My Little One
... My dog passed away this evening.
I woke up this morning to my mother yelling at her. Apparently, Sadie (that's the dog) had gotten into my mom's purse, dug around a shitload, and managed to pull out my mom's inhaler. To top it off, she had punctured the canister and got a blast of albuterol. Since half the dose of what's recommended for a human is best for a dog, and she ended up having 100 human-sized doses, we figured she'd overloaded on it. Obviously not a good thing. So Sadie is sitting there having trouble breathing and showing very obvious sympoms. I ended up taking her to the PetSmart that we usually use when we need a vet, as they do have an office there.
That office was not only no help and a waste of money, but full of incredibly rude employees.
So I take her home. I figured that I'd rather let the effects wear off instead of paying 400 dollars to have them stick an IV in her that may or may not have helped. Not too big of a deal, I thought.
So. Cut to home. Sadie just lies around all day. She won't come when we call her, she won't eat her dinner, and we have to shove her outside to pee. Come about 6 in the evening, we decide enough is enough. I call around to some places that I had gotten numbers from while at PetSmart. I only got one decent place that was open, so me and my dad decide to trek all the way across town in the hopes that this place would be ready and willing to help us out by the time we got there. In the meantime, my dad is trying to get a hold of my uncle to find out how much a cremation would cost, juuust in case.
So we go about two blocks down when my uncle calls us back and says "hey, just hit the place right down your street! They're great!" My uncle is a motorcycle salesman with GODLY people skills; when he says that they're great, we believe him. So we go there. And thank God we did.
My dad and I walk in with Sadie bundled up in her bed for comfort since she really hasn't gotten up in two hours. As soon as we walked in, a nurse saw us and regardless of the fact that there was a customer in front of us she immediately told us to go to the waiting room and promptly summoned the vet, who showed up about fifteen seconds later. Not only was their bedside manner top notch, but they listened to what we had to say and immediately sent her to the ICU they had to put her on oxygen. They went ahead and told us to grab something to eat, and that they'd soon get a hold of us to let us know about the status. Thus, the two of us went home for some quick dinner, and Ramey called me and managed to cheer me up a bit.
About half an hour later we head back to the vet's. About two minutes after sitting in the lobby, the vet comes up with some bad news: Sadey's condition is rapidly deteriorating. As we head to the ICU, she explains that my dog's lungs had been filled not with albuterol like we had thought, but with a lot of blood! We go down to see her. Apparently, it's not the inhaler that had caused it. Instead, we found out that cocker spaniels, especially purebreds like mine was, had a tenancy to develop heart diseases and that the albuterol may have simply triggered a disease in her, causing her to basically have a heart attack.
And that concludes the end of my dog's last day with us.
I woke up this morning to my mother yelling at her. Apparently, Sadie (that's the dog) had gotten into my mom's purse, dug around a shitload, and managed to pull out my mom's inhaler. To top it off, she had punctured the canister and got a blast of albuterol. Since half the dose of what's recommended for a human is best for a dog, and she ended up having 100 human-sized doses, we figured she'd overloaded on it. Obviously not a good thing. So Sadie is sitting there having trouble breathing and showing very obvious sympoms. I ended up taking her to the PetSmart that we usually use when we need a vet, as they do have an office there.
That office was not only no help and a waste of money, but full of incredibly rude employees.
So I take her home. I figured that I'd rather let the effects wear off instead of paying 400 dollars to have them stick an IV in her that may or may not have helped. Not too big of a deal, I thought.
So. Cut to home. Sadie just lies around all day. She won't come when we call her, she won't eat her dinner, and we have to shove her outside to pee. Come about 6 in the evening, we decide enough is enough. I call around to some places that I had gotten numbers from while at PetSmart. I only got one decent place that was open, so me and my dad decide to trek all the way across town in the hopes that this place would be ready and willing to help us out by the time we got there. In the meantime, my dad is trying to get a hold of my uncle to find out how much a cremation would cost, juuust in case.
So we go about two blocks down when my uncle calls us back and says "hey, just hit the place right down your street! They're great!" My uncle is a motorcycle salesman with GODLY people skills; when he says that they're great, we believe him. So we go there. And thank God we did.
My dad and I walk in with Sadie bundled up in her bed for comfort since she really hasn't gotten up in two hours. As soon as we walked in, a nurse saw us and regardless of the fact that there was a customer in front of us she immediately told us to go to the waiting room and promptly summoned the vet, who showed up about fifteen seconds later. Not only was their bedside manner top notch, but they listened to what we had to say and immediately sent her to the ICU they had to put her on oxygen. They went ahead and told us to grab something to eat, and that they'd soon get a hold of us to let us know about the status. Thus, the two of us went home for some quick dinner, and Ramey called me and managed to cheer me up a bit.
About half an hour later we head back to the vet's. About two minutes after sitting in the lobby, the vet comes up with some bad news: Sadey's condition is rapidly deteriorating. As we head to the ICU, she explains that my dog's lungs had been filled not with albuterol like we had thought, but with a lot of blood! We go down to see her. Apparently, it's not the inhaler that had caused it. Instead, we found out that cocker spaniels, especially purebreds like mine was, had a tenancy to develop heart diseases and that the albuterol may have simply triggered a disease in her, causing her to basically have a heart attack.
And that concludes the end of my dog's last day with us.