Puppy 911

We started out this week in crisis mode. When Shawn went to wake up Laika on Monday, he found a very sick puppy. Lucky for us, our veterinary clinic is a 24-hour one that doesn’t require appointments.

For the sake of not grossing anyone out too much, I’ll just say that Laika had completely emptied her digestive system in various ways within an hour of waking. After several trips outside, her eyes were cloudy and she could hardly stand. We decided that an emergency trip to the vet was in order, despite the horror of having to drive through the streets of Kyiv during morning rush hour. The trip there was stressful, but Shawn did a great job driving and only had to lay on the horn and “bump” his way through one intersection. The three of us stumbled into the office, and using various internationally recognized hand gestures managed to explain our situation. (Why didn’t they cover puppy bodily functions in our Russian class?!)

The vet on duty whisked Laika into the back room and we helped hold her down as he tied her legs to a metal examining table and inserted an iv. We spent the next hour standing next to her as the vet gave her shot after shot and eventually had to use a clamp to pry her mouth open in order to get her to swallow some Barium. Then we were told to return at 5pm for an x-ray of her stomach. The main concern was that she had swallowed something that was causing an intestinal blockage, so the x-ray would hopefully show how far the Barium moved through her system during the day.

Shawn then headed off to work and I got to sit at home and worry for the next several hours. Laika received some quality petting, which rarely happens because of her normal refusal to sit still for longer than 30 seconds. This is how I knew she was really sick.

She had perked up a little by the time Shawn returned for work and we piled in the car for the trip through afternoon rush hour traffic back to the vet clinic. However, once we reached the door to the examining room, she remembered what had happened that morning and totally froze. It took Shawn, me, and the vet’s assistant to drag her into the room for the x-ray. Shawn and I had to hold her down on the table while the vet took the shot of her tummy (Shawn later stated, “So how many x-rays were we just exposed to?”), then we waited to see what would show up.

The result: Gas. A lot of gas. We could have told the vet she has a lot of gas. But I guess the good news is that there’s nothing seriously wrong with her. She probably just ate something that made her really sick. Any one of the million things she picks up off the ground each day could have caused it. On the plus side, we now have an x-ray of our dog’s stomach. And my left hand.