Emergency surgery

·         After such a happy post on Friday about being really close to have a working kitchen, that happy feeling was delayed a bit. Saturday the contractors from Home Depot showed up at 4pm and were able to hook up the new garbage disposal and the dishwasher, but no one told them that we had put in a new cooktop so they weren’t prepared to hook that up.  They also couldn’t hook up the new faucet.  *groan*  Luckily, CP thought that he could do it, and do it he did.  Color me very impressed.  So yay working kitchen!!  (no thanks to the HD contractors though)

·         To shoo away skunks we bought solar lights to put in the backyard.  We also will be putting in motion detection lights in the hopes of keeping them away (skunks don’t like light).  We’ll see if it works.

·         Now that we have our cable hooked up we get all of the Premium channels for free for two years.  Last year we saw the first episode of Homeland as a teaser, but we didn’t get Showtime so we missed the rest of the season.  Well we have now seen 2.5 episodes and we are hooked!  What a good show.  Can’t wait to catch up with the rest of the first season and watch the upcoming season!

·         The reason that we have only watched half of the third episode is because we were relaxing last night after a long day of home improvement (with a three hour break to watch football- GO EAGLES!), when Fuzzy Britches started acting weird.  She licked her chops and couldn’t get comfortable.  She puked up a small amount of white foam which I have never seen before.  I felt her stomach to see if it was distended, because if it was, then that most likely meant that she had bloat.  Her stomach didn’t feel tight, but as we listened to her labored breathing, we knew that something was wrong and we needed to take her to the emergency vet.

FB in her younger days

The emergency vet immediately took her back for Xrays while CP and I waited nervously in the waiting room.  After a while they led us back into a room and the vet explained that Fuzzy Britches had bloat.  Her stomach hadn’t fully turned and they could perform a procedure where they stick a tube down her throat to try to fix the problem (sorry don’t know the technique), but the vet did say that the technique could work, but then FB could have bloat again tomorrow.  The other option was surgery to correct the bloat and then tack the stomach to the side of the dog’s body so that bloat could almost never happen again.  The vet recommended the surgery over the tube.

We both agreed that despite the ~$5,000 surgery cost, we were going to have the vet perform the surgery.  Although we weren’t expecting this expense, our puppies are our kids right now and FB is still a lively and happy dog (thankfully she hasn’t had any more seizures).  We weren’t going to risk her life to save some money, knowing that bloat could happen again (and possibly at a time when we were not around and not able to respond as quickly as we did).

We walked out of the room and I did my best to hold back the tears as there were others in the waiting room.  CP joked, “well, there go our new windows” but I could see that he was trying to hold back tears too.  We paid for the surgery and then were able to go back to see her before she went into surgery.  They had already given her a sedative so her tongue was hanging farther out of her mouth than usual, she had an IV in her front leg, and I’m not sure that she recognized us.  I was continuing to try to hold back tears, but tried to give her encouragement and tell her that she was good dog.

As CP and I walked out of the building and to our car, I broke down.  I was so worried about her and whether she would make it.  We knew that we caught it early, but was it early enough?  She was an older dog- would that affect her in coming out of surgery?

When we got home it was midnight but I couldn’t sleep until I found out how the surgery went.  I folded clothes, I packed for my work trip, and I tried to busy myself.  Finally at 1:30 the vet called to tell us that she was out of surgery and doing well.  They saw some bruising on her gums which might indicate a problem with clotting, but so far she was doing okay.  They explained that they also took out her spleen because they saw an odd-looking nodule on it and felt it better safe than sorry.  The nodule will get biopsied and we should know the results by next week. 

Poor FB is going to be on pain meds and antibiotics for a few days and needs to rest for the next 10 days.  We will hopefully be able to pick her up from the hospital on Weds when I get back from my work trip.  My parents are thankfully taking Buster to Michigan with them this weekend and during the week we will take him to doggie daycare so that FB can rest during the day.

So my PSA for the day is if you have a large breed female dog that is not spayed yet and the breed is known to bloat, while they are getting spayed you can have them tack the stomach to the side of the dog’s body to prevent bloat from ever happening.  I know that if we ever get another female dog we will be doing just that as I’m sure it is less expensive, the dog doesn’t have to go through two surgeries, and you can have peace of mind for the rest of the dog’s life.

Thank goodness this story has a happy ending….I’m not sure what kind of state I would be in otherwise.