Win or bus after sleepy Sam suffers horror injuries

BLOOD, of course, is thicker than water, but both are fluids without which we cannot survive for very long.

Like so many things, we can take them for granted – until, that is, they are in short supply.

In which case, every single, solitary drop becomes precious and priceless.

There is another saying that goes: “You can’t get blood out of a stone,” but sometimes, just sometimes, you can.

Sam was living proof of this.

Many, many moons ago, before the days of blood banks and all that jazz, Sam was run over by a mini bus.

When I say run over, I mean just that.

Being a lazy dog on a hot, sunny day, he had lain under said bus in the shade.

This was absolutely fine while the vehicle was parked up.

But, mid-afternoon, the driver started her up for the school run and drove right over Sam’s abdomen.

Now Sam was a big dog but so was the bus.

And it was quite a lot heavier than him too.

The abdomen contains a number of organs within what amounts to a closed space, barring a little room for expansion when the diaphragm, the thin sheet of muscle that separates the chest from the abdomen, is able to relax.

At the very front is the liver, which is large but protected by the ribs.

Behind it is the stomach, which, of course, can vary greatly in size.

The kidneys are tucked up under the lumbar muscles at the last ribs and the adrenal glands nestle tightly to them.

The slipper shaped spleen, which can be engorged with blood or flat and empty (think a “stitch” when you start running without warming up), is located close to the stomach on the left side.

And then there is the glorious wriggly mass of small and large intestine.

To finish it all off, we have the bladder (again hugely variable in size), in Sam’s case a prostate gland, situated above the neck of the bladder and below the rectum, and, barring a few blood vessels, a ureter or two and a urethra. That just about sums it up.

As you might expect, some of this was likely to be damaged when the bus wheel rolled over Sam and, when he was rushed to the surgery – his puffing, panting, pallor and pain confirmed to us that some of it indeed had been.

The trouble was, with no blood donor in sight and none stored in the fridge, how was he ever to survive?

To find out the answer to that question, you’ll have to wait until next week.