Continued from
PAGE 1: Injured dog limps to hospital, sits in waiting room

Enough about dogs who walk into hospitals. Do doctors make hound calls?

The next time you check in to the BRD Medical College Hospital in Gorakhpur, India, bring a chew toy for your suitemate. IBN Live reports that vacant beds are routinely occupied by stray dogs.

But don't go booking a room for Fido just yet. This isn't a bold step toward interspecies healthcare. Authorities say that the situation is due to hospital administrators' poor management. The hospital is so understaffed that dogs just come and go as they please ...which makes today's TOP 8 list particularly useful:

THE TOP 8 SIGNS YOUR SUITEMATE IS A DOG
	8	Greets you by sniffing your colostomy bag.
	7	Will only take medication packed in cheese.
	6	Gets into tug of war with doctor's stethoscope.
	5	Digs a hole and buries your x-rays.
	4	Gets all twisted up in IV tubes and then stands there staring at you like, "HI!"
	3	Imitates ambulance siren. Day and night.
	2	Keeps sneaking off to the morgue to go "roll around in something".
	1	ACTUALLY LIKES HOSPITAL FOOD.

"Yankee", a 6-year-old Yellow Lab, got worse than a case of heartburn when she gobbled a steak kabob last Halloween. According to her guardian Mary Strazzone, she gulped it down, skewer and all, "practically inhaling the whole thing." The bamboo skewer went right through her stomach and lodged itself in her heart.

Veterinarians where able to remove part of the skewer, but a portion remained. Yankee was in desperate need of open heart surgery. Gary Ellison, one of the veterinary surgeons explains, "We don't have the capability of doing bypass at our veterinary hospital and we needed the human surgeon's expertise."

At least 10 doctors from the University of Florida Congenital Heart Center rallied to help. Using equipment from the human facility, including an MRI unit and a heart bypass machine, cardiothoracic surgeons put Yankee on bypass for 55 minutes on Jan. 27 while they removed the skewer and rebuilt her heart valve. Yankee was on her feet and wagging her tail by the end of the day.

Lead surgeon Mark Bleiweis, M.D., says, "I'm really proud of what we did, and that we were able to put this many people from so many specialties together to save this dog's life."

Source:
"UF Physicians, Veterinarians Report Dog's Open Heart Surgery a Success."
UF College of Veterinary Medicine PR. 7 Feb 2006.