Pawcurious Vet Blog: Pet help, stories, and information with Dr. V

I saw a dog in today who had something funny going on with his eyeball. The medication that I would normally send home is one we don’t use too often, and when I grabbed the last remaining box on the shelf I saw it had expired sometime last year. Great.

So I asked my tech to bring the dog back to the owners while I figured out what to get for them. I don’t script out eye medications too frequently so I wanted to make sure the prescription I wrote was for a human drug they would be able to fill at any pharmacy. I jumped on the computer to access my online version of Plumb (a veterinary drug book).

A minute later the tech comes out, looking sheepish. “So, um, I told them you’d be in in a minute and that you were looking up some stuff on the internet.”

THAT always goes over well. Maybe doctors do this more than one would admit, but if my doctor were to do that, no, I don’t think I would want to know.

Realizing her mistake, she tried to backpedal- “not that she doesn’t know what she’s doing….she’s just looking up a medication since all ours are expired….wait, that sounds bad too….ummm….be right back!”

I told her next time she could just not explain anything and that would be OK. She reads this blog so it’s OK to rib her a little. When she’s not convincing owners I’m hiding in the back surfing the net for diagnoses she is a fantastic tech, honest.

Before I had kids, life was much more exciting for Emmett. We went to dog park all the time, I bought little dog cookies from specialty dog bakeries, I used to nap on his belly.

Life was good.

Then I had my daughter, and things got a lot more boring. We hung out at the house. He had to eat grocery store treats. I napped with the baby. It wasn’t that Emmett was less loved, or less important, or even that I thought things like specialty dog cookies were unnecessary now that I had a real kid. I just didn’t have the time. I mean, you could argue the same thing for what happened to my daughter after my son was born; life spreads you a little thinner with each new event, and you do the best you can. That being said, I understood when the dog who had been stellar for two years suddenly started peeing on strollers, eating diapers, and generally acting out. He got over it.

Now that the kids are older, I have a little more time to re-dedicate to dog parks and special cookies and the like, and I honestly intended to get right on that. It’s been 4 1/2 years since Emmett had me to himself, which doesn’t seem like that long ago at all, but it is. Now he’s middle aged. And now he has a terminal disease. I have a predetermined amount of time to make the past few years up to him.

The nice thing about dogs is, making amends takes all of 10 seconds. There is no long “I’m sorry” letter, no awkward reunions, no tearful accusations of neglect. Want to make up for not giving a dog a special cookie for a few years? Give him a special cookie. All is forgiven. (Apologies in advance for the blurriness of the pictures; I’m still learning the camera.)

Or in this case, a special doggie donut. Made of dog-friendly granola. It smelled like honey and seemed like it would be quite delicious.

I’m Emmett, I’m so sad, you know I’m sick, right? Want to give me a treat?

Yes, well, that will do quite nicely, I think.

Seriously? You’re seriously going to make me hold this on my nose? You DO know I’m a cancer patient, right? (And to that I respond, there is nothing more noble than going forth with life as it is normally, so yes, I made him balance the donut on his nose.)

The next 5 or 6 pictures were me realizing far too late that the fisheye lens does not have the capability to capture a clear picture of a dog messily devouring a donut with speed and great gusto. I guess the macro lens would have been a better choice. Trust me, though, he enjoyed it.

Only at the end did he slow down enough for me to get a somewhat clear shot of the sad remnants.

Voila! Happy dog.

To all the pet moms out there:

We ply them with food and treats and toys, spend hours grooming them and rubbing their bellies. We may not get any handmade cards or macaroni necklaces in return, but we do get this: pure, unadulterated, unconditional love. It’s the best gift they can give, and the primary joy of having a pet.

Have a Happy Mother’s Day!

I was a very sensitive kid. So much, in fact, that my mother only got through “Rock a Bye Baby” one time because I cried so hard at the idea of “down will come baby cradle and all.” What a mean lullaby. I couldn’t watch Road Runner cartoons because I was so sympathetic to the coyote- he wasn’t evil, he was just a carnivore. He just wanted to eat. And Tom and Jerry? Awful. Poor Tom. I’d cry every time I had to watch him get disemboweled, electrocuted, or decapitated. Man, that was a sadistic cartoon.

It seems that my daughter is following in my footsteps. One morning while I was at the gym, my husband turned on the TV to a station unknown and went back to bed. When I came home, my daughter was bawling her eyes out because she was watching a cartoon about either a puppy mill or a lost dog or something involving dogs and animal catchers, and she was inconsolable. When Mulan died, my son was philosophical. He said, “OK,” and went to play with his trucks. My daughter, on the other hand, still talks about her. Empathetic child.

When I found out about Emmett, my first thought was, “#@$@%!@#@#%@#”. Then, it was “How am I going to explain this to my daughter?” I figure, at least I have some time to figure it out, because I still don’t know the answer to that.

Tonight, she started crying shortly after I put her to bed. “I had a dream about a doggie who lost his family,” she sobbed. Apparently she saw something on TV this afternoon- this time Grandma was the culprit- and it again made her sad, musing about pets and loss. “Don’t worry,” I said, “Emmett won’t lose us,” then paused without saying, but we are going to lose him.

She looked at me and sighed. “But we already lost two dogs this year,” saying what I was thinking. “Skippy went to live with Maria, and Mulan…..Mulan…..”

I had no response to that. I gave her a hug, tried to distract her, and then went downstairs to give Emmett his meds.

I could lie and tell you of all the things I do at work, I like them all equally well. Sadly, I’m a crummy liar. I have definite preferences, as do most vets I know. If you figured those preferences out early on and don’t mind putting yourself through the wringer to be able to do just that for the rest of your career, then congratulations, you’re a specialist. The rest of us have to muddle through the stuff we don’t like in order to do the things we do. If you’re really lucky, you end up working with someone who likes the stuff you hate, and vice versa.

For example, when I was in school, I thought I would like surgery. I like doing tactile things, sewing and baking and building, so it made sense that I would like to sew and build animals too, at least at the time. Then I tried it and realized the difference: you can’t start over on a surgery. You can’t eat the parts you messed up or just frost over them. And I find that stressful.

I avoid most major surgeries these days, sticking to the small and easily performed ones- abscesses, ear hematomas, the like. Spays and neuters are considered part of the general practice deal as well. Neuters are a piece of cake. I could neuter dogs and cats all day. Spays, though, are a different entity altogether.

When you neuter a dog, you make a little incision just cranial to the scrotum. You advance the testicles through the incision, tie them off, and close your incision. Done. A spay, being a major abdominal surgery, is a different beast. Because you are removing both the ovaries and the uterus, you need to be able to access everything from the ovaries, up by the kidneys, to the uterine bifurcation, down by the bladder. When you do a spay, you are right in the middle of everything.

In a smaller dog, or in a cat, the procedure is still pretty straightforward. However, the bigger and older the dog, the more exponentially difficult this surgery becomes. Spaying a 5 month old chihuahua takes 20 minutes (for me; other vets are speedier). Spaying a 7 year old, 90 pound Rottie in heat? I don’t even know how long it would take, because I haven’t done that in a few years, because I would do everything in my power to schedule it on my boss’s day. He doesn’t mind that kind of thing. It’s kind of like swirling some spaghetti around in a vat of crisco intertwined with spurting blood vessels, and you need to find a certain single strand of spaghetti and isolate it without disturbing anything else. Kind of like that.

So when I asked my tech what was on the schedule for tomorrow and she kind of mumbled, I knew that there was some kind of spay that I wouldn’t want to do on the books. A 50 pound German Shepherd. Sure, it could be worse, but oh, how I wish I had 10 cat neuters instead (that is the easiest surgery ever, and therefore, my favorite surgery ever.)

So the last you heard of me and my cat food experimenting, I had to give all the freeze dried food to Emmett and was tackling my bag of raw food patties.

The Nature’s Variety brand makes feeding raw food very convenient, if you’re not into preparing all that stuff yourself. It appealed to me for several reasons:

1. You can buy it in little 1 ounce medallions, or larger 3 ounce patties.
2. The meat is ground up, so you don’t have big bone chunks floating around in the stuff.
3. They actually went the distance to do an AAFCO feeding trial.
4. There are multiple flavors, so could potentially be an appropriate choice for a pet with food allergies.

I’m not saying you should or should not try a raw food diet- there’s plenty of information floating around on the net both for and against it, which you should read and digest (ha ha) if you’re thinking about going this route. But if you are, trying a pre-made brand like this is a great way to give it a go before committing to it for the long haul.

These little 1 ounce medallions make it really easy to measure small amounts for cats.

It was right about this time that I found my husband’s fish eye lens, which I assume is the secret weapon of many a food blogger. It really makes these little nuggets look assertive.

You can take a few frozen nuggets at a time and thaw them in the refrigerator overnight (I made sure to use a dedicated container that wasn’t used for human food.) I microwaved them for a short bit in a disposable bowl to take the chill off, put it in an area the human kids can’t access, and turned the cats loose.

Apollo lacks patience. It’s a family trait. (Yes, they were still frozen at this point.)

Hungry kitteh is not amused to be fed frozen food patties in order to get a decent photo op for the blog while I had the fish eye lens attached. It’s so hard to get a good photo of a monochromatic cat.

Once it was thawed, they liked it. They liked it plenty. I was using the chicken formula, whose smell was much less nauseating to me than the venison one, and for a few days all was well.

Then- *sigh* Then, Apollo’s hair started falling out. This is what happens when he starts getting his food allergies. I had hoped his problem was a grain source, which would be solved by feeding a grain free food, but this was not to be the case. Apparently he has a protein sensitivity, to either chicken or fish, since those are the protein sources in the foods he has been eating the last month.

So, the cat food experiment is temporarily halted while I get his allergies under control, and then I will hopefully be able to pick back up with the raw food venison variety, which is actually the exact food I used to get his food allergies under control last time.