An adorable puppy narrowly escaped death after swallowing a huge 20cm stick while playing fetch in a park with his owner.
Mastiff Sidney suffered a horrifying injury when a sharp piece of wood became lodged in his throat.
The stick came within millimetres of puncturing vital organs after disappearing so far down the 13-month-old’s airway that it vanished from view.
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“It’s the kind of thing which happens all day in parks everywhere without anything untoward happening,” owner Elaine Fulton, from Belfast, told Need To Know.
“But this time I knew something was wrong straightaway and I heard a yelp of pain from Sidney.
“He was too far away for me to see what had happened but the noise he made was really troubling.
“Then he came running back and stood by my side clearly in distress.
“I figured something must have happened with the stick and I tried to open his mouth but he just wouldn’t let me look inside in the way he normally would.
“A guy came running over from the coffee kiosk to see if he could assist but he couldn’t get Sidney’s mouth open either.
“I scooped Sidney up in my arms and literally sprinted with him to my car to get help.”
Because it was a Sunday afternoon, her regular vet surgery was closed, so she drove Sidney across Belfast to the Vets Now emergency clinic.
Incredibly, emergency vet Sasha Burns Fraser managed to remove the entire stick using forceps without it snapping or splintering, saving Sidney’s life.
Elaine said: “It’s a 20-minute drive across the city and I was so worried about Sidney that my heart was in my mouth for the whole journey.
“Sidney is such a wee character and he’s just an incredibly lucky dog.
“He came so, so close to dying and it’s really traumatic thinking about it.
“Without Sasha’s expertise, I don’t know what we would have done and I’ll always be incredibly grateful to her and her colleagues for being there and saving his life.”
Vet Sasha added: “Elaine explained what might have happened but poor Sidney was just in too much pain to let us look inside his mouth even after we gave him pain relief.
“So the only option was to sedate him so that we could examine him properly.
“I could feel something on the right-hand side of his windpipe but without being able to look inside his mouth, I couldn’t be sure what it was.
“The issue here was that a potential stick injury is not going to show up easily on an X-ray, unlike something like a stone or a metallic object.
“But once we were able to look inside Sidney’s mouth, there was nothing immediately visible.
“After five minutes or so, I was able to find a tiny wound under his tongue on the right-hand side just where the tongue is connected to the mouth.
“There was a very small hole there which I could just about get my little finger into, and I could feel what I thought could have been the tip of a stick.
“I began to very, very gently pull.
“I thought the stick might be a couple of centimetres at the most but it just kept getting longer and longer.
“Myself and the nurses working with me could not believe the length of what we were removing from such a relatively small puppy’s throat.
“By the time we got it all out, it was 20cm long, longer than my hand and I’ve never seen a stick of that length in a dog that size.
“There’s a lot of very important blood vessels in that area and it’s very surprising indeed that the stick didn’t puncture the oesophagus, which links the throat and stomach, or the windpipe.”
“If that had happened, we would most probably have been looking at a very different outcome but instead we were able to flush out and close the wound.”
The mischievous pup has since made a full recovery and is back to stealing socks and trying to chew up his owner’s bank cards.
Elaine said: “He was on soft food for a couple of weeks, lots of scrambled egg for example, and I think he quite enjoyed getting spoilt rotten.
“To look at him now, chasing about with socks and trying to chew up my bank card, he really has made a miracle recovery.
“I got him just a couple of months after my old dog Bruce died so the thought of losing Sidney as well was just awful and I was blaming myself for it of course.”
Vets Now, which operates 60 emergency clinics and hospitals across the UK, is urging dog owners to avoid using sticks during games of fetch because of the risk of life-threatening injuries.
Instead, vets recommend using safer alternatives such as rubber balls and purpose-made dog toys.
Sasha added: “The team and I are so pleased Sidney’s made a full recovery.
“He was a lovely character with a very gentle nature.
“Elaine’s completely right to be raising awareness of this issue, we do see a lot of stick injuries in our clinic and Elaine did the correct thing in seeking vet help straightaway because every minute is potentially crucial in these cases.”
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