Sick man's hospital reunion with beloved Chihuahua sparks remarkable turnaround for them both

From his hospital bed, frail James Wathen, 73, told a health care worker that he missed his dog, Bubba.

Wathen hadn’t seen Bubba, his faithful one-eyed Chihuahua, since he arrived at Baptist Health Corbin, a medical centre in Kentucky, almost six weeks prior.

Wathen’s health was quickly deteriorating. He had stopped eating and his voice was barely audible to the centre’s staff.

So the hospital decided to break its no-pets rule and allow a visit from Bubba.

“One of our social workers realized it was mourning the loss of the dog that was making our patient even worse and emotionally unhealthy, we pulled out all the stops and found the dog,” Kimberly Probus, the Chief Nursing Officer at Baptist Health Corbin, told WKYT.

Mary-Ann Smyth, president of the non-profit Knox-Whitley Animal Shelter, where Bubba was taken and placed with a foster family, told TODAY that Bubba had also fallen ill since being separated from his owner. He quit eating around the same time Wathen did.

On Saturday, Smyth brought Bubba to visit Wathen at the hospital.

"There wasn’t a dry eye in the room," Probus said.

"He was so sad at first," Smyth said of Bubba’s first visit to the hospital. “We had him wrapped in a baby blanket and he was shivering. The minute we got about 20 steps from this guy’s room — I kid you not — his little head went up. His eyes got real bright and he was like a different dog.”

The animal shelter posted a photo of the moving reunion on Facebook.

“When Bubba was handed to James he started to cry and then Bubba started to snuggle James and it makes you realize that animals are not just pets they are loved ones,” the shelter wrote.

On Tuesday, Bubba’s second visit, staff noticed a remarkable change in Wathen’s health.

"He’s done a complete turnaround. He’s speaking, he’s sitting up, he’s eating. He doesn’t look like the same guy," said Smyth. “And the dog is eating and doing better now, too.”

"He doesn’t even look like the same man. I didn’t expect the improvement to be this good," Probus said of Wathen’s turnaround. While Wathen’s health is still considered unstable, death is “no longer immediately imminent.”

"He had given up all hope of ever getting better without his friend, but once they got back together, I think they both now have a reason to live. It’s amazing," she said.

According to WKYT, Wathen and Bubba will continue to see each other regularly. The hospital is currently looking into implementing a pet-visitation policy for similar situations.

"Pets normally aren’t allowed in hospitals because they’re considered less clean," Probus told The Dodo. ”That thinking has changed in the last decade or so, but our hospital did not have a pet visitation policy at all. We’re going to change that this week. We are ethically bound to meet the emotional needs of our patients, so we have to allow it when we can.”