For about eight seconds, veterinarian Dr. Adrian Walton thought he was about to lose Wallace, the adorable puppy who was brought into his care on Wednesday.
But the little dog lived — and it’s all because his owner came clean that his pet had fallen victim to an opioid overdose.
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In a video posted to YouTube on Wednesday, Walton, the owner of Maple Ridge’s Dewdney Animal Hospital, told the story of a puppy who was brought into the clinic near death and “getting weaker by the minute.”
Walton first thought that the puppy was hypoglycemic, or had low blood sugar, which is often the case when young dogs don’t eat.
Staff checked Wallace’s blood glucose level; they rapidly figured he wasn’t hypoglycemic because his glucose readings were too high.
Walton then had a talk with the puppy’s owner.
“I said, look, I need to know, is there any possibility that this animal had gotten into narcotics. And he answered yes,” Walton said in the video.
“What kind? Fentanyl.”
Staff at the clinic quickly secured an emergency dose of naloxone, a medication that can reverse the effects of an opioid overdose, as they checked on the puppy.
“His heart rate had dropped to 20 beats per minute,” Walton said. “He was not reacting to stimuli, and he wasn’t breathing very well.”
The dog was injected with naloxone. And for approximately eight seconds, Walton thought they would lose him.
“Then all of a sudden, he stood up, looked around and went back to being a normal dog.”
Staff at the clinic gave him the name “Wallace” after Mia Wallace, Uma Thurman’s character in the film Pulp Fiction, who was brought back to life from an overdose after she was injected with shot of adrenaline.
The experience was an instructive one for pet owners, the video said.
“It is only because the owner was honest and told us what the dog could have gotten into” that he’s still alive, it noted.
“We really, I mean really, really dont’ care what you smoke, ingest, inject,” the video added. “We care about your pet.”