Former Giants relief pitcher Jeremy Affeldt told an incredible story on Tolbert & Lund Wednesday afternoon, when he recounted saving his dogs life by performing CPR.
Affeldt was out in his barn with his son tending to a baby goat, when he heard an alarming sound coming from inside the house.
“All of the sudden my sister-in-law says ‘he’s dying!’” Affeldt began. “Immediately my brain goes: I’ve got two other boys in the house, and then I have two of my nephews in the house. So I’m thinking I’ve got my sister-in-law yelling ‘he’s dying,’ I’ve got my wife screaming my name, so I look at my son and my son was like ‘yeah, she said dying.’
“I start sprinting out of the barn and I’m running down the driveway from the barn, and I see my wife and she’s got this 70 pound, five month old pup, he’s gonna be like 180 pounds or something. She’s giving him the heimlich, like she has him picked up in the air, and I’m like ‘what?’
The dog in question was Kodi, a South African Boerbel, pictured below.
“So I run, I grab the dog and I’m like ‘what’s the problem?’ My wife’s hysterical, she’s freaking out, she’s screaming ‘he’s dying! He choked on a turkey neck.’”
“I rip open the mouth, and she puts her hand down there trying to get the turkey neck out, and her hand keeps slipping off the turkey neck, and the whole time my dog is actually going limp, his tongue is starting to fall out, his eyes are rolling back, I mean this dog is dying right in front of me. It’s chaos.
“I wait for her to go inside, I keep the dog’s mouth open, and I literally have to punch my hand down it’s throat. So I punch my hand down there and my fingers grabbed it on the turkey neck and I ripped it out, threw it on the ground, and when I did that there was a lot of blood that came after that, and I actually initially thought I had ripped the esophagus out of the dog. I was like ‘oh no,’ I think I just literally killed this dog.
“I looked down, and it’s just coughing up blood, and then it died. Then I said honey, that it’s girl, I’m sorry.”
Despite what appeared to be a lost cause, Affeldt wasn’t about to give up as his wife implored him to do whatever he could to save the pup.
“I close the dog’s mouth, and I know you can’t give CPR through a dog’s mouth because it’s too big. So I close the mouth and I start blowing into the nose. I have no idea what I’m doing. I’m blowing as hard as I can into the nose cause I’m panicking because I have no other option.
All of the sudden I felt the dog swell up, and when he swelled up he shot — you see in the movies when you’re giving CPR and someone drowns and all the water comes out — well his lungs were filled with blood and fluid from suffocating and the capillaries bursting. So he shot all the blood while my mouth wasn’t removed from the dog yet. He shot all of that into my mouth. And I spit it out all over the ground, I’m trying not to throw up. All of the sudden he looked at me and blinked, and then he died on me again. He went limp.
“So I give him CPR again. I couldn’t get him going, and then on the third try I was like ‘this is it.’ I did the same thing, I blew as hard as I could into his mouth on the third try and he swelled up again, I moved my face, he blew more lung blood out, and then I literally thought he had died. I was whispering in his ear…because there’s a lot of blood on the ground right now. It’s traumatizing, even for me. I was like I’m going to have a hard time sleeping for a while.
“All of the sudden he nuzzled me, and he pulled his tongue back in his mouth and his eyes were like Hunter Pence eyes man, they were massive. They were wide open. I’m looking and he’s scared to death.”
From that point, Affeldt threw the dog into his pickup and raced as fast as he could to a 24-hour veterinarian, that was supposed to be 18 minutes away.
“I got there in 11 (minutes), and I did about eight illegal moves on the freeway and on frontage roads and I allegedly have a train horn that was in full effect on that truck. I was moving vehicles. I’m surprised the cops didn’t get called on me for how I was driving.
“They were waiting for him, they got him on oxygen, and three days later he came home.”
Now Kodi is back to normal, but things have changed with regards to his relationship with Affeldt.
“This is a whole different scenario for me when I look at this dog. This dog turned, looked at me, ran, got up on its hind legs and put his big floppy paws around my neck, pulled me into his face, and nipped and licked my face for like five straight minutes. My wife starts kind of tearing up and she’s like ‘he so knows you saved him.’”
Listen to the entire story below.
