FAIRBANKS, Alaska — When he saw Tink, his 2-year-old German wirehaired pointer, lying lifeless on the snow with a cable snare cinched tight around her neck, Barry Whitehill did the only thing he could do.
He loosened the snare, a process that seemed to take forever, and started giving the dog mouth-to-mouth resuscitation.
“By the time I got her mouth open, her tongue was blue and her gums were blue,” Whitehill said. “I held her mouth open, held her tongue out and started breathing down her throat.”
At the same time, unsure how to give chest compressions on a dog, Whitehill began lifting the dog up and pounding her chest down on the ground.
“I was working on her for quite a while, and all of a sudden I saw the color come back into her gums,” he said, “but she wasn’t breathing.”
Whitehill continued his resuscitation efforts and Tink “eventually let out two big gag reflexes,” he said, and her breathing kicked in, though she remained unconscious.
While Whitehill was busy reviving Tink, his other dog, Molly Rose, a 6-year-old German wirehair, got caught in another snare, but unlike Tink, she was smart enough not to pull on the snare and tighten the cable. After finding and releasing Molly Rose, Whitehill threw the still-unconscious Tink over his shoulder and began hiking out to his truck.
When Whitehill got to an area he knew he could drive to, he set Tink down on his coat and headed for his truck.
“No sooner had I left her when she came running past me and started hunting again, sniffing around through the brush,” Whitehill said.
Whitehill, 56, was hunting sharp-tailed grouse near his home off Nordale Road outside Fairbanks on Dec. 6, an area he has frequented often in the past 17 years, when Tink and Molly Rose were caught in the traps, which had been set by an unknown trapper.
Little did Whitehill know then that saving Tink’s life may have saved his own.
Warning signs
Even though Tink didn’t show any ill-effects from the incident, Whitehill took her to an emergency veterinary clinic in Fairbanks. It was on the way to the vet with his wife, Patti Picha, that Whitehill temporarily lost his hearing.
“We were talking, and all of a sudden her voice went out,” Whitehill said. “It sounded like her voice was at the end of a long echo chamber.”
His hearing returned by the time they got to the vet’s office but as he was waiting for the vet to examine Tink, Whitehill’s left arm went numb. A few minutes later, as he waited in the truck, the left side of his face went numb.
“What really concerned me was when we were at the vet’s office and he said, ‘I’m going to go wait in the truck. Could you tell them to hurry up with the dog so we can go to the ER,”’ Patti said. “Usually, he’s pretty stoic about things that are wrong with him. He’s got a high pain threshold and for him to say, ‘I think I need to go to the ER,’ it was really frightening.
“I didn’t know if we were looking at a heart attack or what,” she said.
Patti left Tink and her credit card with the vet and hustled her husband to the emergency room at Fairbanks Memorial Hospital, where doctors performed a CAT scan and found what they thought to be the source of Whitehill’s problem — bleeding on the brain.
Doctors arranged an emergency lifeflight to Anchorage but Whitehill asked to go to Harborview Medical Center in Seattle instead. Whitehill’s first wife, Betsy, had died of brain cancer eight years ago and had been treated at Harborview, one of the top neurology treatment facilities in the world.
“I knew the quality of neurosurgery down there based on the experience with my wife,” Whitehill said.
Serious problem
Doctors in Seattle performed an angiogram on Whitehill — a procedure in which doctors inject dye into blood vessels that can then be viewed on X-rays to detect blockages in arteries — and came back scratching their heads. The bleeding on his brain wasn’t the problem; it was healing and wasn’t serious enough to cause the symptoms Whitehill had experienced.
As doctors huddled together examining X-rays trying to diagnose the problem, Patti said it resembled something out of “House” or “Grey’s Anatomy,” two popular TV medical dramas. One doctor told her the case was “very complicated.” Another told her it was “very interesting.” Another told her it was “very challenging.”
“You can see them all thinking these things but they’re only going to tell you so much,” Picha said. “To have all those doctors of that caliber working on it was reassuring.”
Doctors eventually diagnosed Whitehill with a blocked right carotid artery at the base of his brain, a potentially fatal condition and a common cause of strokes. They think the stress and exertion of performing CPR on Tink set off a series of “mini-strokes,” which explains the numbness he felt in his left arm and face.
“He had a complete occlusion of the right carotid artery,” Dr. Sekhar Laligam, a world renowned neurosurgeon and director of Harborview’s cerebro vascular surgery unit, said. “The blood flow was severely diminished on the right side of his brain.
“He was lucky that he didn’t suffer a major stroke,” Laligam said, adding that some patients who have a similar condition often suffer some kind of paralysis. “God was kind to him and his dog.”
Doctors put Whitehill on blood thinners for six weeks in hopes the artery will repair itself. He will return to Seattle on Jan. 20 for a checkup.
If the blood thinners don’t work, Whitehill will undergo an operation in which doctors take a piece of artery from his forearm and bypass the carotid artery. Laligam said there is “probably a 75 to 80 percent chance” the artery will heal itself.
Whitehill spent a week in the neurological intensive care unit and another week in the hospital so doctors could monitor his progress. Patti spent the month with him in Seattle. Seeing her husband lying in the intensive care unit with other patients who had suffered major strokes “brought home what could have happened,” she said.
“To have this happen and way it played out was truly amazing,” Patti said.
Back home
The fact that he returned to Fairbanks earlier this week in the midst of one of the worst cold snaps in decades didn’t bother Whitehill.
“I never thought 46 below and ice fog would look so good,” he quipped.
Indeed, Whitehill is just happy to be alive and thankful that he was close to town when he fell ill. A deputy manager for the Yukon Flats National Wildlife Refuge who has spent 31 years working for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and plans to retire this year, Whitehill spends a good chunk of time outdoors. This summer, for example, he spent 70 nights in a sleeping bag, mostly in remote locations on rivers in the Brooks Range.
“I’m very fortunate,” Whitehill said.
Tink and Molly Rose, meanwhile, were happy to see Whitehill when he returned home earlier this week after a month in Seattle.
During an interview on Thursday, all it took was a small pat of his hand on his leg for Tink, whose smooth brown and white-flecked coat defies the wirehaired nature of the breed, to jump up into Whitehill’s lap. Molly Rose, who has the prototypical wiry white coat, sat by his side demanding equal attention.
“They’re pretty much glued to my hip now when I’m home,” Whitehill said with a smile.
Whitehill still doesn’t know who set the traps in the area but he said two of his neighbors’ dogs also were caught in the snares. Neither dog suffered an injury but Whitehill said he hopes whoever is setting the snares recognizes by the tracks what is happening and pulls them.
“Somebody’s not thinking,” said Whitehill, himself a trapper several years ago. “Everybody in the neighborhood goes down there with their dogs.
The scariest part of the whole episode wasn’t his time in the hospital waiting for doctors to diagnose his condition or the initial mini-strokes that he suffered that prompted his emergency flight to Seattle or the prospect of brain surgery, Whitehill said. The thing that frightened him most was seeing Tink lying lifeless on the snow with a snare around her neck.
“The scariest part was the dog,” Whitehill said. “I just remember thinking, ‘If I don’t save this dog I’m as good as dead.”’
That may well have been the case.
“That’s what Barry always says, that things happen for a reason,” Patti said. “I don’t know if it happened for a reason, but I’m happy the way it happened when it did. They just saved each other.”
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