The price of life

When Dr Magdoline Awad and her dog, Rex, suffered serious health scares, she learned the value of preparing for life’s unexpected turns.

It was a dramatic end to an otherwise uneventful day. “I’d been for a run that morning, I’d gone to work and picked up my two youngest kids,” Dr Magdoline Awad recalls. “We had a normal family evening at home. Then my husband and I went to sleep and sometime during the night I had a major seizure. It came out of the blue. I’d always been very healthy.”

The 46-year-old vet was rushed to hospital, given a CT scan and diagnosed with a large brain tumour.

“It was about six-and-a-half centimetres in diameter,” she explains. “A few days later, I was in hospital having brain surgery.”

It was, Magdoline says, an immense physical and emotional upheaval. “In that week before the surgery, I looked at my life and thought, ‘Is this it? I haven’t done everything I wanted to do.’ I had my will written.”

As it turned out, the tumour, though massive, was benign and surgeons were able to remove it successfully. But this wasn’t to be the last medical emergency for Magdoline’s family. During her convalescence from surgery her loyal kelpie, Rex, was rushed to the veterinary hospital with a grass seed embedded in his lung.

Magdoline is a former RSPCA NSW vet, now chief vet officer at insurance underwriting agency, PetSure. She met her husband while they were both working with animals. As such, their kelpies, Don, 15, Rex, nine, and Blue, one, are much-loved family members.

“I was at home recovering from my surgery when my husband said, ‘Can you have a look at Rex? He doesn’t seem so well.’ Rex is a dog who can run 50km. He’s an amazing athlete and a great dog but he was lethargic, he had a temperature of over 40 degrees and his heart rate was up. I asked my husband to take him to the emergency centre at the Animal Referral Hospital.”

Doctors performed a CT scan and a specialist surgeon removed part of Rex’s lung. He spent a week in intensive care. Then he was on “restricted rest” at home for eight weeks. Life in the Awad household was beginning to return to normal. Then, says Magdoline – once again, right out of the blue –

Rex became unsteady on his feet.

“He was having difficulty walking down the stairs,” she says. “His movement became more restricted until he couldn’t move his neck or open his mouth. We took him back to the animal referral hospital. They did another CT scan and found a ruptured disc in his neck. It was extremely painful but Rex is a stoic dog. They needed to operate to remove that disc material to relieve the pressure on his spine so he could walk again.”

Both Rex and Magdoline survived their brushes with mortality, and both are thriving now, taking runs together.

Magdoline stresses that Rex’s two major medical procedures cost many thousands of dollars but a significant portion of that was covered by pet insurance, and that was a huge relief, at a time when the family was coping with other major stresses in their lives.

It was the type of perfect storm that strikes only rarely but, she says, “it’s taught me you just never know what’s around the corner and it makes a huge difference if you’re prepared”.