by admin | January 15, 2016 8:52 am
Rosie is our smart dog. She is high-strung but controls majority-interest of brains in our two-canine household. Sometimes when Sam will not come inside, she goes out to look for him, shaking her little head. Rosie is a rescue dog who looks like Chewbacca when her fur is long. Her breed is uncertain, but certainly mixed. She is 5 years old, well-behaved and does not shed. Sam, on the other hand, is a 7-year-old sweet, special-needs dog. He doesn’t shed either, and appears to be part poodle, part cocker spaniel. The latter explains his dumbness. There is no such thing as a smart cocker spaniel. It is an oxymoron.
Sam and Rosie are great friends.
The only downside to Rosie is that she is a bit sickly, and a tad chubby at 20 pounds. We have spent more than $2,000 in veterinarian bills in those five years, which breaks down to $100 a pound. Surgery for bladder stones. An emergency trip to an out-of-town vet when she developed a wrenching, hacking cough. It turns out that was simply pollen allergies, treated with children’s liquid Benadryl. It cost $400 for the x-ray and antibiotics to learn this. A couple of other random incidents as well.
So when the hacking cough came back a week ago in the dead of winter, I began dosing her with Benadryl. It had no effect. When she coughs early in the morning downstairs, I can hear it in bed upstairs. That is her only symptom. She is still lively, prances around, and happily gobbles down her food. But after a week of Rosie hacking so loudly we could not hear “The Good Wife,” it was time to take her to the vet.
This is never a pleasant experience. Rosie hates traveling in a car. She starts shaking, drooling, whining and pacing around before I’m out of the driveway. It has thus always been this way, and we gave up “pleasure” rides years ago. Sam, on the other hand, loves to ride, one of his saving graces — that and being a good walking companion. Rosie does not want to leave the couch, except for gobbling groceries and to do her business. This means that Rosie’s antipathy toward the car has only increased, since the only reason we make her travel is to either head to the vet or to the groomer.
I put a towel on the seat to catch the drool and off we went. Rosie was pitiful, shaking and whining — but not coughing. The vet, as always, examined her with great deliberation. He ruled out heart and lung issues, and finally concluded she had kennel cough. I had missed her Bordetella appointment in November. That is the fancy name for kennel cough, used for a variety of airborne afflictions. It is not serious and is easily treatable.
Unless you are Rosie. It is impossible to sneak a pill into this dog. I have buried a small tablet inside a golf-ball sized hunk of hamburger, which she happily ate and spit out the pill. I have ruined several pills trying to force them into her throat and finally switched to all liquids. This can be problematic, especially in this case. The preferred top five or six antibiotics were only in pill form. The vet finally came upon a solution. A local compounding pharmacy would create the preferred antibiotic in liquid form. Of course, it would be about twice as expensive. But Rosie thinks liquid medicine shot into her mouth with a plastic syringe is a pooch treat. She is not as smart as she thinks.
So, $244 later, we headed home. The pharmacy would deliver the liquid medicines to the vet the next morning. We would have to get through one more evening of owning a dog that mimics a goose honking when she starts coughing.
I realized something after I dropped her off at home and headed back to work. Rosie had not coughed once since we got in the car to go to the vet. Not even a tiny hack. The vet had shrugged it off. It’s like when that annoying rattle in your car magically disappears as soon as you take it to the dealership, only to resume on the way home.
Hours have passed. Rosie is snoring on the study couch. She has not coughed in more than eight hours. Irrationally, I am tempted to yell at her. “Cough, dangit! I didn’t spend $244 for you to just cure yourself!”
It is too late to cancel the medicine, since it is being compounded. I plan to dose her whether she resumes coughing or not.
I am going to get my money out of this dog, all $100 a pound of it.
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