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| Meg
was owned by Helen Fletcher of Stoke on Trent. Meg's tragic story
is told to us here in Helen's own words.
"Meg came to live with us when she was nearly 5 years old. She was already stick-mad, she would find a stick and drop it at your feet. If you ignored it, and walked on, she would pick it up again and run around to the front of you, and drop the stick in your path, then back off it, and ‘work it’. When you threw the stick, Meg would race up to it and swoop it up and carry on running for a little way, before returning to us, to have it thrown again. She was very persistent and hard to ignore. As long as I have lived ‘everyone’ had thrown sticks and stones for their dogs, so I saw no harm in this activity. My son Colin, who was only 18 months old at the time, would pick up the stick at her insistence and throw it for her (see photo). |
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| One
Sunday, whilst we were in the park, Meg found a stick and kept on asking
for it to be thrown, so as usual, we duly obliged, time after time, she
never tired of the game. It was lovely to see her so happy and
enjoying life.
Little did we know at the time that this would be the last time she had a stick thrown for her. On this occasion, she almost overtook it as it flew through the air, it landed and stuck in the ground on end as a javelin lands. And Meg raced up, she was very fast, and tried to swoop it up, but it had stuck in the ground, and as she lifted her head at full speed, the stick went down her throat, making her squeal. She stopped so fast and retched a bit, which dislodged the stick. We ran across to her, and she seemed ok, just a bit quiet, but we started for home straight away, we just knew she was hurt. Meg kept her head down as she slowly walked back. She didn’t want the stick anymore, and it took ages to walk the mile back home. In those days, we didn’t have a telephone of our own, so we went off to the nearest phone box. I telephoned the vet who wasn’t very amused at being disturbed during his Sunday lunch. |
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| He
was very patronising and I was nearly hysterical. I demanded that he let
us come to see him, I think he realised that his attitude was getting
him nowhere, so he changed tactics, becoming very soft soapy, and told
me that in his experience, there was nothing much to worry about. He
could just as well do tomorrow what I was demanding he do today, only
that it also meant dragging his vet nurse out from her home too. He made
me feel very guilty for disturbing him. He said that he would just
look down her throat, to make sure there were no splinters, and then
give her some antibiotics and send her home. I was placated. But later on, after sitting with Meg for an hour, I wasn’t so sure, so I went back to the telephone box to look for another vet. There was no directory, and Telephone Directories didn’t answer the phone despite it ringing for five minutes. I gave up and went home in despair. All my friends were at a dog show that day, and I had had no one to turn to. The next morning Meg's neck was
so swollen, she didn’t seem to have a neck, only a head that merged
into her shoulders. I put her in the back of the car and I was driving
down the road sobbing my heart out, when I saw a friend. She flagged me
down, and after listening to my tale, jumped into the car, and said
"you are not going to that vet, I’ll take you to mine" |
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| My
friend's vet was smashing, and said that if I had rang him yesterday he
would have met me at his surgery and examined Meg. Meg was admitted to the vets that day. As I didn’t have a phone I signed a form giving him my permission to end her suffering if things were too bad. They spent the first day trying to get her temperature down. She didn’t seem to respond to the antibiotics, however overnight she started to respond, and looked brighter, so they put her under anaesthetic to x-ray her and give her a thorough examination. The vet discovered that the stick had ripped Meg's oesophagus, so badly, it was beyond repair. It had also broken her collarbone, and her chest cavity had filled with blood. I had a phonecall, via a friend, to say that they let her go peacefully. If only, are two of the saddest words in the English language. If only I had known then what I
know now, Meg would have had more years with us, she would have been
re-trained onto fetching a safe toy, i.e. a ball on a rope or a frisbee,
which is what my present dogs play with.
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