It's never a great start to your lunch break when you are informed by your child that the dog is throwing up... under your bed. Somehow she managed to find a small bottle of advil/aleve, chew it open, and digest a few pills. And it turns out that advil is toxic to dogs. In fact, one pill is 4x the dosage she would have been prescribed. Once we put all the pieces together we called her vet. Because it was close to closing time they said to take her to the ER. So we called another local vet because the ER reviews weren't great and it would cost much more. The second vet wouldn't take her. On a whim Marc called another local vet that he knew of because we have a new neighbor that is a veterinarian. They were very gracious and willing to see her an hour before closing. They have been amazing and we will now be using them as our doggie doctor.
So what happens when your dog eats too much advil? They throw up repeatedly and go into kidney failure.
What's the treatment? Well normally 48 hours on an IV fluid flush will do the trick. But does Riley ever make things easy on us? After 72 hours at the vet on the IV her blood work was still not in normal range. In fact it hadn't budged much. So when Friday evening came we were presented with two options for the weekend.
1. Take her to the ER for the weekend at $500 a day.
2. Take her home and administer SubQ injections (think needle, bag of fluid, a lady who hates needles, and a man that passes out when watching someone have needles stuck in her neck), have her bloodwork checked at the ER, and assess from there. Just a side note, the ER bloodwork was $150 - three times what the vet charges.
We went with option two. It was not a fun weekend, but we made it. She did great the first couple of injections, but it was downhill from there.
See the bulge in her back? That's the fluids.
The ER blood work was good enough to remove the IV catheter, but we still had to do the injections. Poor thing had so much fluid pumped into her that she looked huge. We called her a water buffalo because her front half was so much larger. And water, because yeah, we're creative like that. She also couldn't jump up on our bed like usual. Too much fluid/weight to get up there. She finally gave up.
So over a week later we are still not done with treatment. We had to give SubQ injections through Wednesday night, but we are done now. She has lost weight as you can see below because she isn't eating. They have her on a special renal diet that she refuses to eat. We tried mixing it with her regular food, but that won't work either. It's been an interesting and expensive week. She goes back next Wednesday for hopefully one final check on all of her levels.
The lesson for everyone to learn is that advil is bad for dogs. There was a point that we didn't know if she'd make it home, but she is back to being her pesky, mischievous little self... which is what got us into this situation to start with.
And one more detail I can't leave out about our "fun" weekend. We took the girls to the Braves game Friday night. We were running late because of the dog so we were in a hurry to get in the stadium. When we came back to our car that night it had been broken into and ransacked. At the time we didn't think they took anything. EVERYTHING was dumped out. Napkins, cooler, glove box, center console, the bags of the dogs medical stuff. Everything. But they didn't find the tablets hidden under a seat. The kids were spooked, but they handled it well.
They did not break a window, so the only thing we can assume is that one of the doors didn't shut all the way so it didn't lock. Here's the thing. Why is it my problem when I don't lock my doors? What makes a criminal think it is okay, locked or unlocked, to go through my car and my belongings.
As it turns out they did find an old phone that the girls play with. They ended up dumping it somewhere in the parking lot. A nice gentlemen charged the phone and called us to try and return it. He said he found it next to his truck in the parking lot.
We had a tough week, and Fall Break is very much welcomed over here. Things could have been much worse, and we are thankful for the Lord's protection over our family. The good news is that next week more than likely won't be so difficult!
