[Dailydrool] Young Charlie's grand gesture and my brilliant, if belated, discovery

[Elizabeth]

Today is pill day. Young Charlie and I have both come to detest pill days this summer.

Every other day I encase two Yunnan Baiyo capsules in cream cheese, shove them down Charlie’s throat, and hope they will stay down. I do this before his breakfast and before his dinner.

After all the practice I have had, I am still terrible at getting these things down his throat. If I am not lined up just so with his body, I end up trying to push a capsule in between his jaw and jowl instead of down his esophagus. The capsule gets slimy and hard to control. Charlie gets squirmy and hard to control. 

And yet Charlie must have these capsules every other day to boost his clotting capability and keep the tumor on his spleen from getting too brittle too quickly. I do not blame him for disliking them, though. Even I, with my poor human nose, can smell them. They have the kind of herbal smell one would not want to face as a cup of tea.

It used to be I could give Charlie pills wrapped in small pieces of American cheese left on his kibble. He would swallow those right up without chewing or even tasting them. Then he got old and much more discerning. He no longer likes American cheese. For a blissful couple of weeks he would take his Yunnan Baiyo capsules in cream cheese with his kibble. No more. Now we have to do it the hard way. 

On the previous pill day, this past Saturday, I waited until Charlie had finished his drink of water and gone to lie down in the dining room to await my calling him to breakfast. I stood behind him, pinched behind his canines to force open his mouth, jammed the first cream cheesed capsule down his throat, and held his mouth closed for a couple of swallows. I thought I had gotten it down, but he immediately coughed it up.

I tried again, but he swung his head wildly back and forth, defying me to grab his muzzle. When I finally got hold of it, he snarked at me. I snarked right back. He may be an old, dying dog, but we cannot have snark. This medication is too important for bassitude. 

After a few minutes, I tried again. This time it stayed down. Popped the second capsule down his throat, held his muzzle shut, let go, and the next thing I knew, he had urped up that capsule at my feet, along with half of the BIG drink of water he had had before I started trying to give him his meds. A big, gloppy, wet urp, with a battered orange capsule still somewhat covered with cream cheese in the center of it. A grand gesture, indeed. In fact, he looked rather pleased by it, a sort of "that showed her" look on his face.

I did get the second capsule into him shortly afterwards, and he did keep it down. 

And then, while I was recovering from the experience and already dreading the evening pill battle, I remembered Pill Pockets. I had never tried them before because American cheese has always worked with all my bassets and is so much cheaper. But desperate times call for desperate measures, and I made a special trip to PetSmart to buy a bag of peanut butter flavored ones. 

I am delighted and relieved to announce that, for the moment anyway, Charlie is now ingesting his capsules in Pill Pockets without fuss. There was a moment of tension this morning when he spat one out only half consumed and with the capsule still in it; but he did, in the end, ingest the whole thing. No drama, no swearing, no bargaining, no feeling as if either of us had been wrestling with an extremely cheesed-off alligator. 

Pill Pockets are the stuff that restore relationships.

I hope I have not jinxed things by sharing this.

Elizabeth