Trevor the dog was rushed to the vet in Warrington, England, after he blew up to three times his normal size.
Trevor was having a regular morning with his owner, Jessica Jennings, when she noticed something strange happening to him over breakfast. Jessica’s mom asked her “Does Trevor look fat to you?”
The normally slender Dachshund was growing bigger by the minute until he was literally three times his usual size within the space of an hour!
Jessica didn’t know what to make of it.
“Before we knew it, his head and his body resembled one big mass,” Jennings told As It Happens host Carol Off. “He literally looks like a seal. He had just blown up like a really, really large balloon. There was no definition of where his head, his neck, his body, his legs, where any of it started.”
When they went over and touched him, “he felt like bubble wrap, because he was all sort of crinkly underneath.” Jessica immediately rushed Trevor to the vet.
It turns out Trevor had a hole in his windpipe so that every time he took a breath the inhaled air was exhaled into his body.
“Every time he took a breath, some of the inhaled air escaped through a hole in his windpipe around the muscles and fatty tissue under the skin, and X-rays showed the emphysema was worsening,” veterinarian Michelle Coward of the Willows Veterinary Group said in a press release.
“Surgery was the only way to repair the injury but due to its location, there was a significant risk of complications.”
Not only that, but the build-up of air was collecting around Trevor’s heart, and causing it to separate from the sternum!
Fortunately, Trevor pulled through the surgery. They patched up the hole in his windpipe, and also left a small nick on his skin for the excess air to escape.
Jessica says they had to knead the extra air out of him from bottom to top. “We had to start from his bottom and work our way up to his head and neck and gently squeeze the air out of him just to deflate him,” Jennings said. “He was dead happy. I think it was more of a release for him.”
What an incredibly weird and scary thing to happen. Thankfully, it didn’t take long for Trevor to be back to his old, cheery, slender self!
You can listen to Jessica’s radio interview of Trevor’s experience here.
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