Vet Tails Excerpt – Piggy Sue’s Facelift

Running a vet clinic with a great team and getting fantastic results helping to improve the health and well-being of our patients as well as giving their owners peace of mind is an incredibly rewarding feeling. There are many joyous moments but working with animals there are always sad moments too and many challenges to experience.

Our team had steadily grown and my wonderful colleague Tara, a very kind, compassionate and wonderful vet, had joined our team. Tara is always very thorough and careful which are qualities that make her an excellent vet and the perfect vet to complement me, who can be known at times to be a bit gung ho!

Our team sometimes quietly shake their heads and sigh when they learn about some of the projects that I plan and execute. One of these was to create a television series about our work. I was presented with the opportunity and believed that it could be a fabulous vehicle to help educate, inspire and entertain people about the work we do. Our team, not too keen to be in the limelight, quietly shook their heads but they all stepped up and played their part to help make it come together.

The filming crew we worked with were very keen to see what we got up to on a daily basis and to capture the special moments in our veterinary practice to create a good show. Many of our clients were keen to participate and share their stories with the crew, while others preferred to stay well out of camera range. I was amazed to learn how much is involved creating a TV series behind the scenes and was thankful to our crew for keeping filming as streamlined as possible so that none of our patients were unnecessarily stressed. The series was called M.A.D Vets 24/7, in this case MAD is an acronym for Making A Difference and showcased the work of ARRC and Holistic Vets.

Not long after the series had screened on TV, we received a call from a lovely lady called Preetha. She had seen M.A.D Vets on television, enjoyed the show and was hoping that we would help her pet pigs as she was having trouble sourcing the services that she needed locally to help them. Preetha was clearly devoted to her piggies, very charming and she pleaded with me to help as she desperately wanted to arrange surgery for them to alleviate their blindness. Although I had never done surgery on a pig as she required, I made the decision to jump at the opportunity to assist, much to the quiet amusement of our team who no doubt shook their heads in dismay at me taking up another crazy project out of our comfort zone.

Piggy Sue, Lulu and Sassy are delightful and much loved pot-bellied pigs. Pot bellied pigs have an incredible propensity for putting on weight and becoming obese even when their food is very carefully rationed. Unfortunately with these piggies, their obesity had caused deposits of fat around their eyes and skin folds obstructed their vision. Piggy Sue was so badly affected that she had run into the clothesline and hit her head one day.

Preetha, wanting to do everything that she could to help her dearly beloved piggies, had located an international pig specialist, John who she could bring to New Zealand. John needed a small animal vet clinic and team that would be prepared to use their dog and cat anaesthetic machine and adapt it. Anaesthesia in pigs can be very risky but this approach would allow for the pigs to have a relatively safe anaesthetic and surgery to correct their blindness.

We studied what we could about pig anaesthesia as well as the surgical procedure and then checked and rechecked all the surgical gear, drugs and equipment that we would need and a date was set. Preetha flew John into New Zealand and when the morning arrived she fed the girls a small meal with some sedative, loaded them into the horse float she had hired and drove over an hour to get to our clinic.

That day we met Piggy Sue and Co, lovely girls weighing in at approximately one hundred and twenty kilograms, as well as their lovely owner Preetha, who was as charming and kind in person as she was on the phone. John taught us how to sedate, anaesthetise and then perform corrective surgery to restore the pigs’ vision. With surgery, not only did we need to remove skin folds from above the eyes but it was also necessary to perform a procedure that in effect facilitated a face lift to pull excess skin away from the eyes.

While the girls were sleeping they received hoof trims “manicure and pedicures”, dental checks, ear cleans and blood samples were also taken for testing. Piggy Sue’s surgery was complicated as she also has a condition called micro-opthalmia (abnormally small eyes) making it more difficult to restore her vision. Lulu’s surgery was relatively straightforward and John decided that Sassy wouldn’t need surgery.

The pigs recovered well and were taken back to their home the same day. Preetha described the wonder of Lulu and Piggy Sue waking the following day, looking around and being able to see for the first time in a long while, even though it took a few days for their eyes to adjust to light again. The media loved this story and the girls featured in numerous articles and on television with reports telling the story of the three little pigs and also their makeover. Lulu’s surgery was a success and her vision was restored but Piggy Sue needed a repeat surgery a year later. Unfortunately, because of her abnormally small eyes it has been impossible to restore her vision to the same degree as Lulu but in Preetha’s care she is a happy piggy!