| Calcinosis Circumscripta
I thought I would let you know a little about my experiences with the condition 'Calcinosis Circumscripta'- a problem I had never even heard about until recently but which my vet tells me is quite common in Rotts.
My 4 month old male puppy woke up one morning and decided to try chewing. He chewed everything within his reach but his favorite chewable items were sticks. . . little sticks, big branches - they were all the same to him! It was at this time that he started to teethe and his gums were red and sore and we tried desperatly to replace sticks with teething toys with moderate success. One day I noticed 2 small white ulcers at the back of his tongue on the outer edges - 1 on one side, and 1 on the other. I mentioned them to the vet during a routine check and she said that he had bitten his tongue with his new big-boy back teeth and that the ulcers would disappear. . .they didn't. They got larger as his tongue grew and appeared as white/yellow ulcers the size of a penny on the surface of the tongue and extended down through his tongue to the under side. Another trip to the vet and this time we were told that he had probably got splinters of wood from his 'stick days' embedded in his tongue and that they would grow out eventually. 'Boss' was now six months old and was picking at his food. The chewing had stopped and he wasn't putting on the weight he should have been - another trip to another vet led to an operation to remove the lumps from the back of his tongue. The lumps were the size of marbles and were chalky in appearance and texture. When you shook the test tube that contained them it sounded like you were rattling pebbles around. The puppys' tongue now looks like and hour glass! two huge pieces of tongue were taken away and the rest of the area stitched up as well as it could be. The vet said that, although common in large breeds, he had never seen the condition in the tongue of a puppy before. He said it is normally found in soft tissues within the body and may never be recognised. He offered no explanation as to its cause although he assured me that diet and early innoculation were not to blame, and that it should not re occur again. What a relief!! 'Boss' now eats properly - it can't be easy to eat with two chunks of rock in your mouth - and is growing just fine.
So PLEASE keep an eye out for ulcers in the mouth that don't heal normally or get larger and get them checked out. Parents of Rotts are entitled to worry about their babies!! Has anyone else out there heard of this problem before??  | 
10-04-1999, 05:47 PM
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