‘Well, it can be. Chicken is plain so it can be good for a dog with stomach problems. But in some cases it can actually be the problem. Plenty of dogs are allergic to chicken.’
‘No, it isn’t that because he was still scratching when he was eating beef chunks.’
‘I’m afraid that nearly all processed dog food, even beef chunks, has chicken in it. The company only has to have a certain percentage of beef in the food to be able to call it beef chunks, and the remainder is made up of other meat. So you really do need to give him the hypo-allergenic food on its own and nothing else. At all. No biscuits, chews or treats of any kind.’
Mrs H looked put out. ‘Well, that seems a bit hard on him. He really does love his treats.’
I tried to sound patient. ‘I know it’s hard, I really do appreciate that. And I’m sure he loves his treats. What dog doesn’t? But put yourself in Muffin’s shoes. Would you want to be itchy and uncomfortable all the time? You can always give him the hypo-allergenic food as treats, too. If the allergy isn’t cleared up it may lead to ear infections, bald patches and sore spots on his skin. So it’s really worth giving it a good go.’
Silence.
‘Oh. Well. All right then. If you insist.’
This conversation, or a version of it, happened a couple of times a day and was no doubt a re-run of the conversation the pet owner’s own vet had already had with them. Often it was only because a specialist repeated the advice that the owner eventually acted on it.
Of course, not all pet allergies are due to food; pets can also be allergic to dust-mites, fleas and pollen, which can make life for their owners pretty difficult. But food is always the place to start, and with the majority of pets this is where the answer lies.
One afternoon while I was in the dermatology unit a deafening alarm went off. ‘Crash,’ shouted Annie as she sprinted out of the room.
I went to the door, to see an impressively athletic clinician race past me, hurdle a trolley that someone had left across the corridor and disappear in the direction of the Intensive Care Unit.
‘What on earth is going on? Where has Annie gone?’ I asked.
‘It’s the crash alarm. My housemates told me about this,’ Lucy replied, joining me in the doorway as we watched more clinicians sprinting down the corridor. Lucy had spent the previous year living with three girls in the year above us, so she was invaluable when it came to hints and tips about rotations. ‘The alarm goes when an animal suddenly needs resuscitating or serious emergency care. Usually the case is either in the ICU or in surgery, and all members of staff who are available to drop what they’re doing have to run to help.’
‘I wish we could help,’ I said.
At that moment, an intern turned the corner into our corridor coming back from the direction in which clinicians had been sprinting minutes earlier.
‘What’s going on?’ Lucy called 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