If one of the members of your family was suffering from severe heart trouble, chances are they might need a pacemaker.

But, what do you think would happen if it was your 4-legged friend, suffering from heart trouble? Much the same.

Some heroic measures went into saving one Garland County, Arkansas dog recently.

His name is Rudy, and he's a 4-week post-op pacemaker patient.

Just like some humans who feel like they're having gas pain or indigestion when they're really having heart trouble, for Rudy, it was much the same.

What brought him in? Burping!

"With an AV block, the heart isn't working well at all. The signals going up the nodes and coming down crossed each other out," says Dr. Robert Zepecki with All Pet Center.

After a consultation in Memphis, Rudy's parents rushed him to LSU for surgery.

"The beat was back, and strong, this pacemaker's the same size my mother wears," says Dr. Zepecki.

But like many other heart patients of any species, there were complications.

"He looked terrible. His color was bad. His tongue was purple. He was in bad shape," says the vet.

Rudy made it back to a surgical suite at LSU in time.

That's where doctors realized one of the two leads sending volts to his heart was cracked and reworked it to operate with one.

"His pacemaker could be implanted in a human tomorrow along with the wires they used and it would be just the same," says Pacemaker Educator Sandy Charleton.

Since Rudy's damaged heart needs to use his pacemaker 100 percent of the time, his device would rate on the low end when it comes to longevity, about 5 years.

But checks like this see how much energy he's using, helping Rudy get the most out of the device and life.

"We program two times as much energy as he's using to give him a safety margin and that protects the life of the battery," says Charleton.

And with that, this Boxer can put his whole heart back into doing all that he loves.

With the growth in this technology, Arkansas pet parents don't have to go out of state to get their kids the surgery or the pacemaker, just talk to your veterinarian.