McKenzie: Injured puppy lucky to find itself in skilled hands

Rudy lies in the corner of his pen, his scarred scalp showing through the layer of fur burned thin; his head, leg and paw looking marbled where fur and skin, melted near to bone, slowly heal and scar.

On his back a blue bandage covers a gaping burn wound.

“It’s a little bit pieced together — I just treat the burns and I didn’t investigate anything,” says Dr. Jason Wheeler, veterinary surgeon at Virginia Veterinary Specialists, as he reaches to pet the 9-week-old Labrador-mix puppy, “but apparently he got burned by grease.”

Rudy gingerly raises his head toward Dr. Wheeler’s hand, flinching slightly as the doc gently strokes the puppy’s nose.

“He’s really coming along pretty well. He had so many third-degree burns. It was pretty much through the fur and skin,” the vet says, gently petting the mostly black puppy with swirls of gray skin showing the outline of its burns. “We’re waiting to see if we have to do skin grafts. Luckily, puppies especially have a lot of loose fur and so it’s pretty forgiving, but we may need grafts in some areas.”

Rudy really got it good, in a bad sort of way. It happened just as he was starting to have a good end to a bad beginning.

Found in a trash bin near Roanoke, Rudy came home to a family that had planned to hang onto him and take him to the area SPCA, maybe even keep him. About 8 weeks old, the pup — then without a name — was finally indoors and living with people.

Then came the accident.

The family, it is said, was deep frying something for dinner. Could have been fish. Could have been chicken. Like Dr. Wheeler said, he didn’t do the investigation. Whatever was cooking for dinner, it ended up on the dog when the pot of grease came off the stove and all over the puppy that, as puppies are wont to do, was underfoot.

The burns included a serious one on the tip of the dog’s nose, a bright red spot that led to the pup’s name, Rudy, as in Rudolph, the red-nosed.

“They took [the dog] to a vet clinic near Roanoke — we’ve worked with the vet before — and she called to ask some advice,” Dr. Wheeler recalls. “I said just go ahead and bring him up and we’d take care of it here.”

Here is a good place to be. Virginia Veterinary Specialists is in the same facility as the Virginia Emergency Treatment Service and Specialty, the region’s weekend and after hours emergency veterinary service out by the airport.

VVS started a few years ago when Dr. Wheeler and internist and practice partner Dr. Carrie Miller packed up their Denver office to move across country to Charlottesville.

Veterinary technicians Colleen Todd and Katie Miller, no relation to Dr. Miller, packed up and moved, as well. Since then, vet surgeon Dr. Kevin Stiffler and internist Dr. Kate Jones have joined the practice to which other vets refer pets with the need for special treatments, from chemotherapy to thoracic surgery.

“We’ll see how he’s healing up before we know exactly whether we’ll need to graft. When the skin started healing, it was pulling up his one eyelid so he really couldn’t close it,” Dr. Wheeler says as Rudy lowers his head and feigns sleep, peering through half-shut eyes.

“After he gets better, we’ll work through the local SPCA and they’ll adopt him out,” Dr. Wheeler said. “The main thing is that he’s doing a lot better. He’s a sweet dog.”