As you know Benalla Vet Clinic regularly performs advanced small animal surgeries including ‘keyhole’ abdominal surgery (laparoscopy). The following story is an example of how helpful laparoscopy can be to enable an accurate diagnosis safely and quickly.

Sunny is a gentle 13 year old Dachshund who presented with pancreatitis (inflammation of the pancreas) and also hepatitis (inflammation of the liver) as diagnosed using our in house blood analysis lab. Although hospitalised and receiving treatment, he was not improving in the time that we would normally have expected. There was concern that the illness may not have been a straight forward organ infection.  It was proposed that laparoscopy, being a minimally invasive technique, could be performed so that Dr Steph Miechel could not only view the liver and pancreas, but also obtain biopsy samples safely and accurately. 

This procedure was performed (click for a short 1 min video) and Sunny recovered very quickly from the surgery. Luckily for him the pathology report revealed a nasty infection in both liver and pancreas rather than more sinister problems that unfortunately occur frequently in older animals, such as cancer.

In the past an ‘open’ exploratory surgery would have been required to obtain the same diagnosis and samples, but the large wound created (from chest to pelvis) in order to allow the veterinary surgeon to get access into a dogs abdomen results in a slower recovery because of a much larger and more painful wound. In contrast ‘keyhole’ abdominal surgery requires two or three tiny 1cm incisions.

Sunny has made a complete recovery and illustrates how we can effectively use minimally invasive ‘keyhole’ surgery in dogs and cats to great effect with minimal trauma and much faster healing, which is great news for our pets!

This is the lovely, gentle Sunny after his surgery