A miniature Doberman faces his fourth surgery after being run over
by an SUV.
AUBURN – The 10-pound doggie sat curled in a laundry basket, hiding the scars of his first surgery. Tire burns dotted his little body, only the size of a shoe.
Erin Talpey looked into Rocky’s brown eyes and knew she couldn’t let him die.
Doctors in Lewiston had done what they could for him. To make it, he would have to go to Tufts School of Veterinary Medicine in Boston.
“Either it was time to say goodbye to him or take him to Tufts,” said Erin’s mom, Kathy.
So the mother and daughter packed Rocky in the car and drove to Boston.
Three surgeries would follow, to repair the flesh and bones battered by a sports utility vehicle that never stopped.
“At first I was angry,” Erin said. “But maybe they didn’t see him.”
The accident happened on July 5.
The night before, Rocky had discovered a porcupine in the flower bed outside the Talpey’s Pownal Road home. The garden is situated outside his normal domain, a territory defined by the family’s Labradors, Tanner and Dutch.
The pair wear electronic collars that keep them inside a fence that is buried beneath the yard. Rocky, a miniature Doberman pinscher, tended to stay with them.
But the porcupine’s wake was too much for him to resist. He was sniffing the flower bed when he slipped.
He rolled down a steep bank that ended at the side of the road. Rocky tumbled right into a white SUV.
“We think it flipped him over the tire itself,” said Kathy Talpey, who had glanced away for a moment. She looked up in time to see a white blur.
“I saw it sort of slow down and then take off,” she said. She knew something had happened to Rocky and she called Erin.
“He was laying in the road just screaming,” Erin said. “His tongue was sticking out of his mouth.”
She scooped him up and they rushed him to the Animal Emergency Clinic in Lewiston. Doctors performed emergency surgery to repair some of the devastating internal damage.
“They were wonderful,” said Kathy.
The decision to take Rocky to Boston came the next day.
It took more than 40 staples to close the incisions after the first operation. In the later operations, he had plates and pins put into his back hips and legs, where the most severe damage was done.
The last operation, which happened on Thursday, removed the socket in his left rear hip. Doctors say the tendons and ligaments will keep the leg secure.
Once he heals, he should be ready to lead a normal doggie life. He is only 16 months old.
Erin knows she will be paying the medical bills for years. They have totaled in the thousands of dollars, she said.
She has refused to be more specific, even to her mother. Friends and co-workers have questioned why she would spend so much money.
“It’s not your dog,” she said. “If you really do love your dog, you do what you can.”
Meanwhile, Rocky has persevered.
He has slowed and some of the hyperness has gone, Erin said. But he’s still the same doggie she loved.
He is still proud. He still thinks he’s one of the big dogs.
“When he looks in the mirror, he sees a Rottweiler or a Great Dane,” Kathy Talpey said.
dhartill@sunjournal.com
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