olddude
Posted : 8/16/2011 10:37:04 AM
I know what you mean about the financial aspect of something like this. I have a 14 year old lab that all of a sudden quit eating and within a couple days could not get up off his mat. My business went under because of the decline of the economy over the past few years and I had to start taking social security way before I planned to so money now is really tight. I called my vet and told him what was going on and he told me to bring him in which I did. Fifteen minutes later half my social security check for the month was gone. He tested positive for Lyme and also possibly heart worms. My dogs all have been on Heartguard and Frontline accept in the coldest part of the winter about 3 months of the year.
The vet gave him Doxycline and Prednisone and after several days he started showing signs of some improvement. I mean he started to act like he wanted to get up and move around some. He was still very weak and acted like he still had a lot of pain in his hips and back but each day he seemed to get a little better.
I have never had much trouble pilling him or any other dog for that matter I just try and forget about how bad it seems for them and look at it as how bad it could be if he didn't get his medication. Sometimes handling stubborn dogs or any animal may seem cruel to some but is a necessary part of keeping them safe. Most times it is harder on you than it is the dog because they can sense your emotions or fears before you even try to do what ever it is you are about to do. The more you mess around and try to convince the animal to take his meds the more stress they will sense in you and all kinds of bells and whistles go off in his head that something just ain't right.
I wrote the last little bit in just to prepare you for how I had to get Boomer to start eating through all of this. When he first started going downhill I thought he had been poisoned or had eaten some bad food because I had just opened a new bag of dog food and neither of my dogs seemed to want to eat it. Same food, bought at the same place, and they in the past never seemed to have a problem eating it but both would just turn their noes up at it and walk away. It was really hot outside and they don't seem to want as much to eat when the temps are high so I just figured it was normal. A day or two turned into a week so I dumped the suspected food and went to another place and bought another bag with the same results only the little dog would eat this food if it was mixed with table scraps or canned food. Boomer would not eat anything but he would drink water.....lots of water. I knew I had to get food in him or he would waste away to nothing as he had already lost 20 pounds or more and started look like some street roamer. I tried everything, raw meat, canned food.....every brand imaginable, I even went to the store and bought chicken breast and cooked it for him but he would not eat and he became so weak I thought it would be best to just take him in to be put down.
Finally I went out to the garage where I had been keeping him because it is cooler because it has some AC in there and I felt like Matt Dillion getting ready for a big shoot out with some bad guys that had just molested Miss Kitty and I said as I walked through the door....This is your lucky day Boomer, it is the first day of the rest of your life so let's make it a good one. I was armed with two cans of chicken and rice country delight I had just gotten at Pet Smart and I told Boomer, It's me and you buddy, one of us is about to pig out. I opened both cans before I went through the door and threw the lids away and me being the tight wad I am had already decided none of it was going to waste. Well, I was wearing some of it by the time I finished stuffing the second can of food forcefully down his throat and he looked like he was wearing a chicken stew bandana but most of it went in where it belonged. This also made the little dog happy because she got to show her affection by cleaning up all the left overs off me and her buddy Boomer. I had to go through this for several days until the medications really started to kick in to where he would finally eat on his own.Once he finally finished his medications he did fine for about two weeks but started the same thing only this time he could not get up at all. He had gone outside to go to the bathroom and just fell over and could not move and when I found him I carried him back inside and called the vet but in talking to him I knew I could not afford to take him. He told me that this is the way lyme disease works, there are good days and there are bad ones.
After a couple days he perked back up not to his normal old way of doing things but he could get up to go do his business outside and not just go where he was laying and have to stay that way until I came to clean the old boy up. This has been really hard for me, seeing my friend go down this way and not being able to afford to get him to the vet like I need to but he, like I am a victim of bad timing and a really stinky economy and there is really nothing much we can do but just enjoy the good days we have and provide what ever care we can give up on the bad. It's sad too because old Boomer has always been there for me when I was down, eager to do whatever necessary to cheer me up and even when I was sometimes mean to him or fussing at him for being in the way, he would always greet me when I got home with a big ol smile on his face and a wag of a tail. As bad as he must have been feeling through all of this he lost a little of the smile but he was wagging that big ol' tail the whole time and that's is how I knew he still had the will to fight and still had a few more smiles left to share.