Cat ate ribbon

[Tootsiepops]

Hello!

I was out for lunch yesterday with my one year old daughter and the restaurant gave her a balloon.

Lovely.

Except my 4 year old cat got hold of it this morning and has wolfed down about half a metre of the (curling) ribbon the balloon was attached to. I couldn't catch her in time to stop it happening.

Does anyone have any experience of this? I am now terrified it's going to end up twisting her gut in some way, but don't want to over react in case it passes naturally.

I will call the vet when it opens, but I'm super worried (especially as we are due to be going away for a long weekend tomorrow leaving the cat in the house with her sitter stopping by to look after her).

Try not to stress, until the vet opens there isn't much you can do. Easier said than done I know.

Said cat is now having emergency surgery.

Little madam

My cat does this regularly, we wait til it comes out. It normally does. He eats plastic bags and plants too, so we ban all these from the house but he can sniff out some curling ribbon and break into a cupboard to get it. So far he has been ok.

Hope your cat is ok

The vet said she needed surgery because it was about a metre of ribbon she'd eaten, which is quite a lot. She said the chances of it working its way through her stomach and intestines in one piece were pretty slim, and there was a high chance it would get knotted or stuck somewhere.

Anyways, surgery is now over and the ribbon has been retrieved. Yay!

But, whilst they were in doing the surgery, they noticed the cat had a very enlarged pancreas and swollen lymph nodes, so they've taken samples and are going to do biopsies

Oh lord, this might be a blessing in disguise though. It's better to find things out sooner rather than later.

Thank god you had the sense to go to the vet & not hope for the best.