Bromethalin

Hello vets - Give me the real here… My 80 pound boxer and 20 pound frenchie found 2 bars of bromethalin rat poison my husband had dug and buried under our concrete slab.. I called my friend who’s a vet tech and he recommended inducing vommiting - tried peroxide and walking around - NOTHING - tried again - nothing - loaded up and drove over an hour to the nearest emergency vet.. doc was swamped so we waited over an hour to be seen and then another hour before they gave apomorphine…. I had given about a teaspoon of activated charcoal powder with 5ccs of water at home.. They both threw up - the boxer had some very small reminants in her stomach contents - the frenchie just had grass and bile - The vet gave sub q fluids and sent us home and we were told to watch for neurological symptoms.. But I feel like I need to do something else … is there anything else or is it a just hope and pray situation… I’ve cried for hours, my kids are beyond upset. I don’t know what to do think or say.. I’m devastated… 1.) what else do I need to or can I do? 2.) how will I know if we are in the clear? Days ? Weeks? Its been 36 hours sincere ingestion 3.) if they show symptoms can they recover?

Hello and thank you for raising this question.   Obviously if dogs do vomit right away, this is very helpful and indeed, more direct ways to induce vomiting do exist; Peroxide is extremely outdated now and is in itself a toxin, which can cause problems of its own. Vets did use it sometimes when I first qualified. Hopefully your vet has also taken the Hydrigen peroxide into consideration.  What they should have access to - because no vet has the best response to every single poison locked away in their heads - is a resource outlining the correct treatment for poisonings.  There are books for this (updated every so often) and in the UK there's a well researched and regularly updated toxicology database.  If you ask, your vets should be able to validate their choice of actions by outlining the resouce they referred to and to give you some idea of what to expect, with some idea of the perventage risks.  This would be based on other cases, as vets using the database tend to feed back the outcomes to the system.  The assessment depends, to some extent, on information such as the weight, health and hydration of the pet.   Perhaps a phone call to your vet and asking how they know that their choices were the right ones, might help to put your mind at rest.  I'm afraid that I dont know the answer in this case.

My understanding (which your vet must verify- I am not your vet and do not know your dog's situation) is that it can take up to 5 days for symptoms to start and they can be subtle at first, so I'm afraid that you still may need to be monitoring the patient at the moment.   From this point, it may that treatment is symptomatic ie monitoring the patient and treating any clinical signs as they were observed.  Those might include be neurological signs eg wobbliness, altered walk, or sometimes fitting.  I hope that something here is of help.

It sounds to me that raising your concerns again with your vet in the short might prove to constructive; it is a tough subject to be worrying about on your own at home.