to him, eager to be filled in on the story.
‘We had a cocker spaniel in ICU, whose heart stopped. The clinicians who got there before me had the defibrillators and adrenaline out and they’d intubated it. They were doing all they could. Luckily lots of people were available, and so the ICU was pretty crowded. I was just in the way, so I left. Unfortunately it doesn’t look good, though.’
Half an hour later Annie was back. ‘We lost it,’ she said. ‘Lovely little dog, but it had septic peritonitis. That’s such a serious condition, and it threw its heart into a fatal arrhythmia. Its heart just couldn’t cope.’
I felt terribly sad. Someone had just lost a beloved pet, and it reminded me how close my family had come to losing our dog, Tosca, when she had the same condition just over a year earlier.
It had all started when Tosca began acting very strangely. Instead of being her normal annoying self and constantly demanding attention, she started hiding in strange places around the house and we’d end up hunting for her.
This went on for a few weeks until, one Saturday evening when I was at home for the weekend, I found her lying on her side groaning, with the biggest belly I had ever seen. She had managed to get into her dry food sack and eat an enormous amount before drinking a whole bowl of water. This was strange behaviour. She’d always loved her food and been a bit of a scavenger, but she’d never stolen from her food sack before.
Tosca had eaten so much that I felt alarmed. I rushed her to our local out-of-hours vet, Louise, who decided that there was too much food in her stomach for it to pass, because it had swollen with the water. Tosca would need to go into surgery that night so that her stomach could be opened and the food removed. Louise promised to call us when it was all over.
I spent the night in a restless doze, waiting for the call to say she was out of surgery and had come round from the anaesthetic. But it never came.
By two in the morning, four hours after I’d left her, I decided to call and see what was taking so long. Louise explained the surgery had gone well, but Tosca wasn’t waking up from the anaesthetic smoothly. She had been waiting for Tosca to wake fully before phoning.
By morning Tosca had finally woken up, but she was in a critical condition and clearly very ill. It was a Sunday, and I had to travel back to university. My parents promised to let me know how Tosca was, and I drove back feeling very afraid that something more than just a food-gorging incident might be going on.
On Monday afternoon Mum phoned. Tosca was deteriorating and she had been referred as an emergency to the Queen Mother Hospital. Mum was driving her up immediately, collecting Dad from his train on the way.
I waited outside the hospital as my parents drove into the car park, then ran over to open the boot of the car. Tosca was such a sorry sight. I was used to a bouncy, full-of-life dog, who would normally be leaping up to lick my face in greeting. But now she remained limp and unresponsive. Attached to an intravenous drip, she couldn’t even stand up.
Gently I lifted her in my arms and took her into the hospital, where the receptionist phoned the emergency team. Seconds later several vets and nurses rushed out with a trolley to whisk her away.
After giving an account of Tosca’s history to an impressively thorough final-year student, a tense hour passed before we were called into a consulting room with the senior clinician, Giacomo. Little was I to know that he would be the clinician in charge when I would be doing my ECC rotation a year later. He explained that Tosca’s abdomen had become septic after her operation and as a consequence her heart had started beating in an irregular rhythm that could be fatal. Even with further surgery to flush out the infected fluid, together with medication for her heart, she would only have a fifty-fifty chance.
I could feel the sob rising in my throat. Tosca was an invincible dog. And she was only ten, not old for a spaniel. How could this be happening? The clinician gave us a moment and then asked gently that if Tosca were to crash, should she be resuscitated? We said yes, of course, but desperately hoped it wouldn’t come to that.
He took us through to give Tosca a cuddle. I stroked her head and those floppy, silky ears, praying that it wouldn’t be the last time I saw her. Tosca was taken to surgery, my parents drove home and I went back to Welham Green to wait.
Once again there was no phone call. Hours passed as I tried to tell myself that no news was good news. Four in the morning came and went and I was still wide awake, so eventually I gave in and phoned. Tosca had made it through surgery, but was still in a critical condition. She hadn’t come round from the anaesthetic as expected, which could be indicative of a brain tumour – and this would also explain her recent change in behaviour. In addition, they had found another small cancerous tumour on her adrenal gland, but it was so close to a blood vessel that it couldn’t be safely removed.
The news that she had cancer as well as septic peritonitis was pretty devastating, but there was still hope. The cancer was in its early stages and might be a slow-growing type, so there was a good chance that she would have another couple of years if she made it through this ordeal. I said a little prayer. ‘Come on, Tosca,’ I whispered. ‘Don’t give up now.’
First thing the next morning I went in to visit her. She was in the Intensive Care Unit and I had to battle through a jungle of wires and tubes just to get to her. She had two fluid lines going into her, a urinary catheter, a drain out of her abdomen and four ECG wires. The ICU unit, surprisingly, was a very calm room, full of composed, friendly and helpful clinicians and nurses.
A week later Tosca was still in the ICU. Her heart had regained its normal rhythm, but she wasn’t recovering as fast as she should. She was very depressed and not eating, which was so unlike her. The staff decided that maybe a change of scenery would help, so she was moved to the much brighter soft-tissue ward. Another day passed, and she was much the same, so they took a further sample of fluid from her abdomen. The culture showed that she had a very resistant strain of bacteria that wasn’t responding to the antibiotics she was on. It was a testament to her strength that she’d made it this far.
Tosca was put on one of the strongest antibiotic drugs available, and over the next few days she gradually began to improve. As a vet student I was allowed to visit often, and I spent hours every day sitting in her kennel giving her cuddles, catching up on my studies and talking to final-year vet students about their experience of being on rotations. Tosca was still refusing food, and she had lost an alarming amount of weight. The ICU nurses tried to entice her to eat, and I tried, too, but she refused everything until, after eight days, when the clinicians were starting to seriously consider placing a feeding tube in her under anaesthetic, she finally let me give her a small piece of sausage. I joked that she must have heard that if she didn’t eat she would need to have another procedure.
After three weeks she was finally well enough to go home. It was a Friday, which was great, as it meant I could travel back with her. My parents met me at the hospital and Tosca was brought out, still weak and wobbly, but with a wag in her tail. Mum and Dad had tears in their eyes; we all adored Tosca and we had come so close to losing her.
We put her on her bed in the boot of the car for the two-hour journey home. Soon after pulling out of the car park, Tosca started howling and yapping. It was a habit that she had when she was excited or wanted to go for a walk. Normally it annoyed us, but now the sound of her yaps was like sweet music. We all laughed. We had our Tosca back.
Over the following months Tosca recovered well, but then she gradually lost her sight and her head began to tilt to the left, confirming that a slow-growing brain tumour was probably the root cause of her problems. But even blind she coped remarkably well. She knew the layout of the house and she still insisted on charging around as
