Animal Insting

Considering they have the lives of thousands of people in their hands I guess its good to know these airline companies don't take themselves too seriously.

I'm sure you won't mind if I write about myself again, since I am such an interesting subject!  And anyway, when I'm sick, all I can think about is how yucky I feel, and how I wish I was all better again.  I think most people and animals feel this way, but I guess I could be wrong.

Well, yesterday Mom took me to visit Dr. Patricia, who was very interested in how I was doing.  Dr. Patricia looked at the x-rays of my lungs that got sent over from Mission MedVet, and then she came into the exam room, and she listened to my breathing and to my heart.  Then Nurse Debbie weighed me and took my temperature, and my temperature was normal, but I lost a pound since I was there on Saturday getting filled up with fluids.

Then while we were there, the radiologist came to the clinic because it was her day to do that.  So she looked at my x-rays, and then I got new x-rays taken, and she looked at those also.  And all of this took a really long time, like over two hours, and it was past our suppertime, so Mom and I were hungry.

Anyway, the radiologist said that I definitely had pneumonia.  And she said the way I got it was that I had an infection someplace else in my body, and then the bacteria went swimming through my blood until they got to my lungs, and they gave me pneumonia.  And probably the infection that I had was in my intestines where the Ten-Inch Thing got stuck.

Dr. Patricia brought the x-rays in the room and showed them to Mom, and she pointed out the fuzzy parts where the infection was, and the non-fuzzy parts where the infection used to be but now it's going away.  Which means that I am getting better, but I'm not all well yet, which is why I still feel yucky.

Then Dr. Patricia said I should keep taking Doxycycline and also I should start taking Baytril.  But I don't have to take Clavamox, so Mom got to trade that in for the Baytril, and it almost came out even.  Then Mom paid the bill, which was $181, and we went home and ate supper.  But I have to go back there today because Dr. Patricia wants to see me again.

Oh, and Dr. Patricia said that Mom shouldn't let me do anything at all, like just sleep and eat and potty.  She said it was the same as when a human is on complete bed rest.  Except that Mom does not want to get out a crate to make me stay in, so she told me just to sleep a lot and not do much else.  Which is an easy command for me to obey, at least so far.

And guess what else!  The people at the clinic did not want to keep my Ten-Inch Thing, for some reason, so they asked Mom if she wanted it.  And she said she did because she wanted to clean it up and figure out what it was.  So she washed it and untangled it, and she found out it was a long piece of stringy yarn stuff, with a chewed-up bit of green plastic in it.  Mom still cannot figure out where this piece of string came from, because it doesn't look very much like the pink blanket, but maybe it is the pink blanket.  Mom is not sure, and I'm not going to tell her where I got it.  And I am also not going to tell where I got the green plastic thing to chew up, but I do remember that I liked chewing it.

Anyway, when Mom got the whole thing cleaned up and untangled, it turned out to be FIFTEEN inches long, and not just ten!  So I think I was very clever to get it all inside me and then to get it all out of me again.  Of course, I did end up with pneumonia, so I guess that part wasn't so clever.

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!

Piper shredding a toy.  I swear I did not teach her to do this!

Mom said I should write a blog entry about my sister, Piper, because I have set a very bad example as a big brother, and that is probably why she got sick.  We're still not totally sure what is wrong with her, but we thought at first that she had something stuck in her gut, and that's why she kept puking all the time.  If you get something stuck in your gut, that is called "intestinal blockage."  And what we thought maybe was stuck inside Piper was a piece of the pink blanket that some of us dogs have been chewing on.

Of course, I'm the dog who most likes to tear things up and swallow the pieces, but Mel does it too sometimes, and so does Piper.  Mom thinks Piper must have learned this bad habit from me, but honestly, I never taught it to her.  She just started doing it all by herself.  Nicky is the only dog here who doesn't tear stuff up and eat it, but he gets in trouble in other ways, like by digging holes in the yard and eating the dirt out of the holes.

Elizabeth Taylor was a beautiful and famous actress who loved dogs and horses and also other animals, such as cats.  Last week Ms. Taylor died, so everybody has been talking about her, and I decided I should talk about her, too.


She was born in London in 1932, so that made her British, but her parents were Americans, which made her also American.  Before World War II started, the Taylors moved back to the U.S., and they settled in Los Angeles.  Mr. Taylor ran an art gallery, which is what he had also done in England.  Lots of movie people came to the gallery, and they noticed Elizabeth and how pretty she was.

Soon she was acting in movies, and one of the first movies she was in was Lassie, Come Home, in 1943.  The next year, when she was 12, Ms. Taylor starred in National Velvet, which was a film about a girl and her horse.  While she was working on this film, Elizabeth fell off a horse and hurt her back.  Later in her life, she had lots of back problems because of this accident.



In 1946, Ms. Taylor was in another Lassie film, which was called The Courage of Lassie.  In this movie, Lassie shows that she is much smarter than the Nazis.

After that, Elizabeth Taylor made a whole bunch more films, and they were about people, not about animals.  But she always had one or more dogs of her own, and one of her very most favorite breeds was  the pekingese.

In the 1970s, Ms. Taylor and her husband, Richard Burton, were supposed to make a movie together in London, but it was a problem to take their pekingese dogs because England had a 6-month quarantine before a dog could come into the country.  So the two stars got around the quarantine rule by living on a yacht that was anchored in the Thames River while they made the movie.  Their dogs stayed on the boat with them and never set paw on British soil.

Dogs always seemed to like Ms. Taylor, and they did whatever she asked them to do.  But they didn't pay much attention to her husband, Richard Burton, which he thought was annoying.  So one time he brought home a Pekingese that he said he had rescued, and its name was E'en So.  This dog was the opposite of their other dogs, because he listened to everything Mr. Burton said, and he mostly ignored Ms. Taylor.  She could not figure out what was going on until finally, Mr. Burton admitted that he had bought the dog already trained.  And it turned out that E'en So only knew commands in Welsh, which Mr. Burton spoke and Ms. Taylor didn't.

Elizabeth Taylor was married 8 different times, but she only had 7 husbands because she married Richard Burton twice.  Anyway, after her second divorce from Mr. Burton, she had a couple of new husbands, and also some different dog breeds.  The first dog of a new breed that she owned was a Lhasa Apso named Elsa.

For her 60th birthday, Ms. Taylor was given a collie puppy that was a great-grandpup of Pal, the dog who first played Lassie.  This was while she was married to Larry Fortensky, and when they got divored, he wanted to keep the collie, but she sued for custody and won.

Later on, Ms. Taylor discovered the Maltese breed, and she had a Maltese named Sugar.  "I've never loved a dog like this in my life," she said in 2004.  "It's amazing.  Sometimes I think there's a person in there.  There's something to say for this kind of love -- it's unconditional."  Sugar went everywhere with Ms. Taylor, and a Christmas ornament was made that looked like Sugar.  When anyone bought the ornament, the money went to help people with AIDS, which was a cause Ms. Taylor raised a lot of money for.





After Sugar died, Ms. Taylor adopted another Maltese named Daisy.  Ms. Taylor had a lot of health problems and other painful stuff to go through in her life.  Twice she almost died of pneumonia, and she spent time in some rehab clinics to get better from alcohol and drug abuse.  She had at least 20 major operations, broke her back five times, and had both hips replaced.  She had skin cancer, a brain tumor, and also had congestive heart failure, which is what she finally died of.  And in all the good parts and bad parts of her life, Ms. Taylor had dogs around her.  "I sometimes think I prefer animals to people," she said one time.  "And I was lucky.  My first leading men were dogs and horses."