More bad news...

Addie after we first got her

So it’s been an especially exhausting and challenging month. With Fletcher being diagnosed, Sam and I have put a majority of our energy into making sure that he’s comfortable and that his pain is well managed. He’s been doing a lot better and we’re so thankful to all of you for your continued thoughts and support.

On Labor Day, we got a very unwelcome surprise when a neighbor stopped by to let us know that my car had been broken into overnight. The thief broke out the entire back passenger window and caused some damage to the frame. Luckily, the only thing they got away with was an AT&T router that had been mailed to us in error. AT&T had no record they’d sent it to us and asked that we just drop it off at a UPS Store to send it back, so I had it in my car to drop off when I got a chance. I never got the chance. So we’re lucky in that no further damage was caused and nothing of more value was stolen, but unfortunately, we have to have the car in the shop a few days to have that fixed.

As if our luck couldn’t get any worse, yesterday, we came home from work to Fletcher’s pill bottles all on the floor, one of which was completely chewed through and all the pills missing. The medication is called Rimadyl, which is a mild pain reliever and anti-inflammatory. Our regular vet had given us a large bottle when Fletch was first diagnosed because, if we’d decided to take the “keep him comfortable” route of treatment instead of the amputation, he would have needed quite a bit of the Rimadyl. We’d gone through a fair amount of the bottle, but Fletch’s dosage was half of a pill every twelve hours. We estimated that 15 or so pills were missing.

Normally, we’d been keeping the pills on a high shelf near the kitchen and the areas were blocked off from the dogs during the day. Yesterday, Sam and I were running late for work, so after giving Fletch his morning medication, we just put the pills in the middle of the dining room table out of reach. A few months back, Addie started chewing up things, including the TV remotes, so we’d gotten into the habit of putting the remotes in the center of the dining room table out of reach and we didn’t have any more problems with it. It would never have crossed our minds that the pills would be reached in the center of the table. Addie would have had to have jumped onto the table to get close to them and she still would have had to use some pretty impressive and persistent reaching tactics to be able to get a hold of the pill bottle. So you can imagine our shock when we realized what she had done. We immediately called the vet we’d been taking Fletch to as they also have a 24 hour emergency clinic. They said that the Rimadyl would start to cause kidney failure, but we likely wouldn’t notice symptoms until the 2^nd or 3^rd day, but that they could start treatment on Addie that would limit the effects of the medication on her system and save her life.

We were at the vet in half an hour. Addie will have to stay hospitalized for about 3 days with constant fluids through an IV and be given activated charcoal and other medications all while they monitor her kidney levels and functions. The treatment will set us back another $1000 or so, but without it, Addie would have died from kidney failure.

Please keep our little greyhound family in your thoughts. It’s been an incredibly rough month and I’m not sure how much more bad luck Sam and I can take. The good news is that if bad luck comes in threes, then we should be done, but we’re still not buying a lottery ticket any time soon.