In June, 2011, Kira Davidson’s boyfriend took her to Disneyland for her birthday.  It was a great day – until they returned home and Kira found her dog, Gypsie, shaking and acting “really strange.”

Gypsie, a 4-year-old Manchester terrier Kira had rescued “straight off the street” a year earlier, was “shaky and she’d never been shaky before. I figured that maybe it was because it was colder that night. The next morning, I woke up and I went out to get her some dog food. When I came home, she was excited and jumping like she normally does and we went upstairs. The next thing you know, I turned around and she was falling and tipping over and then she really fell down and I freaked out.

“My first instinct was to feel her heart and I noticed it was very, very, very slow. So I took her to my local veterinarian in Pasadena.  He said there was a heart murmur and it was beyond what he could do because he’s not a heart specialist.”

The veterinarian referred Kira, who lives in Temple City, to the Advanced Veterinary Care Center in Pasadena. Fearing an expensive treatment, Kira – who had been laid off from her job with an insurance company days before – went to a couple of other veterinarians first. She was told the same thing that the first practitioner had said.  So she took Gypsie to Advanced Veterinary Care.

“They were very accommodating and we found out that her heart wasn’t working right and the only way to save her was to put in a pacemaker.”  The hospital filled out forms for an Angel Fund grant to help Kira and AVCC matched the grant.  “So basically they saved us $1,000 on the pacemaker. And within about a week I had found out what was wrong with Gypsie and she was on the surgery table. She has always been a very fit dog. She’s got a lot of muscle, more than fat. So she was the first patient of theirs where they actually had to implant the pacemaker under her muscle, instead of just under her skin. The pacemaker is the exact same thing they put in a person. And it turned out really good. Dr. [Sarah] Zimmerman said she loved the result. She said she wanted to do it that way on more dogs.”

Today, Gypsie is a healthy, normal terrier.  She can keep up with other dogs.  She jumps and runs and plays.  “She’s fit!” Kira says happily.

But her dog would be gone by now, if she had not gotten the pacemaker, Kira believes. And she is delighted to have Gypsie back – just as she was before last June.

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