SOUTHWEST MIAMI-DADE, Fla. (WSVN) — A dog found sick and starving by a University of Miami student has died a day after undergoing surgery.
UM student Sharon Meguira said she found Rei roaming by a water treatment plant in Hialeah. She cared for the dog for about a month and noticed her condition was steadily deteriorating.
"She’d stopped, like, being able to walk, stopped being able to hold herself up," said Meguira. "She was falling over herself, and at that point, I was like, ‘There’s something wrong.’"
Meguira brought Rei to a vet but had to take her home when she could no longer pay the rising medical bills. When the dog got worse, she went to Facebook, and that is when she made contact with Jennifer Diliz.
"I do rescue whenever I can," said Diliz. "Dogs are my passion. Animals, really are my passion, so I thought, ‘Let me just go by and see how I can help, or just to meet the dog.’"
Rei was then brought to Bravo Animal Health Center in Southwest Miami-Dade, where Dr. Juan Bravo performed surgery on the canine and removed twine from inside her stomach and intestines. "All this was attached, so there’s parts of the stomach and there’s parts of the intestines … so it’s all scattered all around," he said as he held up the twine.
7News cameras captured Rei still under the effects of the anesthesia following Monday’s surgery.
The dog, Bravo said, was not out of the woods just yet. "The prognosis, I think, is still a little bit guarded, just because of all the time that had passed," he said. "You hope that everything is going to be OK, and if it is, everything is going to be 100 percent OK, but still, you’ve got to get through the initial next two or three days."
Rei’s road to recovery, however, came to end, Tuesday, when she was pronounced deceased.