A dog struck down with a chronic cough after inhaling grass was saved when his owners noticed he wasn’t ‘singing along’ to Shania Twain.
Five-year-old Border Collie Jax loves howling to the country star’s hits including ‘Man! I Feel Like A Woman’ and ‘That Don’t Impress Me Much.’
When the musical pooch suddenly lost his bark and started coughing, owner Ellana Farrow knew something was wrong.
She took him to Linnaeus-owned Northwest Veterinary Specialists (NWVS) in Sutton Weaver, Cheshire.
A CT scan revealed he had inhaled a 5cm long grass seed which was embedded in his lungs.
Vets performed a bronchoscopy procedure using a tiny camera on the end of a tube, to remove the grass from inside Jax.
Ellena, from Preston, Lancs., suspected Jax was feeling poorly when he stopped ‘singing along’ to Shania Twain.
She said: “At the beginning of August Jax suddenly started coughing a lot for no obvious reason.
“I thought it might just be a virus but when it didn’t improve after a couple of weeks I went to our local vet.”
Ellena, who is a respiratory physiotherapist, says her professional background made her fear the worst.
She said: “The vets treated him for potential lungworm but when Jax still had symptoms weeks later I was concerned it could be something more sinister.
“He was referred to NWVS and once a CT scan confirmed the issue was likely a grass seed or similar I wasn’t hugely concerned, in fact I was actually slightly relieved.
“I was shocked at the size of the grass seed, though. It was 5cm long and more like the full seed head of some long grass.
“Jax is back to his normal self and out running with me and chasing frisbees like nothing ever happened. Best of all he’s singing again.
“I have a camera in the living room to check on him if I’m out for a while, and I often used to catch him singing along to the radio when I checked in on him.
“He’d not done it for quite a while but then Shania Twain came on not long after his vet treatment, when we were both relaxing in the living room, and he just decided to sing.”
Vet Chantal Rosa said: “Fortunately, no surgery was required as we were able to retract the troublesome seed by performing a bronchoscopy, where a thin, flexible tube with a camera, light source and miniature tools is fed down through the airways into the lungs.
“This allowed us to locate the grass seed and safely secure it before carefully retrieving it.
“The seed was quite a size, measuring 5cm, so no wonder Jax was coughing so much as this would have been a major irritation for him.
“The whole procedure went very well and Jax recovered quickly.
“He was allowed home that same day and is doing very well and has fully recovered from the cough.”
