Owners' intervention brought pet dog from brink of death

NORFOLK

Sandy Harvey's miniature poodle was dead. Now it isn't.

That's the short story.

Here's the longer one:

Sandy was in the kitchen on May 15, fixing a snack for the dogs. Wes Harvey was upstairs on his treadmill, connected to his oxygen tube. Sandy heard a thump from the living room, and found Tini (short for Martini) flat on the floor, unmoving.

She ran with the dog upstairs.

"Wes, is she dead?"

She laid the dog on the bed.

"She was gone," Wes said. "I know, because I've seen it, a lot of times."

Wes Harvey was in Vietnam. He saw soldiers impaled on bamboo spikes and explosions that imploded brains. He was exposed to Agent Orange.

Now he has oxygen because his doctors diagnosed lung cancer and gave him two to six months to live. That was eight years ago.

Eventually, the hospice workers quit coming around. They gave up.

The Harveys didn't.

With Tini on her back, tongue blue, eyes not responding to light, no heartbeat, no breathing, Sandy started CPR. Wes told her to stop. He had a better idea.

"I mean, the dog was dead," Wes said. "I saw a lot of head trauma when I was in Vietnam in 1968. When I worked with those guys, first they had to get a heartbeat. I figured if we could get the blood moving around, she would keep her functions."

He told Sandy to hold the oxygen tube to the poodle's nose while he did chest compressions.

After about a minute, he listened again with his stethoscope and picked up a faint thump. If they stopped, it stopped, so they didn't stop.

After several minutes, the edge of Tini's tongue turned pink. In 20 minutes, her eyelids flickered. Her toes jerked. Her legs twitched. After 45 minutes, she rolled over and tried to sit up.

They called the vet. He said to stabilize the dog before they came, so they worked for 10 more minutes. At Dog and Cat Hospital, Tini was given a shot to reduce the swelling of her brain. By the end of the day, Tini wouldn't eat or drink and couldn't walk, but she was alive.

The Harveys wondered if they had done the right thing. They took her home. They slept that night, and ensuing nights, with a shortened leash looped around Sandy's arm and Tini in between them. Sandy used an eyedropper to squirt water in Tini's mouth, and gave her a tablespoon of food at a time. For a month, they carried her everywhere.

"Her eyes were dead," Sandy said. "There was no life in them."

"I'm thinking, I've seen this before with people in the war," Wes said. "They came back, but they didn't come back whole."

The Harveys figure Tini tried to jump on a blanket on back of the couch. It slipped, Tini fell, and hit her head on the coffee table.

After she woke up, her personality changed. She wasn't as playful. She forgot how to chew rawhide. She couldn't bark. But six weeks after she died, Tini was able to lift her tail. Over the summer, her voice started to come back. She can chew again. She likes to sit in Sandy's lap.

Wes fought the Vietnam War and came back in poor health, then had to fight the government for benefits. He had 37 radiation treatments and eight chemotherapy rounds. He has oxygen upstairs and down. He never gave up, and neither did Sandy.

This week, Tini wagged her tail.

Diane Tennant, (757) 446-2478, diane.tennant@pilotonline.com