreign bodies and are: vomiting, diarrhoea which may be tinged with blood or conversely a complete cessation of defecation, a refusal of s ‘feeding, depression and abdominal pain. One of the signs of this pain in dogs is adopting the prior posture: front legs on the ground and buttocks up.
A bowel obstruction that is not taken care of in time can, in turn, be complicated by a rupture of the intestinal wall leading to peritonitis, a very serious infection of the abdominal cavity that threatens the life of the dog.
My dog has swallowed periodic protections: how to react?
If your dog has swallowed any sanitary protection, the only thing to do is to contact your veterinarian as soon as possible after ingestion.
As much as possible, and if you know them, try to give details of the incident to your veterinarian: how many pads and/or tampons did the dog swallow? Did he take the time to shred them before ingesting them? When did the incident happen?
My dog has ingested sanitary napkins or tampons: what can the vet do?
If the ingestion was less than 2 hours before you knew it, then the vet may try to induce vomiting before the ingested material enters its intestines. This can be done by injecting her with an emetic medicine to empty the contents of her stomach.
Attention!
You should never induce vomiting yourself as this practice, when not supervised by a veterinarian, can be extremely dangerous for the dog.
If the ingested elements are expelled during vomiting, the veterinarian will then prescribe a gastric bandage to the animal to limit the risk of gastritis and ask his owner to monitor him in the days following the incident. Preventively, we can add little well-cooked green beans to the dog’s bowl to help him expel any remains of periodic protection in his faeces. If, on the other hand, the dog shows the symptoms of intestinal obstruction listed above, then his veterinarian should be consulted again without delay.
If the ingestion of sanitary napkins and/or tampons is older, the veterinarian may then choose to implement medical or surgical treatment depending on the location of the foreign body in the digestive tract and the risk of digestive obstruction. Associate.
Before that, to diagnose the occlusion, he may need to take an x-ray of the animal’s abdomen. But as the material of the feminine hygienic protections is not radiopaque (it lets the rays pass and is not visible on the images), the veterinarian will have to make the dog swallow a radiopaque product as part of an examination called a barium swallow. If there is occlusion and bowel movement stop, the contrast medium will stop where the tampon or towel is stuck, indicating to the vet where to act. The diagnosis is more difficult if the occlusion is partial and it does not completely stop the transit. In this case, the veterinarian may need to perform an exploratory laparotomy. This is a surgical operation where he will have to open the abdominal cavity of the dog to make his diagnosis and intervene at the same time.
