Very Not A Good Day, with Veterinarians

 

Darkness didn't get better yesterday.  He got worse.  He couldn't possibly have anything left to put through . . . but he went on trying, with distressing results.  I finally went to bed at about . . . six, believing or at any rate hoping that he had finally settled down and was over the worst.  Darkness has these episodes oftener than Chaos first because his gut is more sensitive—or more damaged, take your pick—and also because he's a more determined scavenger.  I'm pretty sure he found something in the dark Thursday night, and I wasn't fast enough seeing, to tell him to drop it.  Hellhound honour:  they both will drop if I tell them to, but I have to see what they're doing in time, before they bolt it. 

           But these unwelcome melodramas usually only last a day.  They usually begin with a Morning Cataract and have subsided by evening.  Even though this one was clearly more severe than usual I assumed we were working to more or less the same pattern.  I also went to bed believing that if Darkness was still in trouble he would call me to let him out.  This is one of the reasons I have gone on crating them:  to ensure that if someone is in trouble he will howl.

            Wrong on both counts.  I got downstairs at about noon to a Terrible Smell . . . and when I let them out of the extremely nasty crate Darkness squirted all over the floor.  Twice.  There was bright red blood involved.  Quite a lot of it.*  I opened the kitchen door to the hellhound courtyard while I dove for the phone and yelped at the vets' receptionist**—IhaveadogcrappingbrightredbloodalloverthefloormayIbringhimin?  I did remember to get dressed. . . .

            The good news:  it probably is 'only' colitis, which is to say inflammation of the lower intestine, duuuuh.  To give my vet credit he expects you to know that 'colitis' is just a fancy Greek word for inflamed bowel, and that it doesn't tell you anything you don't already know.  But Darkness actually still looks fine, if you don't know him well enough to see otherwise***:  his eyes are still bright and his coat is still shiny.  And there's no bloating, and his gut area is no sorer than you'd expect.  So we came home again, somewhat reassured, and with drugs.† 

            I had been planning on putting up a guest post tonight, but then I had also planned on using blog-writing time to do some auction doodles.  But I'm exhausted.  I've been in a post-adrenaline haze all day, to the extent that I was fairly ill with it myself for a few hours, the way it can go, when the world is an alien unknowable place, reality is a theory, and my head hurts.  I needed something grounding†† and so very reasonably I turned to . . . knitting patterns.  Deramores http://www.deramores.com/ on whose mailing list I am sorry to say I am on, is having a 10% off all books sale and, well, um, I haven't actually bought anything yet but there does seem to be stuff in my virtual shopping basket.†††

            I've rung Niall to say that I may not make it to service ring tomorrow, but I'm planning that that should be because I sleep about twelve hours tonight‡, not because there are any more dramas. ‡‡  Can I go to bed yet?  

* * *

* Although bright red blood is extremely eye catching.  Even in my state of frantic alarm I recognised the quantities as 'inflammation' not 'haemorrhage'.  

** I'd forgotten they were open on Saturdays.  I had assumed that one of the reasons this was happening was because it was a weekend.  Although Rowan, my first whippet, was the queen of out-of-hours disasters.  She was accident-prone, but only late at night and on weekends.  Yes, I'm sure this was deliberate.  She was that kind of dog. 

*** Or it's not your kitchen floor. 

† It makes me sad that I'm not a good enough homeopath to cope with a bad bout of the Hellhound Disease.  Ars Alb, the standard food-poisoning remedy, usually immediately cheers a streaming hellhound up—which is an indication that it's working—even if the streaming goes on a bit longer, and I assume is why these events usually don't last more than eight to twelve hours.  There are a few other standard remedies I will try—Pulsatilla for changeable Chaos, Lycopodium for Darkness' noisy colic for example—but yesterday nothing touched it.  One of the reasons I was up till six was that I had most of my homeopathic books off the shelves and on the floor, looking for what I'd missed.  The answer was in there somewhere.  I just couldn't find it. 

            I'd been meaning to tell you my latest Magical Arnica^ story.  I was wrestling with my frelling dustbin in the dark.  They've changed our garbage-collection day and I'd forgotten, although the truth is I frequently wrestle with my dustbin(s) in the dark because I forget even when they haven't changed collection day recently.  I managed to jam my left thumb between the bin and the opening gate—and there isn't quite enough room for the dustbin to get through the gate even when there isn't a thumb in the way, and you have to force it through.  I was already in mid-force when my thumb misaligned itself.  *&^%$£"!!!!! that hurt.  I did not drop everything and rush indoors for my Arnica bottle because I was rather involved with the standard developing situation of dustbin falling down stairs.^^  By the time I did come indoors again my thumb would no longer bend and was going THROB THROB THROB in an extremely unpleasant way.  It was a shock when I saw it too:  it had swollen about half again its normal size and the site of the jam had turned black, while the rest of the thumb was purple.  Yeeep.  Arnica.  I was thinking, this is going to take a while, should I take another pill every five minutes or every fifteen minutes (frequency allowable in an acute)?  By the end of the first five minutes my thumb still looked appalling, but the worst of the pain was blunted, so I didn't take another pill.  By the end of fifteen minutes the black had reduced to a pinprick and the joint would bend again, although there was still a fair amount of purple.  At this point I took hellhounds for their hurtle, being perhaps a little cautious with my left thumb.  Today—less than two days later—the purple is gone, and the black pinprick has turned red.  It's a little tender to the touch.  That's all. 

            But I couldn't fix my hellhound. 

^ Which is also to be thought of when you have vomiting and diarrhoea together.  

^^ I hate dustbin collection day.  It is nonetheless to be preferred to no dustbin collection day. 

†† Something furthermore that can be done while keeping one eye on the hellhound bed at all times. 

††† We also spent about two hours on the sofa during which I read, with increasing bewilderment, one of these frelling dystopian novels that everyone but me loves.  It's very well written and I started off thinking, hey!  This is a good one!  . . . but it's all these horrible dysfunctional people doing horrible dysfunctional things, and going on and on doing them—get out, you morons!  Why are you putting up with this nonsense?—and I have the heart-sinking feeling that this is the beginning of a series and will therefore end somewhere calculated to make you buy the next one.^  However the hellhounds liked it.  

^ Not that I would ever stoop to doing such a thing.  Especially not twice in a row.  

‡ Chance would be a fine thing. 

‡‡ I consider it a good sign that Darkness was outraged by being given a shallow bowl of chicken broth for supper.