PLEASE NOTE SURGERY IMAGE INCLUDED ON THIS PAGE AND MAY DISTURB SOME INDIVIDUALS Rommel is a very active 5 year old Weimeraner. His owner had obtained him as an adult dog and he had a background of being mistreated as a puppy. Despite this Rommel is just the most placid and loving dog that you can imagine.
Rommel came to use one day in September after he had fainted. Clearly something was amiss as it is not normal for dogs to faint.
We found on examination that it was difficult to hear Rommel's heart, although judging by his strong pulse his heart seemed to be working very well. An xray of Rommel's chest was revealed the most amazing thing - his heart appeared to be the size of a football, and he had very little room left for his lungs! We quickly did a follow up ultrasound examination to look more closely at his heart and found something amazing.
No it wasn't a football in his chest but his liver! Now his liver normally should live just behind the diaphragm in his abdomen, it has no business being in his chest. In fact it was compressing his heart and lungs and stopping them working properly.
Surgery was required to correct this problem and during the operation we found that Rommel had what is known as a congenital pericardial-peritoneal hernia. This means that he was born with a hole in his diaphragm and part of his liver had moved forwards to sit next to the heart in the pericardial sac. Rommel had been living with this problem all of his life and it was only his fainting that caused us to find it. The hole can be seen in the photograph.
Treatment at surgery required us to make a larger hole in his diaphragm so that we could remove the 2 liver lobes present. They were too big to pass through the existing opening. Once removed from the chest one of the liver lobes appeared very abnormal so we removed it completely. The second lobe was placed back in its normal position and the hole in the diaphragm permanently closed.
Rommel made a good recovery and now has more energy and stamina than ever before because his heart can beat properly and he now has greatly increased lung capacity.
Rommel had a second problem that we found in September and that was another hernia on both sides of his anus. This meant that when passing his motions he had a lot of trouble, and spent a lot of time straining. This problem was of secondary importance to his chest problem so was left until he had recovered from his first operation. Surgical repair of this hernia was successfully done in November & now Rommel is back to full health.
Radiograph (x-ray) of Rommel's chest
Rommel during surgery
