Jasmine the Yorkshire Terrier recovers after surgery with Dr. Heidi Kellihan, clinical assistant professor of cardiology at the UW School of Veterinary Medicine. (Photo: Nik Hawkins)
More and more often each year, pacemakers are preserving the lives of dogs with heart disease.
Take, for example, Jasmine, an 8-year-old Yorkshire Terrier. After being diagnosed with sick sinus syndrome in 2013, her owners decided to have a veterinary medical cardiologist implant a pacemaker to keep her heart beating. It saved her life. But during a recent traumatic incident, the little metal device rescued her a second time—and in a completely different way.
On November 11, 2015, one of Jasmine’s owners was cleaning a shotgun, and it accidentally discharged when the little Yorkie was nearby. The unfortunate canine was sprayed with pellets. They embedded themselves in her torso, and at least one punctured her neck, where a bundle of vital blood vessels converge. But the pellet was stopped cold before it could cause any serious damage.
The metal pacemaker implanted in Jasmine’s neck stopped one gun pellet before it could cause any serious damage to vital blood vessels. (Photo: Nik Hawkins)
“In dogs as small as Jasmine, where you don’t have much room to work with, one of the best places to put a pacemaker is in their neck,” says Heidi Kellihan, clinical assistant professor of cardiology at the UW School of Veterinary Medicine. “The pacemaker stopped the pellet and probably saved her life. It killed the pacemaker, but not Jasmine.”
After the incident, the owners rushed Jasmine to UW Veterinary Care’s Emergency and Critical Care Service (ECC). The ECC veterinarians and technicians stabilized her, but knowing Jasmine had a pacemaker, they brought in Kellihan and the Cardiology Service for further evaluation. They discovered the pacemaker was no longer functioning.
To avert a cardiac crisis, Jon McAnulty, professor of small animal soft tissue surgery, stepped in to implant a new pacemaker, this time in Jasmine’s abdomen because her neck had suffered injuries. He also removed the rest of the shot from her body.
Now, other than the inconvenience of some new scars, a shaved patch of fur at her surgery sites, and a cone collar, Jasmine is doing just fine. And her new pacemaker is keeping her heart going strong.
Pacemakers have been used in dogs since 1968, but for many years the procedure was extremely expensive. Now that they’re becoming more affordable, they’re also becoming more common. The Cardiology Service implants about one a month on average, helping dogs with otherwise fatal heart conditions lead relatively normal lives.
Nik Hawkins