Oscar the Labrador has a new lease of life after vets gave him a heart pacemaker in the first such operation in Hong Kong.
The six-year-old pet suffered from third-degree heart block, a serious condition that caused him to faint up to 10 times a day and could have killed him.
Now, surgeons say, he could live another six years, with the electronic device keeping his heart rhythms in order.
'This is not easy to treat,' owner Anna Lee, a part-time nurse at the Victoria Veterinary Clinic in Yuen Long, where the operation was done on Tuesday, said yesterday. 'If I had not done it, Oscar would have died.'
Pacemaker implants in animals are not new, but the city lacks specialists for the operation and owners in the past have usually flown their pets overseas or flown surgeons in, both expensive undertakings.
Vets Ken Thorley and Matthew Field consulted several cardiologists at the University of California, Davis, Cornell University and Michigan State University before performing the surgery. 'Before we went in, we knew what we were doing,' Thorley said, acknowledging they were well aware of the risks. 'When you operate on the heart, you are always very tense; but we were happy to see how well it went.'