[Dailydrool] Big Scare

[Brenda Waldrop]

Elphaba, my 2 ½ year old basset decided to take a few years off my life this
weekend. I agreed to take my teenager and four of her friends to the mall
Saturday, because I'm just that masochistic. It was supposed to be a short
trip, but 8 hours later we finally managed to get home. The dogs were going
crazy of course, acting as though we'd been gone for weeks when in reality
we hadn't been gone any longer than a normal work/school day.

I noticed right away that Elphaba seemed more hyper than usual, which is
saying a lot. She kept running around the "perimeter" of the apartment,
sticking her nose under furniture and cabinets and trying to eat any stray
pieces of paper etc. that she found there. (I deep-clean these hidden areas
about once every 5 years, so the organisms under my couch have evolved to
form their own system of government!)  I also noticed she had her tail down
and wasn't wagging it at all. We're talking about a dog that wags her tail
even in her sleep.

After about an hour of following her around removing objects from her mouth
every 5 min I really began to worry. She refused to settle, even when the DD
offered her lap, which is Elphaba's favorite place on the planet. She would
get up on the couch, lie down for about two minutes, then jump up and begin
her circuit of the house. At one point she grabbed one of the pillows from
the couch and began trying to eat the fringe off the edges.

Really worried now I got out all my basset books. I ran through all the
tests for bloat but that didn't seem to be the issue. Her abdomen was pliant
and not distended, she had no pain anywhere I could find on her body, and
her gums were pink as can be. The only thing I could find abnormal is that
she seemed to have a "mini" case of the hiccups. You couldn't see or hear
them, but if you held her you could feel these tiny hiccups happening.

So, I dosed with simethicone and Pepto-Bismol (although I think the carpet
got more of the pepto than she did). I held her up and tried to burp her
like a baby (this required help from teenageslave and I'm still not sure we
got it right), I massaged her belly, but nothing seemed to work. Finally,
somewhere in hour three, and just about as I was getting ready to go to the
emergency vetspital, she threw up. An almost solid mass of paper, cloth, and
undigested kibble about the size of a softball. Brilliant! Surely she was
cured.

No such luck. The trek around the house began again. I called the Vet ER and
of course they said "We can't tell anything without seeing her." So, as I
weighed the rent vs. vet ER dilemma. (Vet ER would have won for sure), she
threw up again. Same stuff, baseball size this time. Yes, now she must
surely be cured!  Not a chance, although she had begun passing quite a bit
of gas, much to the dismay of the teenageslave.

It's now 11pm, and I'm on the phone with my sister who has a small herd of
miniature daschunds, when Elphaba stops in the middle of the room, grabs a
mouthful of carpet (this is a not an easy thing we have very short carpet),
and pulls it up about 2" before letting go. Flabbergasted I tell my sister
who says, "She's trying to eat grass!"

I grab the leash, bundle Copper in his coat (doG forbid I leave him inside),
and head for grass. We have grass where they do their business but the
gardeners keep it really short, she wouldn't have been able to eat any when
she went out earlier. The complex down the street however never mows theirs
and it was about 6" high. She hit the grass running and began chomping away.
I let her graze for about 5 min and then tug on the leash and she trots
right over tail wagging. We get back in the house; she curls up on the couch
next to her favorite human (teenageslave), and goes right to sleep.

That was it! She never threw up anything else, she was back to her normal
self the next day, and the min-hiccups were gone. I think that she had some
gas/upset stomach from being the little garbage disposal that she is and the
meds and vomiting fixed her right up. I'm thoroughly convinced the whole
needing to eat grass thing was psychological, she had a stomach ache, and
instinct told her she needed to eat grass to fix it.

Definitely one for the pet psychologist!

Brenda- momslave to Copper (I slept through most of the fuss) and Elphaba
(Grass cures everything!)
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.dailydrool.org/pipermail/dailydrool-dailydrool.org/attachments/20081215/9cfb87f7/attachment-0002.htm>