pet connection

I practice at North Idaho Animal Hospital in Sandpoint, and I love taking care of the animals who come in our doors.

Infected toenails, itchy skin, bad breath? Bring it on. Love it. There’s nothing I like more than to put people’s four-legged best friends back together, and see them go home, healthy and happy.

But being a “television veterinarian” is different. I stand up in front of a camera on Good Morning America or the Dr. Oz Show and talk about a medical breaththrough for canine arthritis or how to help a cat lose weight, and it’s not the same. You just can’t compare smiling at a news anchor and pointing at a new pet product to really getting in there and expressing a dog’s anal glands.

But every now and then, one of those moments happens. The kind where you find out a single animal is walking around barking or purring because of something his owner learned from you on television.

That happened to me most recently right around Christmas, when a Toronto newspaper ran a story about a 7-year-old Boxer named Sheena who collapsed at the park. She wasn’t breathing and her heart had stopped.

Her owner, Kevin Eldon, didn’t know what to do, but his neighbor, Kathryn Armstrong, did. She talked her husband Matt through the process of giving Sheena CPR, and he got her heart beating and lungs moving again, long enough for her veterinarian to diagnose a dangerous arrythmia and get her onto medication for the condition.

And then Kathryn sent an email to the Dr. Oz Show, saying she’d learned how to do CPR on a pet from the “Pets 911″ segment I’d done on the show a short time before.

Christie Keith from the Pet Connection team phoned Kathryn, who shared some details on what happened:

I suddenly heard my husband screaming Sheena’s name, and turned around. She was sliding down an embankment, and when I got to her she was gone. No signs of life. I thought she’d had a seizure. My husband kept going, what do we do? What do we do? And that twigged that memory of the show. I don’t think I’d have known what to do if I hadn’t seen it.

I said, pull her tongue out, blow into her nostrils, blow into her airway, and she just came right back. We walked back to the car and we got her to an emergency clinic.

I’d have never known to do this if I hadn’t seen the show.

I want to thank Kathryn for writing that letter and letting me know that I made a difference for Sheena. I know it made Dr. Oz’s day, too.

But more than anything else, I want to thank Kathryn for learning what I tried to teach, and using it to save Sheena’s life.  That’s what being a veterinarian is all about — even on television!

Screencap of Sheena from Toronto Sun.