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Pets

Dog/House/Docs/Like Mother, Like Son…

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1. Dog

Car-riding in balmier days…

So yesterday afternoon we schlepped the ailing dog out to his Regular Veterinarian, way to he!! and gone on the northerly reaches of Paradise Valley.

Charley is much improved, and yesterday made a Great Leap in terms of recovery. He’s certainly not cured by any means, but yesterday was walking around a little more normally, despite having to struggle to get up and down. He’s even getting up enough zing to take up one of his favorite activities, counter-surfing.

Day before yesterday, M’hijito discovered a large, strange wound that seemed suddenly to have appeared on his back. Son was beside himself: we did not know where this came from or what it could possibly be.

Actually, I had a theory: First day back from the vet hospital (a.k.a. hole in the ground into which to pour money), Charley levered himself to the floor in the kitchen while we were fixing food. When he got himself down, he was laying with his back jammed up against the sharp corner of the cheap Home Depot cabinetry we had installed in that house. I thought at the time he must be getting jabbed, but elected not to try to drag him away from it for fear of injuring him more. So he could have scraped himself while in that position.

We cut away as  much hair as we could and washed it, but since we already had a vet appointment there wasn’t much else to do.

The vet did a much better job of removing fur all the way around the thing, cleaning, and applying a med. He opined that it’s a hot spot.

I said “how can he have a hot spot, since he can’t reach the middle of his back to lick it?” My dogs love to create hot spots, but these always appear on their legs, which are convenient venues for lick-fests. These create fine festering wounds.

He said a hot spot can start as a bacterial infection. He says they’re very common in goldens.

So now poor Charley is bald on the belly (where they shaved him to do an ultrasound of his abdominal cavity), on his front legs (where innumerable IVs were inserted), and on his back.

However, the vet said he appears to be significantly better and held out some hope for a complete or near-complete recovery.

He also discovered that in X-raying the dog’s chest, the 24-hour veterinary had found a couple of ruptured vertebral disks.

Well, holy sh!t, would that ever explain a lot. As you may know from your own experience, disk pain is pretty damned excruciating. It certainly can cripple you up. And it can cause you to feel extremely stressed.

So if he was already in pain when he was placed in the Hated Car, the combination could have stressed him enough to give him a neurotic fit, as it were.

And you simply would not believe how this dog behaves inside a vehicle. He truly is totally panic-stricken.

Yesterday I rode in back with the dog while my son drove the car. All the way across town, Charley huffed and puffed and gasped for air and tried to burrow in behind my back to hide. There’s no question at all that he was terrorized.

The vet thinks the Thunder Shirt idea is a good one. He says a lot of people swear by them. If you read the reviews, about 75% of users feel they work well or at least adequately to calm their dogs’ anxiety. So my kid is going to order one up. But we’ll have to wait until the hot-spot wound on his back heals up before wrapping him in Velcro and nylon. Also the maker’s site says not to put one on a dog when the weather is over 90 degrees — it’ll be a month or two before temps get back down into the 90s hereabouts.

Anyway, this guy is really a great vet: like Young Dr. Kildare, he combines a great deal of expertise with that rarest of all commodities, common sense.

2. House

So I bought a gallon of gray paint to re-do the orange hallway. I’d very much like to get started on that, but it ain’t gonna happen today. Or tomorrow.

This morning I’ll run up to the Depot, where I figure I can get the rollers and a couple new paintbrushes cheaper than they sell them at Dunn Edwards.

However, it must be said that when I rolled into Dunn Edwards the other day with no paint on my face and engaging my usual long, space-covering hiking stride (had to park on the far end of the lot to get the car in the shade), I looked pretty lezzie. The lone clerk personing the counter was a distinctly mannish-looking woman, and she instantly took a liking to me. Amazingly, that led to her establishing a tradesman’s account for me! ♥ So I got the paint at a deep discount.

Ordered just a quart of the white trim paint, since I figured all that would be needed would be some touch-up. But when I arrived to pick up the paint, I learned they couldn’t get the color (which is long out-of-date in the style department) unless they whipped up a gallon. Incredibly, the guy dispensing the paint gave me the whole gallon for the cost of a quart!!!!!

Hot dayum!

The trim in my son’s house is the same color white. Our honored painter screwed up quite a few things in that house. Among these: he painted the hall cabinet without sanding the high-gloss lead paint already on it, and then — get this — after he finished painting he pushed the drawers shut! Not surprisingly, the paint just peeled right off the first time my son opened the drawers.

Painter dude also applied some of the wall paint carelessly and slopped it on the trim around the kitchen doors.

So with this excess of white paint, I’ll be able to repair the paint at M’hijito’s house, whenever I get around to it.

3. Docs

But that will not be soon: I can’t even work on my own house today.

Have to prepare a presentation for tomorrow’s 7:30 a.m. meeting, and from there go straight out to the Mayo, there to begin the (undoubtedly freaking endless) process of figuring out why my body is still afflicted with whatever struck on March 1. Still coughing and gagging, though it’s slowly getting better. But…this is August: whatever the ailment is has hung on for five and a half months.

Young Dr. Kildare referred me to a lung doctor.

I called this guy’s office during office hours and was instantly shunted into an aggravating punch-a-button phone tree. Okay…so get used to it, right?

Don’t think so. This was an aggravation on steroids. By the time I got to the sixth level of “listen carefully for our menu has changed,” I thought oh fuck it! and hung up.

Now this outfit keeps calling me on the phone and leaving messages for me to call and make an appointment. This after they sent me a letter to that effect; I wrote them a note in reply explaining that I gave up after reaching the sixth punch-a-button put-off and that I feel a business that treats its customers this way reveals its lack of consideration.

And I believe that is exactly so. In any setting, when you put off someone who wants to do business with you by sending them through a long, annoying run-around, you’re really saying you care so little for your customer that you won’t even be bothered to hire a minimum-wage clerk to listen to messages left on a voicemail that answers at the first or second level. When your callers are sick people, for chrissake, that is true in spades. How hard is it to plug in a voicemail system that says “Please leave your name, your number, and a brief description of your concern and we will get back to you soon”?

So this is not a medical practice with which I wish to do business.

Called the Mayo and reached a human on the second hoop-jump. Made an appointment. Unfortunately, it’s for 9:10 in the morning tomorrow. So that is going to make tomorrow a bitch of a day: starting out with a 40-minute drive into the rising sun and a presentation whose subject I have yet to dream up; then racing to the Mayo (another 30- or 40-minute drive from the meeting). And presumably, knowing the way my life goes, downhill from there.

4. Like Mother, Like Son

{chortle} I was tickled to learn that a certain retrograde cast of mind runs in the genes. After we returned from the veterinary expedition, M’hijito went off to a favorite Thai restaurant and retrieved a bunch of take-out.

So we’re sitting around after dinner finishing our beers and reading. M’hijito has turned on the lights…and he apologizes for their dimness because, says he, “I hate those new lights! I hate that blue cast they put out…they hurt your eyes!”

Heeeee!

So I was moved to make a confession: when the last administration decreed that incandescent bulbs would be taken out of our sticky little hands, I hoarded boxes of real light bulbs.

Heh heh…if he’d heard about that when it happened, I’d have had to listen to any number of lectures about how foolish that was.

But like his muther, he tried the fluorescent bulbs and tried the LCD bulbs and found them…amazingly wanting.

So when I croak over, he’ll inherit a lifetime supply of lightbulbs that don’t hurt your eyes or make you grit your teeth.

😀

Why? Because endlessly annoying Facebook will not pick up the image you want to illustrate your post. It wants to pick up the banner image, which, if it’s generically the same day after day, quickly bores readers or makes them think today’s post is a repeat of yesterday’s. So the only way to force FB to use an image that has anything to do with your post is to change the banner image to fit the subject of the day. That means today’s banner image (a historic photo of four Nazis, for example) bears no relation whatsoever to the topic of yesterday’s post (ruminations on power outages, for example). So annoying.

 

 

How much would you spend on your pet?

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Notice I don’t say how much will you spend on your pet; only how much you imagine you’d be comfortable spending. Chances are what you will spend, one day, is a far cry from what you think you ought to spend.

In 2017, Americans will spend — hang onto your hat — some sixty-nine BILLION dollars on their pets! This counts expenses all across the “pet industry,” from kibble to collars to that pricey stay in the doggy ER.

The average cost of a visit to one of those high-powered 24-hour veterinary hospitals is not easy to find: apparently this is a closely kept secret. If you look at Yelp reviews of the many such facilities in Phoenix, you see, more than once, people stating they were asked to front $1,300 just to get the animal in the door.

Diagnostic costs alone can run a couple thousand dollars, AARP observes. Prices accrue from there. Treating your cat’s bladder stones will set you back a mere $1,850, as nothing compared to the $3,290 for a dog’s ruptured knee ligament or the $7,000 to fix a busted-up leg.

Americans will start out, this year, ponying up $2.01 billion just to purchase their 2017 pets. Food will cost us $26.7 billion, followed by a distant $16.6 billion for veterinary care.

And that doesn’t count the lawyers. Did you realize some law schools now offer courses in animal law, wherein budding attorneys can learn how to handle pet custody in divorce cases? This doesn’t even touch the dog bite cases, the dog excavation of the neighbor’s property cases, the dog assassination of rabbits, chickens and sheep, the HOA squabbles over the hordes of loose cats…

And lest you think Americans are the only pet-happy nut cases out there, some 41 percent of Australians say they always take their dogs on vacation with them.

So the question is, when your dog or cat or bird or goldfish is dangerously ill or injured and may very well not recover, are you willing to bet on the come that maybe if you throw enough money at the problem the animal will recover?

When is it better — or is it ever better — to throw in the chips and put the critter to sleep than to persist in the search for a cure?

Got no idea, I’ll tellya, how much my son spent on the present episode with Charley. He refused to tell me, but knowing regular vets, I’m guessing $500 to $800 for the vet in Show Low, about $200 for the ordinary vet down here, and something upwards of $4,000 for the four days in the 24-hour doggy hospital. A great deal of drastic effort was spent on treating Charley the Golden Retriever. But IMHO the vet who saved his life was the guy in Show Low. All the rest of it has been additional acts in the opera. I suspect that if Charley had simply been brought home from the Show Low encounter and allowed to rest, the outcome would have been similar or identical.

On the other hand… Probably unnoticed by my ultra-stressed son, it’s pretty clear the Show Low vet did not believe Charley would survive, and in repeatedly expressing that concern to M’hijito, he was signaling (in coded language) that he thought they should put the dog down. When the outcome in fact was survival, he admitted that he was very surprised. And when you look this stuff up, you have to allow: the guy was right.

Except that he was NOT right about the etiology of what ailed the dog. He thought the cause was exposure to high heat and suspected my son had left the dog locked in a hot car.

This was not true. In fact, what he was dealing with was fear- or stress-induced hyperthermia. While the potential outcome is similar, possibly the same, what was really going on was different. The animal was never exposed to unduly high heat: in fact, the interior of the vehicle was rather cold. So you could look at it this way: rather than an assault from the exterior by heat and sunlight, the animal was generating heat from the interior, which must have been dissipating into the highly air-conditioned chill of the vehicle. So, while obviously hyperthermia was stressing the animal’s system, it probably was taking longer than the vet calculated to inflict damage.

That is why, without a doubt, the dog survived. He survived something different from what the vet thought was afflicting him. Whatever the etiology, though, the only known treatment was the same, and in applying it, the Show Low vet saved the animal’s life.

Will Charley fully recover?

That remains to be seen. Each day he is a tiny bit better: he gets up a little more easily, he lays back down a little more easily, he walks a tiny bit more normally. He’s eating well, drinking generous amounts of water, and excreting normally.

If this continues, my guess is that over time he will recover most of his functioning. I doubt if he’ll ever be normal again — though yeah, miracles do happen. More likely after six, eight, ten weeks he’ll come back more or less to normal, and then he’ll spend the rest of his life as the equivalent of an elderly dog. But that’s better than being dead.

I guess.

A dog that will live to sponge food off the table again…

The drama from the outset:

Day One
Update
Homeward Bound
Back in Town
Charley Crisis, Continued

 

Charley Crisis, Continued…

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So my son called in a sweat late this afternoon, having discovered a mysterious wound on the crippled Charley’s back.

I drove down to his place and helped inspect. It looked like a scrape that had started to suppurate. We cut the hair out of the area, washed it, called the vets at the emergency hospital. They advised taking the dog to our regular vet.

On reflection, it appears this injury probably happened when Charley laid down on the kitchen floor, pressing himself tight against the corner of a kitchen cabinet. I observed his doing that last night but figured if he were uncomfortable, he would move.

That, obviously, was wrong: it appears large areas of his back and probably his shoulders are so numb he can’t feel much.

He can walk a few steps at a time; haul himself to his feet; with great difficulty lever himself down to the floor. But he’s badly crippled. The Show Low vet opined that he had suffered neurological damage, which may never clear up.

To make everything perfect, the emergency vet hospital did not understand that M’hijito does not live in Show Low, so faxed all their records up to that guy! This despite having been told who the local vet is and that the local vet referred him to them!

Jeez.

So tomorrow we’re probably taking the dog to the local regular vet. Assuming we can get an appointment. I’m going down to M’hijito’s house to babysit the dog, since he really has to go back to work, having taken several days off on the pretext of “working at home.” He’s found that working at home isn’t working for him and says he needs to go back to the office so he can do his job.

Charley can’t be left alone, and he can’t be driven around in a car — so he can’t be delivered to and picked up from my house, meaning the dog will have to be babysat at M’hijito’s house.

He seems a little better to me today, but my son doesn’t seem to think so.

My feeling is that if he’s going to get better, it will take five or six weeks (at least). I hope that will happen. But I think we have to bear in mind that he may never recover.

 

Charley Back Home

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Charley & Ruby in better days

Charley seemed a little better last night, but he was drugged to the teeth with steroids and tranquilizers and more stuff than the human mind can conceive. M’hijito had to build a spreadsheet to keep track of the dosing!

I wouldn’t have believed it…that a dog could silently work itself into such a nervous state that it can give itself a freaking heatstroke…except that before we even got to the freeway on-ramp he was doing the same thing my son described: pressed himself tight against the door, panting frantically, huffing & puffing like a steam engine. This was in spite of being doped up on sedatives! And in spite of M’hijito sitting in the back seat holding him and trying to calm him.

The freeway is within easy walking distance of the fancy emergency veterinary — less than a quarter mile, I’d say — and we were in my car, not my son’s. So presumably the cause is not some strange ultrasonic noise inaudible to humans…unless all newer cars with backup imaging technology do that. I did call Chuck the Wonder-Mechanic last week and asked if there was any way the back end of the vehicle could have heated up despite the AC blasting away…he doubted it. Pete, his business partner and future Heir to the Empire, said he hadn’t heard of any such high- or low-pitched noise issues in late-model Fords, though it was the first thing that jumped to IT Dude’s mind when I told him the story. Pete suggested I get in touch with Ford…good luck with that! 😀

At any rate, if that were the case, I’m sure the word would be out by now. There’s not a credible sign of it on the Web, at least not that I can see.

It was about a 15- or 20-minute drive to my son’s house. By the time we got there, he was already heating up, even though we cranked the AC as cold as it would go. They’d shaved his belly, so you could feel the skin on there: HOT. Schnozz: HOT.

But he now can walk about 20 or 30 feet, so that’s better than it was. We got him in the house. He gulped down about a gallon of water…you have to hold the water bowl up to his head, because he can’t bend his head down and drink.

Got him flopped down on the cool tiles and put an ice pack between his rear legs, as we’d seen the veterinary staff do. I saturated the fur around his head and neck with water, as I’ve been taught to do in the past to cool off an overheated dog. He soon stopped panting, and eventually he fell asleep.

My son’s employer kindly agreed to let him work from home, and provided a company computer and remote connection to the corporate system. In theory, that’s not part of his job description, but it looks like they’re willing to let him do it for a few days.

The Fancy Vet said to take him to the regular vet in four or five days to have him re-assessed. So if they’ll let him work from home today and tomorrow and a couple days next week, that should simplify life some.

Meanwhile, it looks like the hypothesis that the dog hurt his back or neck when he fell out of the car in Show Low may hold a little water. The veterinary assistant said when they would rub him along one side of his spine, he would act like it was sensitive, and when they lifted his right front leg to bandage the macerated spot where IV after IV has been stuck in, he yelped like it hurt. They did X-ray his spine and couldn’t find any broken vertebrae, so if this theory is right, he must have twisted or fallen cattywampus when he fell on the ground, thereby spavining his back. In that case, in a week or three, he may recover his ability to walk.

Whatever becomes of him, obviously he never can ride in a car again. Which is a bit of a problem. Presumably the only way my son will be able to get him to the vet will be to dope him with Benadryl or a sedative.

So in an idle moment, I googled “dog fear of riding in car,” and the search conveniently suggested an alternative search term: “dog is suddenly afraid to ride in the car.” Following that, I discovered that this is not a rare problem: all sorts of sites and discussion boards describe mature dogs that previously had no problem riding in a car suddenly evincing utter terror.

What would bring this on is a mystery. My son has never been in a car accident; the dog has never been hurt or tossed around by a sudden stop. Apparently out of the blue Charley just decided that cars are bad for Charleys.

It is beyond weird.

To say nothing of beyond expensive. My son refuses to say what he’s spent so far, but I’d guess it’s probably $5,000 to $8,000…possibly as much as $10,000. He said he’d just paid off the car (a 0 percent loan!) because he so much hates being in debt. And now he’s in hock to the credit card companies

Our Story So Far…

Day One
Update
Homeward Bound
Back in Town

A-n-n-d… The Dog Situation

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So we schlepped the dog to the vet at 40th St. and Thunderbird. The dog is crippled: he can barely stand up; he can walk a few steps and then collapses.

Vet did some tests and thinks the dog is probably not bleeding on the inside, but he can’t explain the crippled state. Show Low vet has diagnosed this as neurological damage from the 107.4-degree temperature. He speculated that the dog will never get over it.

Our vet now suggests we schlep the dog to a high-powered 24-hour veterinary center staffed with specialists up on Cave Creek Road. He arranges for us to arrive, and we start driving.

They do an ultrasound of Charley’s abdominal cavity and conclude that, contrary to fears, there’s no internal bleeding. At various veterinarians’ behest, we leave the dog overnight at the Cave Creek doggy hospital.

I am skeptical.

The dog is eating and defecating normally. The dog is drinking plenty of water and peeing normally.

What has happened here is that when Ian opened the car door to let Charley stretch his legs in Show Low, Charley fell out of the car. At that point he could not walk. Ian thought that Charley couldn’t get up because something was terribly wrong.

And something was: a 107.4-degree temperature is terribly wrong, indeed. As in potentially lethal.

However… What if…

What if the dog’s temp was elevated, as we have speculated, because he worked himself up into a doggy tizzy because he hates, hates, HATES M’hijito’s new(ish) Ford Escape? The specialist vet at the fancy emergency hospital stated that this was quite possible: dogs have been known to die from elevated temperatures caused by the whim-whams and the terrors.

What if the dog simply tumbled out of the car because he was huddled up against the door in dismay (as he is said to have been) and when M’hijito opened the door he slipped and fell? In that case, he surely could have sprained (or broken) something in his back. Severe back pain plus several hours in a phobic state from riding in the car would absolutely explain the elevated temperature.

It also would explain why he gets incrementally better with each passing day. Hm.

The expensive vet did not see any damage to his spine, but I do not know if sonograms can detect fractures. What I do know is that people on Yelp comment on the breathtaking cost of this place — one person said they charged her twenty thousand dollars!!!

My son doesn’t have that kind of money: he’s already spent all of his emergency savings on this adventure.

Maybe I’m heartless…but I do hate to see him go into hock over a dog. Especially one that has about four years, maybe five, left in its life expectancy. Especially when in the back of my mind I suspect Charley would get better if simply left alone in familiar surroundings to rest and convalesce.

Granted, I’m not a nice lady. But I just don’t like the looks of this.

Dog and Human Heading Home…

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Charley in the mudOkay, so this morning my son arrived at the Show Low veterinary to discover the dog is much improved, but far from 100%. They’re releasing him to go home. As soon as M’hijito’s dad and NW (New Wife) show up, they’re heading back into town, and I gather he intends to try to get home without further incident and then tomorrow haul him to the vet, taking yet another day off work.

Here in town, my son was using the veterinary favored by NW, but the beloved vet there retired. I was SO totally not impressed with that outfit when I took Ruby there with a urinary tract infection…honest to God, the woo-woo holistic vet at Alta Vista did a better job with better results and infinitely better patient relations. There’s a veterinary at 7th Street and Maryland where I used to take Anna the German Shepherd. Although they’re part of one of those damn chains that try to bamboozle you into signing up for endless unnecessary exams and needless treatments, nevertheless the vet herself seemed to be very good and pretty sensible.

Meanwhile, the dog is still unable to walk normally. The vet up there thinks it’s neurological damage and may never entirely go away. However, if you assume he did not suffer either from heat exhaustion or nervous prostration but instead had a vestibular stroke (not uncommon in dogs), some websites say the gimpiness will clear up in a few weeks.

IMHO, though, the first order of business needs to be to find out what really happened to the dog. We know he didn’t get a fever of 107 degrees(!) from being left in a hot car and probably not even from sun shining in on him (the windows have dark tinting, and the air conditioning is highly efficient). So the possibilities are…

  • He worked himself into such a frenzy that he suffered an episode of psychogenic hyperthermia.
  • He had an infection or heartworm which led to an extremely elevated temperature.
  • He had a stroke (which probably would not have resulted in a 107-degree internal temperature, but who knows?)
  • He had a heart attack (which some sites suggest might elevate body temperature).
  • Some other factor is at work.

This looks bloody expensive, if you ask me…