Past Prescriptions: How a Brigham and Women’s Hospital Team Helped an Orangutan With a Health Scare Back in 1985
Welcome to Past Prescriptions, your occasional trip down MGB Memory Lane! With more than 200 years of history across our academic medical system, there are lots of unique stories to be found in back issues of newspapers and archived hospital communications.
This month we’re taking the MGB Delorean back to 1985, the year when the movie Back to the Future first introduced us all to the concepts of time-traveling Deloreans, flux capacitors, 1.1 gigawatts of power and Enchantment Under the Sea-themed school dances.
The July/August 1985 Edition of Inside Brigham and Women’s Hospital highlighted a unique collaboration between BWH, the Stone Zoo and other local medical/veterinary experts to help reduce the stress on a young orangutan with a troubling medical condition.
BWH Medical Team Responds to Help an Orangutan in Need
Three members of Brigham and Women’s Hospital staff helped officials at the Stone Zoo in Stoneham with the quick diagnosis and treatment of female orangutan with a worrying mass on her kidney.
Zoo staffers had initially believed that Betty, a 24-year-old Bornean orangutan, was pregnant when her torso started to swell shortly after she was observed breeding.
But after her expected due date came and went without incident, they became worried and decided to investigate further.
Jerome Federschneider, MD, a BWH obstetrician with experience observing gorilla births at the zoo, first examined Betty by ultrasound to confirm that she was indeed not pregnant. The ultrasound exam also indicated that the swelling on her torso was due to a mass on her kidney.
Zoo officials then asked BWH if they could send a team of radiology technicians to help them investigate the mass further. They explained that anesthesia is stressful for animals because they don’t understand it and try to fight it, so time and accuracy during the x-ray was of the essence.
The two-person radiology team (Pat Dunning and Mary Catalfamo) traveled to the zoo equipped with x-ray cassettes, films and lead aprons. They squeezed into a small operating room where the 94-pound orangutan had already been sedated and restrained by the zoo’s veterinary team. Dunning and Catalfamo then did their best to quickly and accurately capture images of the mass in question.
Staff at nearby New England Hospital were standing by to develop the X-rays as soon as possible while Betty was still sedated, which led to a few nail-biting moments as the technicians waited to see if they captured images of sufficient quality to allow for a diagnosis.
The team then received good news all around—not only were the X-rays sufficient, but the diagnosis indicated that the mass was a benign cyst that could be immediately drained as part of the same procedure, thus eliminating the need to sedate Betty again.
Thanks to the efforts of this fast-moving and highly coordinated team, Betty was back in her exhibit and on her way to recovery within two hours from the start of her procedure.
As a gesture of thanks from zoo staff, the BWH technologists were invited to stay and watch a film showing the recent birth of a bongo antelope at the Cincinnati Zoo.
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