Hooch's owner had been meaning to send off the forms to get him insured for weeks. Unfortunately she still had not sent them when he sneaked out one winter's evening and got run over.

Twenty minutes after he sneaked out he came limping home and gave a sad little bark at the front door. As the door opened he staggered in dripping a trail of blood down the hall from his damaged foot. His owner brought him straight across to my surgery.

At first glance he did not look badly hurt until you saw his back leg. He was conscious and standing on his other three legs, but his left hind foot had been trapped under the car and looked horribly damaged.

Apart from his foot, Hooch had had a lucky escape. There was no sign of any other injury, and he was not too shocked.

As I looked more closely at his foot I could see that it must have been trapped and dragged under the car wheel, probably because the driver had braked and locked the wheel just as it went over his leg.

Although he is a delightful little mongrel his foot was too painful to touch. Fortunately he had not eaten all day so I was able to give him a general anaesthetic straight away. Once he was asleep I washed his foot with lots of warm saline to remove the bits of grit and dirt from the road. When it was clean I covered the wound with a special moist dressing and gave him antibiotics and pain-killers. An x-ray confirmed that he had not broken any bones.

I explained to his owner that we would need to clean and dress the wound regularly until it was beginning to heal, then we would graft a piece of skin from his side over the wound to replace the missing skin.

For the first three days I had to change his dressing every day then I was able to leave each dressing on for three or four days. Ten days after his accident we took a skin graft from his side to cover his foot, then came two more weeks of changing his dressing under anaesthetic every five days.

At last, one month after his accident, he was able to run around without a dressing, though his owner is taking great care that he does not escape again. Hooch's owner really wished she had paid the £8 a month insurance premium instead of having to pay more than £500 all at once, though she was very glad to see Hooch recovered.

Simon Thomas's practice is at the Gatehouse Veterinary Hospital, Allerton Road, Bradford

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