By the time Dobby arrived at Ryan Hospital’s Emergency Room (ER), he was in a bad way. The two-year-old Welsh Corgi had been vomiting off and on for a few days and was straining to urinate. “He also wasn’t eating,” says owner Zhi Peng Yang, who lives in Philadelphia and rushed Dobby to Penn Vet.
“When he got here, Dobby was in circulatory shock, and, given his symptoms, I was immediately concerned about a uroabdomen, which is a dangerous situation of urine leaking in the abdomen,” says Natalie Kovak, a resident in the ER and the attending physician that Friday afternoon. “I scanned his abdomen with our ultrasound and did see fluid.”
X-rays also revealed a large stone in the dog’s urethra. It was causing the life-threatening obstruction keeping him from urinating. Kovak placed a drain in Dobby’s abdomen to remove the urine. She also inserted a urethral catheter to help pass the stone and placed him on intravenous fluids, pain medications, and antibiotics.
“He was very unstable,” she remembers. “I actually thought he wasn’t going to make it for a while, even with all our overnight interventions in the ER.”
Novel plant-based approach to a better, cheaper GLP-1 delivery system
Research led by Penn Dental’s Henry Daniell investigates the use of a lettuce-based, plant-encapsulated delivery platform as a new oral delivery of two GLP-1 drugs previously approved by the FDA in injectable form.
No brain, no gain: Neuronal activity enhances benefits of exercise
Research led by Penn neuroscientist J. Nicholas Betley and collaborators finds that hypothalamic neurons are essential for translating physical exertion into endurance, potentially opening the door to exercise-mimicking therapies.
In honor of Valentine's Day, and as a way of fostering community in her Shakespeare in Love course, Becky Friedman took her students to the University Club for lunch one class period. They talked about the movie "Shakespeare in Love," as part of a broader conversation on how Shakespeare's works are adapted.
In Becky Friedman’s English course Shakespeare in Love, undergraduate students analyze language, genre, and adaptation in the Bard’s plays through the lens of love.
Beating the heat: Designing cooling for bodies in motion
Dorit Aviv, director of Weitzman’s Thermal Architecture Lab, studies how humans, technology, and design intersect, paving the way for the development of novel approaches to cooling people efficiently.
