Dr Liza’s Vet Tales Excerpt – Honcho and Sheila, our staffies!
Dr Liza’s Vet Tales Excerpt – Honcho and Sheila, our staffies!
A couple of years prior, I gave Ash a cute staffie puppy for his birthday. Ash called him Honcho (aka Honch), a brindle, boisterous and strong pup who was not overly intellectually endowed, and he quickly grew into a tank! We knew that Honcho needed a friend but getting another puppy would not be a wise move since Honcho would be likely to absent-mindedly squash a pup with his brutish strength. So when I saw an advert at university for an adult female staffie needing a home otherwise she would be put to sleep, kind hearted Ash knew that Sheila would be the one.
On the property where Sheila lived, she used to spend most of the time hiding under a truck which was why her owner had wanted to re-home her. Sheila was a lot more timid than Honch but she fitted in and did a good job of being a companion to our monster.
When we adopted Sheila we found that she had cataracts, a thickening of the lenses in the back of her eye and she was just about blind. This explained why all she used to do was lie under the truck at her previous home as inevitably she would hurt herself trying to get around. Her cataracts, I learned from our ophthalmology teacher, were most likely due to her running into the electric fence on the property, a common occupant of homes in some South African cities.
Ash was only too happy to pay for her to have her cataracts surgically removed so that she could see again and hopefully go on to have a much happier life. Unfortunately post-operatively she banged her one eye causing severe damage and it needed to be removed. In addition to having only one eye we found that she also had skin cancer, another common condition in white skinned dogs in South Africa who love to sunbathe. Thankfully this type of cancer only tends to spread through the skin at a relatively slow rate and after surgically removing the cancer and following up with radiation therapy we managed to keep it at bay.
As part of our management plan for Sheila, Ash bought her a special Ultra-Violet protective top to protect her skin from further sun damage. When Sheila got home from her radiation session with her new UV top Honch couldn’t stop sniffing it and eventually, not really understanding much about what was driving him, he mounted her head in attempt to mate with her. Ash said that he couldn’t believe that he’d just spent two hundred Rand on lingerie for Honcho!
Sheila was a gentle soul who very much appreciated life’s luxuries after her comparatively rough life that she spent sleeping under the truck being virtually blind. She savoured sleeping inside on her doggy bed and at night when it was time for the dogs to go outside to sleep in their kennel it was a real chore getting Sheila convinced to move. She would suddenly begin to walk with a special hobble as if to say, “Look at me, I’ve had such a rough life, can’t I stay inside?”, Her hobble miraculously disappeared once she was outside and realised that she hadn’t managed to convince us!
To read more about my adventures, read Vet Tales available as a book or e-book from https://www.drliza.co.nz/shop/