My Own Animals Are a Great Learning Experience

My kitty, Elli, has a long and sordid medical history (this is my favorite way to start this story! It’s the vet student equivalent of “on a dark and stormy night…”)

The important part of her history is that she has a history of (really severe) reaction to vaccinations. This is really not all that uncommon, though I would argue that the degree of severity she had is out of the ordinary. She also is really freaked out at the vet… she spikes a stress fever and even develops a heart murmur only in the clinic (I can hear it at the clinic and not at home, and she’s even had an echocardiogram).

When we moved back to vet school after a summer at home, I noticed that Elli was coughing. She’d had a coughing spell for a couple minutes a couple times a week. One of those all out cat coughs where they flatten themselves toward the ground and streeeeetch their necks out. I took her home with me to the Banfield I worked at over the summer and we narrowed it down to being feline asthma or potentially an upper respiratory tract infection. We ended up giving her depo-medrol (a long acting steroid) with a presumptive diagnosis of feline asthma.

A week and a half later, I noticed that she has a mass about the size of a pecan right where she got the injection.

I talked to one of the feline internal medicine professors (Dr. Zoran) about her medical history, long term and her more recent. She told me to never ever ever again give Elli depo-medrol, because she’s probably reacting to the substances that make the depo-medrol a long acting steroid. She told me to aspirate the mass and take the stained slides to Dr. Barton (the oncologist/cytologist). I actually went and told Dr. Barton the same story and she told me that she’s never seen/heard of/read about a sarcoma (cancer) associated with depo-medrol (though they are associated with vaccines). She gave me instructions about what kind of sample to take (she wanted a core biopsy.)

My friend Ashley and I pinned Elli down at home and took a core biopsy of the mass. When we pulled the needle out, she oozed out some lemon pudding consistency material. (Don’t you love how pathology uses food descriptions?) So we took an impression smear of that and then decided to try to aspirate the mass.

I stained the slides then looked at them with Dr. Barton. We went over them and found the mass was just full of necrotic tissue, with some degenerating neutrophils and a little bit of the drug.

It’s fun to learn from my own pets! (Though, I hope Elli doesn’t develop any more medical problems for a long time!)