A mother claims her two dogs saved her life after she caught rabies from a stray cat at a luxurious Turkish holiday resort.
While eating at La Blanche Resort’s restaurant, Chloe Kelly, 44, was bitten on the heel by a ginger cat that was startled when she moved her chair.
Chloe told SWNS: ‘Animals with rabies tend to be more aggressive and this cat just sunk its teeth into my heel. I only saw it when it ran off.
‘It was really painful and I was screaming in pain, there was blood everywhere.’
This happened on the last night of her holiday with her youngest daughter, aged 20 at the time, so she just wanted to get home and rest.
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Chloe and her daughter flew back and got home at around 6.30am. Tired and in agony, Chloe wanted to get some sleep and thought she would ring her GP to arrange a tetanus jab the next Monday.
‘Little did I know at this point the clock was ticking as with rabies, you need to get treated within 24 hours or else you’re pretty much dead,’ she said.
Her two Staffy-boxer crossbreeds Zeus and Bronson would not leave her foot alone. They constantly kept sniffing and were unsettled.
Chloe said: ‘Looking back I feel they were clearly trying to tell me something.’
And they were. Chloe had rabies and she needed treatment quickly before the infection fatally spread to her brain.
‘If it wasn’t for my dogs, I wouldn’t have survived – they 100 per cent saved my life.
Can dogs sniff out illness?
There have actually been a large number of studies that have assessed a dog’s ability to smell a wide variety of diseases.
Dogs have been able to distinguish healthy people from those with lung, breast, prostate, ovary, bladder, skin and colon cancer. One study managed to train ‘ordinary’ dogs to detect lung and breast cancer via exhaled breath with almost perfect results.
A small study utilising worn socks from children infected with malaria demonstrated that two dogs were able to distinguish between infected and non-infected children with a specificity of over 90%.
There was even one study that found dogs were able to identify individual aggression in a group of psychiatric patients.
Source: VetHelpDirect
‘If I had gone to bed for those two hours it would have delayed any possible treatment even longer and probably proved fatal.’
Instead of going to sleep, Chloe rang 111 and was told to go to hospital as soon as possible. Still not fully aware of how serious her injury was, she got in a taxi straight away.
When she pulled back the plaster at the hospital, the wound was grey and rotting. Doctors had to cut away some of the flesh eating bacteria before it got worse.
The treatment was flown down to the hospital from Northampton – by the time it got to her, it was 26 hours after she was bitten.
Chloe said: ‘As I was bitten on my foot, it was the furthest away from my brain as you could get and I think that’s what has saved me.
‘If it had been my hand I probably wouldn’t be here today, it has been pretty traumatic to say the least.’
Although Chloe survived the infection, she has been left with nerve damage that has made her give up her job as a support worker in a secured children’s home.
As a single mum of two, she is trying to make ends meet by running a hair salon. But she is still lives with daily pain because of the ordeal.
She said: ‘I also lost my home as it was attached to my support worker role so I’m staying with friends at the moment.
‘I also had to rehome my youngest dog Bronson as he is quite a hyperactive dog, so it really has had a profound effect on my life.
‘But I just count myself luckily I’m still here. I’ve never been a big fan of cats – and I’m certainly not one now.’
This is not the only case of someone contracting rabies on holiday. For Yvonne Ford, her scratch was from a stray puppy and sadly died from it several months after.