In the dusty outskirts of Cochabamba, Bolivia, a skinny street dog nobody had ever bothered to name waddled into a veterinary clinic one sweltering February afternoon in 2023, looking for all the world like she had stolen a prize from a children’s birthday party.
Her belly was perfectly round, taut as a drum, and so enormous that her spindly legs splayed out at 45-degree angles just to keep her balance. Locals who saw her that morning swore she resembled a kangaroo carrying a medicine ball. The veterinarian on duty, Dr. Camila Rojas, took one look and muttered the words every new graduate fears: “I have absolutely no idea what I’m looking at.”
What followed was a medical odyssey that ricocheted across three continents, involved a retired Turkish surgeon on vacation, a misdelivered crate of soccer balls from China, and an emergency GoFundMe that accidentally went viral in Japan. By the end, the dog the world would come to know as Fufy had not only survived the most bizarre case of abdominal distension ever documented in canine medicine, she had become a living reminder that sometimes the universe conspires to save one scruffy soul in the most improbable way possible.
It began with a simple X-ray. Dr. Rojas expected the usual suspects in a street dog: a belly full of plastic bags, a twisted intestine, maybe advanced heartworm causing fluid buildup. Instead, the radiograph revealed a perfectly spherical shadow the size of a regulation FIFA soccer ball. No bones, no foreign objects with corners, no gas patterns; just one flawless, ominous circle. “We thought the machine was broken,” Dr. Rojas later told reporters. They weren’t.
Fufy, as the clinic staff began calling her (a name chosen because her swollen belly made her look “fluffy” from the front), was in critical condition. She could barely breathe; her diaphragm was pushed so far upward that every inhale was a shallow gasp. Bloodwork showed sky-high liver enzymes and dangerously low protein levels. The team sedated her for an ultrasound and discovered something that made even the most experienced technician drop her probe: the “ball” was a gigantic, fluid-filled cyst arising from her left ovary, so large it had compressed her stomach into a thin crescent and shoved her intestines into a crumpled pile against her spine. At 9.8 kilograms, the cyst weighed more than Fufy herself.
Standard veterinary textbooks list ovarian cysts as rare in dogs, and the largest previously recorded weighed just over two kilograms. This was uncharted territory. The clinic in Cochabamba had neither the surgical expertise nor the blood bank for an operation of this magnitude. Within hours, photos of the X-ray were circulating in WhatsApp groups of veterinary surgeons worldwide. That was when fate took its first extraordinary turn.
Dr. Mehmet Özkan, a human gynecological oncologist from Istanbul famous for removing record-breaking ovarian cysts in women, happened to be on a trekking holiday in the Andes with his wife. A friend forwarded him the X-ray with the caption “Your kind of crazy, but furry.” Dr. Özkan, who had never operated on a dog in his life, stared at the image for a full minute and reportedly said, “That’s not a cyst. That’s a world record with paws.” Less than 24 hours later, he was on the clinic’s doorstep with a suitcase full of human surgical instruments, offering to help pro bono.
Meanwhile, a Japanese influencer known as “ShibaDad” stumbled across the story, translated it, and posted it with the title “The Dog Who Ate the Moon.” Donations poured in; within three days the clinic had raised $47,000 – far more than needed. The excess was later used to spay 400 street dogs in Cochabamba, but that is another story.
The surgery itself lasted nine hours. Dr. Özkan, working alongside two Bolivian veterinarians and one very nervous anesthesiologist, made a midline incision from sternum to pubis. When they opened the abdomen, 11.2 liters of straw-colored fluid gushed out so fast they had to use kitchen bowls to catch it. The cyst wall was thicker than anyone expected, almost leather-like. Inside was not just fluid but a perfectly preserved, brand-new soccer ball; no, that part is the rumor that refuses to die. In reality, the cyst contained only fluid and one bizarre detail: a single, fossilized chicken bone suspended in the center like a ship in a bottle.
After the cyst was removed, Fufy weighed less than four kilograms – literally half the dog she had been an hour earlier. Her skin hung in empty folds, her ribs starkly visible. The surgical team feared she might go into shock from the sudden loss of abdominal pressure, a phenomenon seen in human cases of giant cysts but never before in a dog. They wrapped her midsection in compression bandages and kept her sedated for 48 hours while her body readjusted to its new, dramatically smaller self.
Recovery was its own saga. For weeks Fufy had to wear a custom doggy “body shaper” made from a child’s wetsuit to prevent seromas. Children in the neighborhood brought her plush toys “so she wouldn’t feel empty.” A photo of her at the three-week mark – sitting upright for the first time in months, still comically baggy but wagging her tail – broke the Bolivian internet.
Today, two and a half years later, Fufy lives with Dr. Rojas’s family on the clinic grounds. The once-gigantic belly is now sleek and athletic; she chases actual soccer balls with maniacal delight, as if determined to prove the universe’s sense of humor. Veterinary journals have published the case under the dry title “Record-Breaking Canine Ovarian Cystadenoma Weighing 11.2 kg,” but everyone else just calls it the dog who swallowed a basketball and lived to wag about it.
Her story has inspired ovarian cancer awareness campaigns in three countries, a children’s book in Japan, and an annual “Fufy Day” in Cochabamba where street dogs get free vet checks. And somewhere in Istanbul, Dr. Mehmet Özkan keeps a framed photo of a skinny brown dog on his desk with the caption: “My smallest patient, my biggest cyst.”
Sometimes the world aligns in perfect, absurd harmony to remind us that miracles still happen – occasionally in the shape of a very round dog who simply refused to give up.