It was 6.30am when Jess collapsed. Her owner saw it happen. She was ten years old, a brindled Staffordshire bull terrier.

Up until that morning she had seemed absolutely fine. She must have actually had a slightly enlarging abdomen for a while, perhaps several months, but her owner had not really noticed it.

She had got up and staggered sideways, vomited and fallen down on her side. Her owner gave her a little time to come to but when she seemed no better, brought her down to my surgery where I examined her.

Her breathing was shallow and rapid, and when I opened her mouth, instead of being pink, her gums were deathly white. Her pulse was a faint, thready trickle and her ears and feet felt cold.

An ecg recording of her heartbeat, x-rays of her chest and abdomen and the results from a sample of her blood gave the answer. She had a growth in her spleen, which had burst, allowing blood to leak into her abdomen.

She was definitely too ill to give her an anaesthetic or perform an operation so my next job was to get a pipe into one of her veins so that I could transfuse her with warm saline and an artificial blood substitute made from a substance similar to gelatine.

She was so collapsed that the only vein big enough to put a cannula into was her jugular. With this in place, I began to slowly resuscitate her.

In a human hospital blood for transfusion is available more or less as needed. In a veterinary hospital it is not so easy. Blood keeps only a short time, two weeks at most once it has been collected, and it is only needed quite infrequently.

One of the drawbacks to being a dog owned by a vet is a much increased chance of being volunteered to give blood in an emergency. On this occasion it was Harriet, the youngest of our labradors, who found herself sitting on a blanket on our kitchen table. With half a dozen hands gently restraining her, I shaved her neck and injected a little drop of local anaesthetic under the skin before slipping the needle of the collecting set into her jugular vein.

It took 20 minutes of patient coaxing to keep her still while I collected three-quarters of a pint of her blood. The blood was promptly despatched to the surgery, quickly checked that it was compatible, and then slowly transfused into Jess.

By the next day she was stronger and the day after she was able to have her operation to remove her spleen. Two days later she was well enough to go home, and at the last count she was still doing well.

Harriet looked as if the extra-special tea she got made up for giving blood, and if it was not for the shaved patch on her neck you would not know she had done it.

Converted for the new archive on 30 June 2000. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.