Our 2.5 y/o Welsh Terrier should be coming home this morning from an emergency surgery.
Yesterday in the TV room, happened to look over at her and noticed something small hanging from her mouth. Realized that she was eating a piece of thread with a sewing needle on the end. Dashed across the room to get it from her...only to have her gobble it faster to make sure I couldn't get the rare treat from her. (Too bad I couldn't just pull out a piece of bacon to distract her.)
She came out of the surgery ok. A $1700 sewing needle. They were able to push the needle through the wall of her stomach and pull it through so they didn't have to make a second incision. They didn't have orthoscopic equipment so that wasn't an option. She was at the vet's within 12 minutes of eating the needle and in surgery shortly after that, so there wasn't time for the needle to start puncturing surrounding organs.
Although the time from my seeing the thread to it disappearing down her throat was just a relatively few seconds, in retrospect, what I did was try to open her mouth to fish out the thread. That gave her time to swallow.
Should something like this happen again, one thing I'll consider is grabbing and firmly placing a hand around her muzzle - which might limit her ability to pull the last of it into her mouth. Not sure if it would matter. But an option I'll try to keep in mind. This isn't exactly the kind of thing we train for.
She should be coming home late this morning and will probably have to take it easy for 2-3 weeks....which will be hard to enforce on a young terrier.