Hit By a Car 

D. E. Larsen, DVM

I was sitting at the front desk of the veterinary school’s small animal clinic. Clock-watching was not something that I did very often. I always found that time passed quicker if you kept busy, but the ten o’clock hour was fast approaching, and our night duty shift was just about over. Then, the hospital would be turned over to a couple of interns.

The quiet was suddenly disrupted by an older couple rushing through the clinic doors with what appeared to be a near-dead little dog.

“Help us, please,” Doris said. “I just backed over our little Finn. I thought he was in the house with George, but he must have squeezed out the door when I left. You have to save him. I don’t know if I can live with the thought that he died by my hand.”

Jim ushered them into an exam room, and I ran to the treatment room in the back of the hospital to get Dr. Snow.

“We have a hit-by-a-car that just came in. It looks like he is in bad shape,” I said. “The old lady is pretty upset.”

“Okay, let’s go see what kind of a chance the pup has of surviving,” Dr. Snow said as he started down the hall quickly. A line of senior students followed him.

Jim had the pup on the exam table when we arrived. Its right front leg was severely fractured, and its respiration was labored.

Dr. Snow approached the table and put his stethoscope on the pup’s chest. Doris was standing at his shoulder, wringing her hands.

“What do you think, Doctor?” Doris asked as soon as Dr. Snow pulled his stethoscope off his ears. He motioned the students to listen.

“I think his leg took the worst of it, but right now, it is the least important,” Dr. Snow said. “His lungs are bruised, and there is bleeding into the airways. We may not be able to save little Finn.”

“Oh, Doctor, do whatever has to be done,” Doris said. “I cannot bear the thought that I was the one who did this to our little Finn. We can’t let him die without doing everything possible.”

“Okay,” Dr. Snow said. “We will take him back to the treatment room and put him on a ventilator. The leg we will worry about tomorrow if Finn’s is still alive.”

“Whatever it takes, Doctor,” Doris said as she reached out and gently patted Finn on the head.

We scooped up Finn and headed to the treatment room. With Finn on the treatment table, Rod quickly placed an endotracheal tube into his windpipe. When Dr. Snow entered the room, we had Finn hooked up to the ventilator.

“This pup is going to die,” Dr. Snow said. “And pretty quickly. Did everyone get a chance to listen to these lungs?”

Jim was the only one who didn’t have a stethoscope in the exam room. He grabbed one and listened to the gurgling in the large airways. Then, you could see blood starting to show in the endotracheal tube.

“Why didn’t you tell her that in the exam room?” Jim asked.

“She is so upset. I thought she needed some time to adjust to the situation,” Dr. Snow said as he unhooked the ventilator. Blood and bloody foam poured from the endotracheal tube. Finn was dead.

“Now, what are you going to tell her?” Jim asked, a little upset with the deception.

“I’m going to wait a few minutes, and then I will go out and convince Doris that we should put Finn to sleep,” Dr. Snow said.

“You’ve got to be crazy,” I said. “What if she wants to see him one last time. What are you going to do then?”

“You guys stay here, practice putting an IV catheter in the cephalic vein,” Dr. Snow said. “If you can get one in a dead dog, you’re doing pretty good. I will go out and calm Doris down and convince her the best thing we can do for Finn is to put him to sleep so he doesn’t have to suffer tonight.”

So, Dr. Snow went out front, sat with Doris and George in the dimly lit reception room, and talked for some time. We could see him sometimes consoling Doris with a hand on her shoulder.

Finally, Dr. Snow presented them with a clipboard with the euthanasia release for them to sign. George signed the paper, stood up, and shook hands with Dr. Snow. Doris hugged him and sobbed. Then they turned and left through the front door. He had pulled off the impossible.

“What do we do with him now?” Jim asked when Dr. Snow came back to the treatment room. 

“We clean him up and get him into a box,” Dr. Snow said. “They are coming back to pick him up in the morning. They want to bury him at home.” Dr. Snow carefully placed the euthanasia release into Finn’s file.

“We have the catheter in place,” Jim said. “You better inject him with some euthanasia solution, or the record will be incomplete, and the controlled drug inventory will be off.”

While Dr. Snow did the paperwork for the euthanasia solution, we cleaned up Finn. We placed him neatly in a small burial box. We slipped it in the refrigerator.

I glanced at the clock as we cleaned up the treatment and got ready to go home. It was almost eleven, and Sandy was going to be worried.

As we were leaving, Dr. Snow stopped us,

“One last thing,” Dr. Snow said. “You guys probably don’t want to do something like this when you’re in practice. Now that I think about it, it was a dumb idea.”

Photo by Mikhail Nilov on Pexels.