- When I first met Yoda, he was nine months old.
He just stole my heart and he was very scared.
Very timid, but once he came out of his shell,
he's just been amazing.
Aren't you, buddy?
He's our little miracle.
- He was this cute little, fluffy thing
with spindly legs and knobby knees.
I immediately fell in love with him.
- Yoda came to us several months ago from our friends
at Second Chance.
We were excited to get him, because we thought that he
would fit in great with our counseling program
and he certainly did.
He was an instant hit with all of our kids.
But a few months ago, a couple of months ago actually,
he got really sick.
Our supervisor, Kelly, had notified me that he just
wasn't acting right.
And as we monitored him throughout the day,
we noticed that he was sneezing and that he was startin'
to cough more and so we immediately took him in to the vet.
And upon examination from the vet, it was determined
that he was developing a very severe case of pneumonia.
We put him on antibiotics and he didn't get any better.
So the next day they did another series of x-rays
and some more tests and they didn't like what they saw
in the x-rays.
We determined that we were gonna take him up
to Oklahoma State University.
We got him up there in the nick of time.
As a matter of fact, if it wasn't for the antibiotics,
Yoda probably would have died.
He was in heart failure when we got him up there.
His lungs were full of fluid.
And they were very concerned
as to whether or not he would make it.
But over the next 48 hours he started to improve
and that's when they started to do the sonograms
on the heart and all the heart tests
and they realized that his heart
was two and a half times the size it should've been.
There was this valve called the PDA that should have
closed after birth and it didn't.
And so as a result, there was a big red flag that came up.
Most people would've just euthanized him.
But for us, he's more than just a sheep.
I mean, he's a precious life
and I believe that all life is precious.
And he works with kids in our counseling program,
so he's part of our family.
We knew that he had some health issues,
but we certainly didn't realize that he was gonna
have a heart condition.
And so, OSU, in performing a wide battery of tests,
discovered if we did nothing he certainly would die.
Originally, Dr. Baumwart, the cardiologist,
was going to try to close the PDA with a coil.
But when they got in there, they realized
that it was way too big.
That was when they came to me and said,
"We need to prepare you that there's,
"unless you want to do open heart surgery,
"there's really nothing that we can do."
And I thought to myself,
why wouldn't we want to do open heart surgery?
I mean, he's part of our family.
And if there's a chance that we can heal him, alright,
that we can repair this, then we should try.
Dr. Ducot, who was the surgeon,
has done this successfully in dogs and cats before.
And her biggest concern was that,
if there was a tear,
we wouldn't be able to stop the bleeding.
And I was gonna need to make a decision
about what were we gonna do with him.
Well it turns out, when she got in there,
and they were able to split his ribs apart,
they could see the PDA immediately
and they also saw how large it was.
And it was fascinating when she talked to me
about how they actually did it and the timeframe
that it took, that as soon as they closed it,
his blood pressure started to return to normal.
He was in heart failure when they went into the surgery.
Did have fluid on his lungs and some other issues.
And it was a complete success.
It took longer than expected, but I'm glad it did
because they learned a lot from it.
And now Yoda's here at Ranch Hand Rescue in cardiac rehab
and he's doing amazing.
- This is Yoda's scar from his surgeries,
open heart surgeries, where they went in
and spread open his ribs.
He's on limited activity right now.
And he will be for next six months.
(giggling)
- Yoda is just a phenomenal partner for us in therapy.
And one of the great things I love about Yoda,
is because he's young and because he has a lot of energy,
it's really great for us to relate that to clients
that maybe have a hard time regulating their energy.
- He's got couple of more weeks to go before he goes
back up to OSU and gets his checkups to make sure
that everything's healing with the heart
and that sort of thing.
And certainly, this is why we say at Ranch Hand Rescue,
it's animals helping people and people helping animals.
Hopefully, he can have a full and productive life
and he will help a lot of people, especially kids,
in the years to come.
And that's our goal and that's our wish for him.