The Dogs

This pic is from Monday morning. Everyone happy and content wanting love and stealing breakfast. Tuesday I yelled and called and whistled for thirty minutes with no response.

He never ventures far from the house. I searched all around (and under) the house, in the barn and pig pen just in case he had followed Chris in that morning without being noticed and got stuck. I jumped in the car to go to the house behind the woods where Hooch has been hanging out to see if he had followed. Still no Chance.

I started walking every inch of the property. At this point I'm incredibly worried. I had given him a dewormer that morning. Could he have reacted to it? Things like that do happen. I had left shortly after and had been gone for a few hours. I was kicking myself for not keeping them confined like I typically would after giving a medication.

Finally, I did find him. Hidden on the far side of the barn, under a tree, not moving. I waded through the tall grass and beat back the tree branches thinking the worst. I picked him up. I guess I was a little rough because he looked at me like I was crazy. Once back to the right side of the barn I set him down and encouraged him to follow me. He took a few steps into the shade of the barn and flopped down again.

I loaded him up and off to the vet we went. He gave us an antibiotic and some more dewormer. The thought was that the worms had allowed an infection to set into his bowels, but Tuesday night he started puking confirming the alternative to the worm theory. It was parvo.

I've now been to a veterinarians office eight times since Tuesday. I will be headed there again in a few hours. If you have no experience with parvovirus, let me tell you a bit about it.

The first sign something is wrong with your dog is usually lethargy, followed by explosive awful smelling diarrhea. I know, these symptoms sound like a million other things. The big sign it's parvo though is when they start puking water. They cannot keep fluids in their body on either end. That's why most dogs with parvo die of dehydration. Usually their diarrhea progresses to a bloody mess. Bacteria capitalize on the opportunity to attack the intestines. If the dehydration doesn't get them then a bacterial infection will.

We took Chance to an emergency vet Tuesday night where they gave him a few injections to ease the vomiting till we could get him back to the regular vet in the morning. I debated where to take him. I was not impressed with the vet the day before, but they are one of the closest offices to us and he needed to get on an IV as soon as possible. I dropped him off, but was not happy with the attitude and service I was getting.

I decided to take all my other dogs in for their annual vaccinations (they were due next month anyway) at our old veterinarian's office an hour away. When we got there we found out Sassy (Chance's sister) already had a fever and was probably in the early stages of the illness.

Standard protocol is hooking the dog up to an IV and waiting it out. They usually give the dog antibiotics and some medicine to ease the vomiting as well. What I didn't know is some vets these days are using Tamiflu and having great success with dogs treated with it.

I went back to the veterinarian's office I had left Chance at and suggested we try this. When I was met with even crappier attitude than I had earlier that day I decided to pull him out and take him to the vet an hour away. Wow, if I thought the attitude was bad previously, believe me I will not darken their doorstep again.

Yesterday, Sassy was still not symptomatic so we thought she was okay to come home and continue on antibiotics and tamiflu. Unfortunately she had some diarrhea a couple of hours ago so I'm going to take her back just to be on the safe side. What an exhausting week! But, as long as both pups are healthy at the end of it then it's worth it.