I think it's harder on me as a Mom when the dogs are sick. With the kids, they have voices and are able to articulate what is wrong. With the dogs, if one doesn't come running for dinner, then something might be wrong.
And when you find the one who is skipping dinner, nested in your bed, and you turn on the lights to see if she's okay and your first thought when you see her drooping eye lid and excessive drool, is Oh My God, she's had a stroke, and your next thought is her non-drooping eye is jacked up and you start to make emergency calls to the vet because with animals, you just don't know.
Did she eat something toxic? Is this the aftermath of a seizure? It really looks like a stroke. What do you do for a dog who has had a stroke?
All those thoughts, and of course the worst ones (what if the vet says there is no hope) ran through my head as my husband and I bundled our almost six year old Beagle into the car, leaving our two kids at home with the other two dogs. Everyone was worried, except Emma, who was just in terrible pain.
Our vet checked us out and sent us on to an emergency care office because we needed to get some tests run ASAP to rule out things like toxins, strokes, and seizures. My husband kept saying she was going to be okay, and I said if the vet tells us we have to put her down, we aren't doing it tonight.
We are two sides of the same coin, he chooses to be the sunnier side, and I naturally fall onto the gray sky side, but that's part of why we're still working after 20 years!
It was a stressful night, but when we got the good news that it's just an eye condition that can even affect people, we were so relieved. Not that it's "just" an eye condition. It is a terribly painful thing where Emma's pupils have shrunk down to pinpoints and don't react to light and she was virtually unable to see. We got home at 11pm, with two kinds of eye drops and a bottle full of doggy pain meds.
No medical marijuana, and my husband did ask.
I haven't gone home at lunch on a work day in quite a while, but I am this week. Just to make sure Emma is okay, and to give her some eye drops. She's on the fence about whether seeing me is a good thing. On one hand, good because she gets her lunch at lunch time, on the other hand, bad because she hates, hates, hates her eye drops.
Stressful, worrisome, and I still wouldn't trade my dogs for anything.
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