Saved by the supervet: Monty Don tells how the extraordinary skill of TV vet Noel Fitzpatrick cured his golden retriever Nigel after he was paralysed

Monty Don recalls the story of how Nigel his dog became paralysed 

He had jumped from a hedge to catch a ball and fallen to the ground 

Supervet Noel Fitzpatrick was able to save the dog  

The scream from outside that September morning in 2012 sent me running into the garden. 

Nigel, my golden retriever and scene-stealing star of Gardeners’ World, was lying on the ground, shaking violently and crying. 

He’d jumped from the top of a hedge after a yellow ball, as he’d done a thousand times before, twisted sideways and up with astonishing speed and dynamism to try and catch it – and fallen to the ground. He was paralysed.

Monty Don reveals how the supervet Noel Fitzpatrick cured his golden retriever Nigel

I stroked his head as I waited for the vet to arrive. All around us the garden at Longmeadow was in its late summer pomp, the day glorious, but at that moment I would have traded it for a cramped concrete yard to have Nigel stretch and clamber back to his feet with a rueful and slightly embarrassed expression. This was entirely fanciful. He lay quivering, crying, clearly in shock.

Carried on a stretcher to the vet’s surgery, he was given a huge injection of steroids to reduce any swelling and then kept overnight for observation. The next morning I rang to see how he was. ‘He’s fine. But his leg has had it.’

NIGEL NEVER SEES RED 

Nigel loves the orchard at Longmeadow, although over the years he’s had to share it with orphaned lambs, a bolshie ram and three pigs which fattened on the windfalls. What he likes is that the apples it produces double up as both scrumptious snacks, which he can munch through with relish, and edible balls, which resemble his favourite yellow tennis balls. A ball that you can eat surpasses all other doggy dreams.

We have 37 different varieties of apples, and his preference seems to be for the smaller ones with a touch of red in their skin, such as Gala or Ribston Pippin. Not that the colour can be part of this choice because dogs cannot see the red end of the colour spectrum clearly. Their eyes and brains distinguish blue and yellow but, as with many colour-blind humans, cannot tell red and green apart.

This suggests that, for Nigel, the red in an apple’s skin is a symptom of the stimulus rather than the deciding factor itself. In fact, red apples are sweeter and have more sugar than green ones, and it is probably this that he is attracted to. As if he isn’t sweet enough as he is!

When I went to collect him, one leg dragged uselessly behind him, bent in on itself, the knuckle scraping appallingly on the gravel. The vet said he might have to amputate it as there was little chance of recovery and ‘it will only get in the way’. 

But he needed a scan to see what other damage had been done. If his abdomen and bowel had been affected, there was nothing they could do.

Nigel slept most of the day and then had a violently upset tummy all night long. He was partially paralysed, completely dehydrated and was reducing in front of our eyes to skin and bone. He seemed dangerously close to death.

The next day we got him to drink a little, but he was pitifully weak, incontinent and one leg dangled from him like a piece of string. We had been up all night and were exhausted, shocked and upset. Outside the sun blazed. Longmeadow – Nigel’s garden – had never looked lovelier.

That night a friend said she knew a vet who specialised in extreme cases. His name was Noel Fitzpatrick, and he is not known as The Supervet for nothing. I rang and he said he would see Nigel at his hi-tech surgery in Surrey – 150 miles away – the next morning. 

There, after a scan, the diagnosis was made – a disc in Nigel’s back had exploded apart as he twisted in the air and the fluid shot out with the velocity of a bullet and cut through his spinal cord, partially severing it. His spinal cord had a wedge cut out from it like a slice of cake.

Although unusual, this was not unknown. Apparently it occasionally happened to a particular type of young, large, but very fit and lean dog with exceptional dynamic power. Nigel fitted the bill exactly. With his own leap in the air, he’d effectively broken his own back. His exceptional athleticism had been his downfall.

Nigel loves the orchard at Longmeadow, although over the years he’s had to share it with orphaned lambs, a bolshie ram and three pigs which fattened on the windfalls

Noel’s decision was not to operate but keep him in the correct position, coupled with gentle swimming in the hydrotherapy pool to maintain movement without any weight-bearing. 

‘His leg is completely dead from the hip down,’ he told me. ‘But I think he’ll be fine.’ Because of the wedge-shape of the damage, there was a real chance of the ends re-growing and fusing.

Five days later we collected Nigel, who walked out to the car, tail up, wanting to leap into the back. 

It seemed little short of miraculous. His aftercare was going to have to be strict – on a lead for six weeks, four 20-minute walks a day, strictly no running or jumping whatsoever. 

Then increase that to two walks a day of an hour, and after two months Nigel would be as good as he was going to get.

Nigel became paralysed when jumping to catch a ball 

It was not easy to keep such an active dog inactive, one who never walked but always ran. Not least of our problems was that, because of the remote countryside where we live, he had hardly ever been on a lead before. 

Perhaps that was the problem. Had he been less highly tuned he might not have had the incredible dynamic energy needed to go from a standing start to bursting open his own spine in a single leap. 

So this enforced restriction was hard. It quickly became a tyranny, with Nigel bored to tears and completely unable to work out why he was suddenly tethered to the lead.

But I stuck with the regime to the letter, and it worked. By the winter, his rehabilitation was complete. He was moving freely off the lead and running without a trace of a limp. 

Our fields flooded in the November rains and he swam across them exactly as he had done before. Other than a tremor in his afflicted leg, which he has retained, and an inability to cock that leg, he was healed. 

Of course Nigel had no concept of being healed or even being injured. Bits worked as they did, when they did. 

A leg out of action was a nuisance, but he adapted. And though part of me yearned to have the old, complete Nigel back, I was very, very happy to have this revamped version, marked by the vicissitudes of life, but not changed.

Monty with Red (left) and Beaufort in 1997

I take my hat off to Noel Fitzpatrick, a man so dedicated to animals that, as far as I can gather, he only stops work to sleep – and does very little of that. His office is set up with seven large computer screens and piles of papers, artificial joints and bones. 

His phone rings every two minutes and he answers with curt, precise instructions to his six senior surgeons and six interns in mid-operation. He reminds me of a flight controller guiding in an endless stream of planes, while also having to repair the engines and fly them himself.

Noel’s nickname The Supervet – which became the title of a TV series about his work – couldn’t be more apt. I’ve had to use the services of many different vets in my time. Almost all are admirable, but none are like Noel Fitzpatrick. 

His clinic is extraordinary, with its hydrotherapy pool where dogs like Nigel swim their way to recovery, its Perspex-sided kennels with TVs for company and regular visits from nurses talking to each animal, its lecture theatre and over 100 staff in total.

There are also amazing ‘bionic’ operations fixing titanium prosthetics into existing bone to provide false limbs, so smashed bodies are reassembled and bolted back together.

Noel Fitzpatrick is a man who loves animals and believes that this love – together with the love that we receive in return from our pets – is the most important thing in the world. But he also understands instinctively that every sick animal – and some he treats have the most appalling injuries – brings with it a distraught owner. The two cannot be separated. It was me he treated with his incredible skill and patience every bit as much as Nigel. n

Extracted from Nigel: My Family And Other Dogs by Monty Don (Two Roads, £20). Order a copy for £15 until 1 October at mailbookshop.co.uk or tel 0844 571 0640. P&P free on orders over £15.

AN UNCLE AND NIECE... BIG DOGS WITH BIG HEARTS 

Red came to me with a lot of family history. She was part-husky, part-Newfoundland, part-Labrador, a big dog essentially designed for the North Pole. I’d had her uncle, Beaufort, for years and for a while his brother Baffin, too, before the pair of them – each 3ft high and weighing 100lb and with a propensity to fight each other – became too much and I’d reluctantly found Baffin a new home on a Scottish island.

Beaufort was gorgeous, proud, aloof and incredibly athletic. He ran like the wind and swam like an otter and could leap a five-bar gate without breaking stride. In his prime there was a purity of movement that never failed to thrill. But as he got older he began to slow and when he was ten we decided to overlap him with a puppy from the same background.

From the first Red was clumsy and overgrown but good-natured, with eyes buried in black hairy wrinkles that made her look adorable. She was, above all, the family dog, the one my children grew up with. She was similar to Nigel, in that she was loyal and gentle, yet perhaps not the sharpest knife in the box.

For such a big dog, she was a dainty eater who’d nibble at her food over two or three sessions. She was also an expert sleeper, snoozing 20 hours a day if you added in all the naps. And she was generous with it, happy for children, cats and other dogs to use her as a pillow and sleep with her.

Red’s arrival gave Beaufort a new lease of life and the pair of them ran and chased balls together for three years until, a tired old boy by then, Beaufort’s kidneys started to fail and he was put to sleep. I dug a hole in the coppice. It was March and the primroses and violets were flowering. The vet and I walked him slowly up the garden and he lay on a sheet by the grave. I stroked his head. Rest now old friend. Rest now.

Eight years later, Red joined him. Her heart was packing up, and one day I found her in the coppice, lying under the cherry tree next to Beaufort’s grave. It had taken all her strength to walk there. The vet came and injected her where she lay, and as I buried her, I wept. I loved her. We all did.

Despite the sadness at the end, most of us willingly share our lives with a dog. That’s because each one is special and each one individual, but the love is uncomplicated and common to all of us.

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-3793074/Saved-supervet-Monty-Don-tells-extraordinary-skill-TV-vet-Noel-Fitzpatrick-cured-golden-retriever-Nigel-paralysed.html#ixzz4KYFIt2xi
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