Supervet Noel Fitzpatrick has revealed the incredible moment a slaughterhouse returned his missing specs two years after he left them inside a cow’s belly.
The Laois-born veterinarian surgeon said he searched everywhere for the glasses after he mislaid them during one of his earliest caesarean sections as a young practitioner in Ireland.
“I have accidentally left my glasses inside a cow. My first year in practice I was doing a cow caesarean. We were looking for my glasses after stitching up the cow [and] couldn’t find them anywhere,” he said.
“Two years later, the butcher brought those glasses back to my dad. Unbelievable. Never caused the cow any problem whatsoever.”
The surgeon and professor is known globally as the Bionic Vet due to his pioneering neuro-orthopaedic work on people’s beloved pets.
He revealed the anecdote as he performed a tricky procedure on a cockapoo puppy’s broken neck in the latest episode of Channel 4 series Supervet.
Before he became famous, the farmer’s son and UCD graduate worked in the 1990s as a farm vet in Mountmellick, Co Laois, and in Dunmanway, West Cork.
Fitzpatrick and his team currently provide cutting-edge procedures for difficult cases at his practice in Surrey, England.
He has previously revealed that his mother Rita would love him to move back home to work.
“She has no idea what I actually do. She thinks I should be in West Cork with my hand up a cow’s, you know…” he told Graham Norton’s BBC Radio 2 show.
Source: Irish Examiner
