Shania Twain saves lives. After reading this story, that statement will be hard to deny.
A five-year-old Border Collie by the name of Jax was recently saved from a chronic illness. Its owner, Ellan Farrow, only started to worry about her pup’s health when the dog stopped singing and howling along to his favorite country music singer: Shania Twain.
According to the Sutton Weaver, Cheshire (England) resident, her “good boy” loves a good song by Shania Twain. He’s really taken to Twain’s “Man! I Feel Like A Woman” and “That Don’t Impress Me Much.” Anytime either of those songs come on the radio, or through a speaker, the dog likes to sing along to the country music star’s hits.
However, Farrow noticed that Jax had been coughing a lot, and she knew something was really wrong when those songs would come on and the Border Collie wouldn’t try to howl-harmonize. She waited a couple of weeks to see if the cough would subside, but it never did, and the singing had stopped completely.
So Farrow took her dog to the vet, and after some trial and error, the veterinarians were finally able to figure out what was wrong with Jax:
“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 Northwest Veterinary Specialists 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 5 centimeters long and more like the full seed head of some long grass.”
The grass seed ended up being the culprit responsible for Jax’s illness – and the subsequent decrease in passion for Shania Twain’s music. So the team at NWVS formulated a best plan of attack to remove the grass seed that was stuck in the dog’s lungs. As veterinarian Chantal Rosa described, a procedure (that wasn’t a surgery) ended up solving the issue:
“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.”
Farrow says that it didn’t take long for her singing pooch to get back to normal after the procedure. He’s apparently as active as he ever was now, and he’s gotten back to singing along to Shania Twain:
“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.”
Just another example of the power of music.
Specifically Shania Twain’s “Man! I Feel Like A Woman,” which you can listen to below:
