A Springer Spaniel from the Midlands is recovering after a horrifying discovery revealed he had been living with a large stick piercing his internal organs, in a case that left veterinary surgeons stunned.
A Shocking Discovery in Kidderminster
The drama unfolded on 12 January 2026 at the home of owners Robert Clarke and Katie Luckman in Kidderminster. Their five-year-old dog, Obi, had been playing in the garden as usual. The couple called him in to go on a shopping trip, but as Katie slipped his lead on, they made a terrifying sight.
"We suddenly saw this sticking out," Katie recounted. A piece of wood was clearly protruding from Obi's abdomen. The pair, who keep their garden tidy, were baffled as to how it could have happened, initially thinking he must have fallen onto something. Despite a lack of bleeding, they knew it was a serious emergency and rushed him to their local vet immediately.
Complex Surgery at Blaise Veterinary Hospital
The local practice in Kidderminster quickly referred Obi to the Blaise Veterinary Referral Hospital in Longbridge, Birmingham, which provides round-the-clock critical care. Specialist vet Lara Dempsey took on the case.
"This was a really unusual case," said Ms Dempsey, an expert in small animal soft tissue surgery. Remarkably, Obi had shown almost no symptoms apart from a failure to gain weight, despite eating normally. "You would never have known there was a problem until the stick had exited the abdomen," she added.
During an urgent 90-minute operation, the full, alarming truth was revealed. The stick had not impaled Obi from the outside, but had been swallowed, possibly months earlier. It had then perforated through his stomach, skewered his spleen, and finally exited through the left abdominal wall.
Vet Lara Dempsey performed a splenectomy to remove the severely damaged spleen, extracted the stick from the stomach, and treated the wounds. She noted that the dog's body had remarkably walled off the foreign object, preventing immediate life-threatening peritonitis.
A Rapid and Bouncy Recovery
Obi stayed overnight for observation but was showing 'huge signs of recovery' by the next day. Owner Robert Clarke reported that the spaniel was immediately back to his energetic self. "He was running round crazy and was immediately back to his old self when we got him home," Robert said, adding that Obi quickly began to put on the weight he had previously been missing.
The family expressed immense gratitude to the team at Blaise for saving their pet's life. Reflecting on the close call, Vet Lara Dempsey issued a sobering reminder: "With the stick perforating through the stomach, this leads to peritonitis which can be life-threatening. Having had such damage to his organs and the stick in him for so long, Obi was very lucky."
