The Week That Was

 

 

In the first place THAAAAAAAANK YOUUUUUUUUUU MOOOOOOOOOOODS!!!!!  You are STARS!  STARRRRRRRRRRRRRS!

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So.  How has my week off from the blog been?

YAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH.

Next question.

I’ve been to three different vets so far this week.  I’m going to a fourth tomorrow.  Life is so exciting.

Other highlights of the past eight days include that hellhounds were just barely beginning to view food as a friend rather than an enemy again, and essaying the occasional mouthful without rushing across the room immediately after and hiding behind the sofa in case it came after them for this impertinence . . . when the hellterror came into the final, full-standing-fertile stage of heat*, and the hellhounds’ tiny little minds exploded with the rush of hormones to what passes in a dog for the cerebral cortex AND THEY STOPPED EATING COMPLETELY.**

They can’t afford to stop eating.  Again.  More.  Longer.  They already look like toast racks because first they were ill and then they weren’t eating because they had been ill, and this is always the way they behave after they’ve been ill.  Or experienced any other disturbing stimulus.  The sighthound’s first defense is always to STOP EATING.

So I’ve been FORCE FEEDING THEM.  Try to imagine how much fun this is for all of us.***

Monday morning the hellterror went outdoors and produced a gigantic mushy sloppy glob.  Nooooooooo.  Because this is her pattern:  this is how it begins.  By the evening, while she doesn’t geyser with force the way the hellhounds do, it was the same substance even if the delivery system was a little different.

When I took her out yet again at midnight . . . she actually looked like she was having trouble walking.  PANIC.  I rang my new vets’ emergency service and was told to bring her in.  Another nice young vet, this one male, Discussed the Situation and . . . I think poor Pav had just really really had enough and was feeling ghastly and was just coming to the end of the fertile phase of her first heat so while she put up with his fondling her abdomen when he went away and then came back she growled and snapped at him.  I’ve never had a dog that bites.  I was tired and stressed myself, and worried, I was completely nonplussed—and clueless.  We got a muzzle on her, my little Jekyll and Hyde, and if anything could have made me feel even more miserable, that was it.

I brought her home again and she went comatose.  It was TERRIFYING.  I . . . um . . . didn’t go to bed Monday night.  I didn’t understand what was happening, it’s been a bad several months, my hellhounds won’t eat unless I literally poke it down their throats†, I was totally losing my hold on reality and reality was sucking big time anyway, why would I want to have a hold  on it?  So I just stayed up, reading some of my backlog of 1,000,000,000 magazines, sitting on my stool next to the Aga, and glancing at the hellterror crate occasionally.  Got through a lot of magazines by the time it was eight o’clock and the day shift was back on duty at the vet’s.

I took her in again at noon.  She’d stopped being comatose†† by then, but she was still rivering.  Aaaaaaaaand . . . my new young engaged-with-the-problem vet?  Is now talking to me about how it’s IBS.  It’s not something in the environment that we can, you know, find.  It’s IBS.  Just like the hellhounds.

THREE dogs, the third one seven years younger AND entirely unrelated AND a different breed . . . ALL have IBS†††?  I know truth, that ratbag, is often a whole lot stranger than fiction, which has to pretend to mind its manners, but . . . REALLY?

Pav also tried to bite this vet.  I was not in good shape.  I hadn’t had any sleep the night before and I am tired of sick dogs—and being patronised by vets.  I burst into tears.  I don’t think this did me a lot of good in the ‘reliability of owner’ category in the clinic records.  And I feel like I’m being told It’s All My Fault.  I am a nervy, anxious paranoid person with IBS . . . and have created three nervy, anxious paranoid hellcritters with IBS.  WAAAAAAAAAAAH.

Pav has a new appointment with the fancy internal-specialist vet tomorrow morning.  The fancy internal-specialist vet that my old vet wanted to send me off to after one round of basic lab tests came back negative because the only other possibility was ‘stress’.‡  We’ve had one round of slightly more comprehensive lab tests with the new vet . . . and I’m being sent off to the fancy internal-specialist vet again.

I got some sleep last night.  I woke up this morning in a temper.  I rang my old homeopathic vet’s new office and they could fit me in this afternoon.‡‡  Which meant finding his new office.  I took Peter so I would at least be getting lost with somebody.

We got lost.

But we got there.

And I have to go to bed, because I have to get up early tomorrow morning for our next veterinarian adventure.

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* I haven’t had to deal with a bitch in heat in years and I’d forgotten the details, or possibly the details are more prominent on hellterrors.  But for most of the year the exterior genitalia on your average bitch is a tiny little vaguely pointed bulge^, as seen from behind, where their hind legs meet.  I knew it swelled when the bitch goes into heat, and sometimes it changes colour—and, of course, it drips.  What I hadn’t remembered—although it doubtless varies from bitch to bitch and breed to breed^^—is that as it swells it turns outward and up.  To the rather creeped-out human at the other end of the lead it looks like it’s saying F**********CK ME.  Which, of course, it is.

^ They pee out of the same hole.  I assume that the geography within that single external opening is sufficiently clear that a hopeful penis won’t take the wrong fork.

^^ Sighthound bitches are famous for whistling nonchalant little tunes while they go into and come back out of heat without anyone noticing.  People who want to breed their sighthound bitches can be extremely frustrated by this.

  Hint:  Be suspicious of a whistling bitch.

** On second thought, don’t try.  No need for any more of us to be this wretched.

*** They also moaned a lot.  Mooooooooan.  Moooooooan.  I always knew that having an entire bitch around two entire males was going to be challenging and it’s hard for me to tell, because of everything else that’s been going on, how drastically I need to change my coping mechanisms for next time.

† Then you slam the jaws shut, tip the head back and rub the throat with your other hand, supposing you have a free hand, while intoning, Swallow.  Swallow, you effing argling *(&^%$£”!”!!!!!.  Then you do it again.  And again.  And again.  And . . . Did I tell you about getting liquid wormer^ all over the kitchen?  That may have been this weekend.  I’m not too good with liquids, although if it’s just water, no big, and even if it’s water with electrolytes, so the floor is a little sticky, so?  But wormer . . . the label of which reads DO NOT GET ON YOUR SKIN OR CLOTHING . . . unh.  Well, we had semi-pulverized dog food all over the kitchen too.  Darkness after a brief manifestation of disbelieving shock goes all stoic and resigned and lets you maul him, but Chaos has a quite astonishing talent for squirting food back out the sides of his mouth even when you’re sure you got it into the back of his throat AND you have his mouth clamped shut.  Arrrrgh.  Blasted gappy carnivore teeth.

^ Special extra-strong wormer, in case whatever this is is worms, instead of the usual wormicidal tablets, which are a lot easier to manage.

†† The day vet said that what the night vet had given her was opium-based and it might have caused this effect.  He couldn’t have told me?!  All he said to me was that it was a muscle relaxant, to stop her gut spasming.

††† Or IBD.  They seem to call it IBD over here:  Irritable Bowel Disorder instead of Irritable Bowel Syndrome.

‡  See:  It’s all the nervy, anxious paranoid owner’s fault.  Yes, well, paranoids really do have stuff blamed on them, just like they have real enemies.

‡‡ I stopped going when he got so overextended you couldn’t get hold of him when, as happened to Darkness, his prescription had made things worse.  Life is too frelling short.  But I’ve thought about him increasingly often over the last several months and he’s taken on another vet and some support staff which ought to make that end of things better.  The other end of things however is that his new office is over an hour away.^

^ Remind me to tell you the Saga of Wolfgang which is the only thing that has gone right this week.