Animal Insting

This is how I looked Friday night, wearing the Cone of Shame.

Well, Barry already told you about how I went to see Dr. Patricia on Friday and how I had to stay there all day and get a bunch of fluid stuff put in the vein of my leg.  I got to come home for the night, but I had a thing called a catheter stuck in me, so I had to wear a pink bandage and a Cone of Shame.

Then on Saturday morning, Mom made us all get up early, and she got dressed and took me over to Dr. Patricia's office before they even opened, but they told her to bring me at 7:00, so that's what she did.  And right before we went inside the vet clinic, I pooped a very hard turd with something weird in it that Mom couldn't figure out what it was.

After that, Mom abandoned me at the clinic for the whole day, and I had to have a bunch more fluids.  And also I got some antibiotics and stuff like that.  Dr. Patricia came and looked at me, and she fed me some very yummy canned food which I gobbled right up because I was really hungry.

And the clinic people kept taking me outside to pee because I had so much fluid in me.  Then finally I pooped a really, really big, long poop.  It was 10 whole inches long!  We don't know what was in it, exactly, but we think it's the thing that was making my intestines be all clogged up.

This is my really interesting, 10-inch-long poop thing.

When Dr. Patricia called Mom to talk to her, she told Mom that it was a Minor Miracle that I didn't have to have surgery because of the 10-inch-long thing.  Dr. Patricia said that if Mom hadn't brought me in to the clinic when she did, I would have had to have surgery for sure.

Also Dr. Patricia said that all the blood work they did on me Friday looked very bad because of the thing in my guts.  She said my liver looked bad and my pancreas looked bad and my white blood cells looked bad. I don't know what most of that stuff is.  Mom knows more about it than I do.  All I know is that I was glad to go home again.

But even though I got to go home, I still didn't feel totally great.  For one thing, it was hard for me to breathe, and sometimes I started coughing, and my chest hurt.  So Mom was sort of worried about me, but she did not really want to take me to Mission MedVet because she had already spent more than $850 getting my intestines fixed, and it is always expensive to go to Mi$$ion MedVet.

This is me at the vet's office.

So we sat around and watched TV all evening, and some of the time I slept, and other times I breathed fast and coughed a little.  Then it got to be bedtime, and Mom gave me some yummy canned food that is called Prescription i/d, and I'm supposed to eat it for FOUR WHOLE DAYS, and my brothers don't get any of it.  And when Mom gave me some of it at suppertime, I ate it right up.  But when she gave me some at bedtime, it didn't seem very yummy to me, so I didn't want to eat it.  And that's pretty much when Mom decided she should take me to the emergency clinic, which she did.

And when we got there, a very nice vet named Dr. Schultz checked me all over, and then she put me in a place where I could get extra oxygen, and that made it easier to breathe.  She talked to Mom for a while, and she said she wanted to keep me there all night and take x-rays of my chest to see if there was something wrong with my heart or lungs.  Because maybe all those fluids I got stayed in my lungs and were clogging them up.  Or maybe I had pneumonia.

So Mom went home and I stayed there, and before Mom went home, she got approved for something called Care Credit, and this means she doesn't have to pay the whole bill all at once.  Then Mom went to bed, and she was very tired because it was about 1:30, which is lots later than she is used to being up because she is an old person and usually goes to bed by 11:00.

In the meantime, Dr. Schultz took x-rays of me and looked at the x-rays, and she called Mom about 2:30 a.m. to say that I probably had something called aspiration pneumonia, which happens when you puke, and some of the puke gets into your lungs.  Dr. Schultz said she thought I could just take the antibiotics that Dr. Patricia gave me, but she also wanted a radiologist vet to look at my x-rays.

So later in the morning, after everybody was awake, Dr. Schultz called Mom again and told her that the radiologist said my x-rays looked "strange" and that there was a diffuse something in my lungs that might be just a general inflammation and not that aspiration pneumonia stuff.

Anyway, I got to come home about noon, and now I have a different antibiotic from the ones Dr. Patricia said for me to take.  But I still get to eat the yummy canned food stuff.  I can breathe better now, but I still have to breathe faster than usual.  If I don't get all well soon, they might do something called a "lung wash" to me.  I'm not sure what this is, but if it's anything like getting a bath, I'm sure I won't like it!