Katie Leonard doesn’t hold back when she talks about Daisy, her five-year-old American Staffordshire Terrier.
“She’s just the best thing in the world,” Leonard gushes. “She’s the snuggliest little dog ever. She and I are glued to each other.”
Over Thanksgiving weekend in the fall of 2020, Leonard and husband Franklin Donn had taken the delightful Daisy and her canine brother, Dexter, to a rural family property in western New York, where the pups had a run-in with a porcupine. Dexter had a few quills sticking out from his body. Daisy had dozens.
Immediately, the couple drove 90 minutes to find care at an emergency veterinary clinic in Buffalo.
“Daisy was in quill removal all night,” Leonard remembers. “The next day, they said, ‘We did everything we could, but there’s so many more internally,’ implying that she might not make it.”
The couple drove home to Baltimore. When Daisy began having trouble breathing, they took her to a nearby vet who diagnosed the pup with a pneumothorax, a dangerous condition of air in the chest cavity that can cause the lungs to collapse. After stabilization, Daisy was referred to another vet who told the couple, “If she’s going to have a chance, she’s got to go to Penn Vet.”
Less than 24 hours after arriving to the University of Pennsylvania’s School of Veterinary Medicine’s (Penn Vet) campus in west Philadelphia, Daisy was in surgery at Penn Vet’s Ryan Hospital under the care of Dr. Lillian Aronson, professor of surgery, and Dr. Chiara Curcillo, a surgical resident. A pre-surgical CT scan showed Daisy had about 10 quills inside her body, Aronson recalls. When the surgeons went in, they found five times as many.
“We weren’t feeling confident until we got to Ryan Hospital,” said Leonard. “Dr. Curcillo was very clear about the severity of Daisy’s situation but optimistic that all was not yet lost.”
During the initial five-hour operation, the Penn Vet surgical team removed quills from Daisy’s heart, lungs, kidneys, diaphragm, intestines, and spleen. They repaired multiple tears, including one in her heart, and removed a pierced lung lobe. The incision began at Daisy’s neck and ended at her hind legs.
Daisy did well, but Dr. Aronson warned that she wasn’t out of danger. Porcupine quills are covered with barbs that cause them to burrow deeper through flesh and muscle. They are dangerous because they can cause internal damage and introduce harmful bacteria into the body.
“She was one of the worst cases I’d ever seen,” Dr. Aronson says. “She was in pretty bad shape.”
In the week following Daisy’s first surgery, the Penn Vet doctors operated on the pup again, removing quills from her pectoral muscles, mouth, jaw, back, and armpit while triaging the complex side effects caused by the quills, including a second pneumothorax. When air continued to escape post-surgery, the Penn Vet team used a rare procedure called a blood patch pleurodesis to seal leaks in Daisy’s lungs caused by punctures.
About two weeks after arriving to Penn Vet, Daisy could go home but doctors warned that Daisy would need further care as quills continued to move through her body.
“These cases can be frustrating because we know the quill migrate quickly and you might not see them for hours, days, or even years later,” Dr. Aronson says.
For more than a year, Leonard brought Daisy back to Penn as needed, waking up at 4:30 in the morning for the two-hour drive to Philadelphia. She’d leave Daisy, return to Baltimore, where she works as a teacher, and head north again after school to bring Daisy home.
Today, nearly three years after Daisy’s porcupine encounter, quills continue to move through her body. Most recently Leonard has pulled quills from Daisy’s leg and near her eye, estimating that well more than 100 quills have been removed in total since the fateful Thanksgiving weekend in 2020.
“Penn Vet is the only place we’ll go for our girl,” said Leonard.
“It’s the best place and they’re the best people ever….Drs. Curcillo and Aronson and all of the clinicians who have worked so hard for Daisy are our ‘Team Daisy.’ We adore them.”
Story written by Natalie Pompilio
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