Anal Sac Impaction

Hi, my name is Cooper Dean, and man, have I had a pain in my backside!!  My Mom told Dr. Paula that I had been licking and scooting on my bottom a whole lot more than she thought was normal, and was I glad she told on me!  I had been trying to allevieate that pressure the only way I knew how, and it just wasn’t working.  Anyway, here’s the scoop on my problem:

Anal sacs are the scent glands that live right inside the anal sphinctor.  In the old days I hear that we canines used to have control of them, but now we just don’t.  Every time we pass a bowel movement and squeeze down with the anal sphinctor to segment them, a few drops of that yellow wonderful-smelling liquid should come out onto the bowel movement to scent the territory.  And you know, I Like to scent my territory — and lately that just hadn’t been happening!  Dr. Paula says that sometimes if I have a loose bowel movement for a while that lets the fluid sit in those sacs too long, that my body starts to absorb the liquid part of the secretion, and then I am left with solids in there!  And I really can’t make a bowel movement big enough or hard enough to empty them out, at that point.  Or she says that sometimes I can get an infection in there, or maybe even the opening from the sac is just too small, and all those reasons can cause the sacs to get too full and even impacted.  Well anyway, my fabulous Mom brought me in to see Dr. Paula, and well, it’s a good thing we know each other fairly well, because she got a little personal with me……  I guess she had to put her finger in where it didn’t belong, and put some pressure in just the right place, and boy howdy, some disgusting black paste came rolling out!  You shoulda seen it, or felt it.  She said that what she did just emptied out the inside of the sac, and because it was Soooo thick, we needed to flush out the sacs to get all the stuff that was still lining the sac.  So she put this contraption on her head so she could see the openings in to the sac, the ducts, she says they are called, and infused this great stuff  in to my anal sacs that really soothed the burn, and flushed all the rest of that black goo out.  And I am twisting and shouting again!!!  Waggin my tail, and definitely Not doing the butt slide and loud licking at my bottom that my Mom thought was so disgusting.  I’m going to go back in to see Dr. Paula in about 3 or 4 weeks to just make sure that my valuable little sacs are producing the liquid that they were made to, and that I don’t need another treatment.  I’ll let you know, and in the meantime, if you know of anyone who has this same problem, maybe they could use a little help, too.

Cooper Dean, signing out.

oble.