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Finn’s Story

In his own words from Dave Wardell:

“These are the very first pictures I took at the vets. This was about an hour in and the reason for taking them was that he was fading in front of us. I thought he was going to die and this might be my last picture of him alive.

You can see from the pics that he is heavily bandaged. The reason for this was that we’d spent half an hour trying to seal his wound and stop anymore air getting into his chest as he was now struggling to breath because of all the air that shouldn’t have been there.

We failed to seal it. We did know at this point that his lungs were also leaking through two holes into his chest as well.

We now had to rush him to another vet, Davies Specialists, ten miles away on blue lights to save his life.

The bottom picture is his now stapled head wound. This is where he got in the way of the second thrust of the knife headed for my upper body. He ended up having his head sliced open and I ended up with nothing more than a slashed hand.

“These are the pics from the following day. So it happened in the early hours of the 5th October. This is post surgery at lunchtime on 6th”

“This is my two hour visit on 7th. He looks so much more alert. But he tired very quickly. He went right back to trying to protect me on this visit and was very guardy of me.

He still had about 4 chest drains in at this point. The cake is a huge liver cake made by a fan of police dogs. We also fell asleep together again. I wasn’t sleeping at this point due to flashbacks and guilt. So the only time I really relaxed was when I was with him.

“We were now starting to feature in regional and national news”

“This was Saturday 8th. All chest drains now removed, it was time to come home. I was the happiest and most scared person at that point. We had a massive bag of drugs and an even bigger list of instructions and things to look out for The kids were happy to see him, but shocked by his appearance.”

9th – First of many hundred cards and gifts for Finn started arriving. This was the first time he showed any interest in a ball. He was just so tired all the time.

That scar and the picture that started a campaign. The last pic is the one that really kicked things off. This was taken on the 10th.

Our pet Staff, Millie, was never far from his side, neither were my amazing children.