Easter Adventure

Happy Easter Everyone!

Well, I wasn't really planning on having a blog today... but sometimes life is interesting like that. My Easter adventure involved me being peed on, someone mentioning me working at Blue Lake, and not getting in to bed until 4am.

So what in the world could have happened to make all those events occur? Well... Tabitha. Yes, little miss Tabbers herself. I know I mention Teddy a lot on my blog, but Tabitha is our in house little drama queen. She's 40 lbs of fur, fluff, and attitude. :) For most of the day yesterday Tabitha had been acting kind of odd. She just wasn't full of her normal amount of energy. For instance, she always sleeps curled up in a little ball next to my mother, every single night. The night before last, she slept downstairs on the couch next to Teddy instead. Something definitely wasn't right with her. She wasn't rough housing with Teddy when she went outside, and she didn't seem very interested in doing much at all.

During the late afternoon, I was down in the kitchen making a snack when Tabitha wandered in to the room. I knelt down to pet her and I noticed that she was quivering a bit. Tabitha is part border collie, and border collies by nature can very nervous and jittery. Because of her skiddish nature, I wasn't sure at first if she was quivering because she thought she was in trouble, or because she was in some kind of pain. I sat down on my knees and cooed to her, letting her know she definitely wasn't being scolded. The poor little thing continued to quiver, and I knew that she definitely wasn't feeling well. It was really starting to worry me, but my mom seemed to not be overly concerned. Apparently she was forgetting that today is Easter, because she kept saying something about taking Tabby to the vet "in the morning."

Later in the evening, I had went to Wendy's to get myself something for dinner. When I came home, Teddy and Tabby were ready to greet me at the door like they always do. As I opened the door, Tabitha came running outside to meet me. Instead of running and jumping at me, she stopped suddenly and yelped in pain. She then went back inside and yelped in pain again. My dad came over to look her over, and when my dad slightly patted her stomach, she jumped and yelped. Obviously something wasn't okay! After talking it over, me and my parents had pretty much come to the conclusion that Tabitha had probably ate something that may have gotten stuck in her intestines. My mom has a horrible habit of buying stuffed toys for the dogs that weren't meant for dogs... and they usually come with plastic noses or eyes that the dogs shouldn't get a hold of. Teddy is very good about not swallowing things like that, but Tabitha will swallow anything that she puts in her mouth. It seemed likely that this is what she had done.

I have to say that I was getting really irritated with my mom! At this point I thought that Tabby should go to the vet immediately, but my mom kept wanting to do a "wait and see" approach. Tabby at this point was panting loudly and quivering very hard. It must have been around 10:30pm when my mom started calling around, trying to find a vet clinic open. Due to the holiday, only one emergency vet clinic was open in the entire city. After some interesting wrangling, we managed to get Tabby in the car and to the vet. When we got to the vet clinic, my mom explained that Tabby had been acting strange for the last day or so before suddenly being clearly distressed. I immediately got irritated with the vet assistant who replied with "Well, if this has been happening for three days, why did you just decide now to bring her in?" Before my mom could even reply, I snipped at the vet assistant, saying "It hasn't been three days. My mother just said it was the last day and a half. And she wasn't showing signs of being in pain, she was just simply acting a little odd." Here we were worried about our dog, and obviously we cared about her, otherwise we wouldn't be bringing her to the only vet open in the city at 11:30pm. I wasn't going to let some snippy woman insinuate that we didn't care about our dog!

As we were sitting in the waiting room, Tabitha clearly wasn't happy. Since she doesn't wear a collar (she yelps bloody murder when we put a collar on her), I was holding her in my lap. As she got more and more worked up, she peed all over me. Yes, and it wasn't just a little bladder leak! The dog completely relieved herself on me... so I just sat there moaning "oh... I feel something warm... Mom she just peed on me!" That wasn't even the worse part... about five minutes later I started to smell something and realized the little squirt had pooped on me too! My mom was trying to clean up after her, but at that point did it really matter? I had just been peed and pooped on. Finally the vet was able to take a look at her, and ordered a round of x-rays. My mom suggested that Tabitha be sedated... but of course the vet disagreed. They took the very reluctant Tabitha in to the back room and told us it would just be a little wait.

A few moments after Tabitha went back, an elderly woman and her granddaughter came in carrying their Dalmatian. The poor dog looked like he was on death's door, and the elderly woman explained that their regular vet had given him something for nausea because he wasn't holding anything down. They obviously took that dog back right away, which meant we were waiting for quite a bit. I wouldn't have minded so much if I wasn't worried about Tabby and currently smelling like pee. Finally, it was about 1am when the vet came back and asked us if we would be okay with Tabitha being sedated, because apparently she wouldn't calm down for them to get x-rays. Well, duh. We agreed to the sedation, and waited and waited. Finally, it was almost 2am before the vet called us back. She showed us Tabby's x-rays, and there was absolutely nothing wrong on her x-ray. Thank goodness for that. The vet then went on to explain that she thought it might be a slipped disk, because this is common in border collies and wouldn't show on an x-ray. She said that the abdominal pain was probably actually pain Tabby was feeling from her back.

The vet gave Tabby an anti-inflammatory shot, and some liquid medication to go home with, with the instruction that our regular vet should see Tabby on Monday. Before the vet let us go and get Tabby, she explained to us that Tabitha had "really spazzed out! I've never seen a dog that is so dramatic... she really got herself quite worked up!" It wasn't too shocking to us! Tabitha has quite the dramatic personality. The vet went on to say that Tabby must truly be border collie with her nervous antics. While they were trying to get the x-ray before sedating her, Tabitha freaked out and accidentally bit her tongue so hard that she started bleeding. Then she started thrashing around and jumped off the table. After this is when they asked us if they could sedate her. The crappy part about this was that after giving her the medication to calm her down, they put her in a room by herself. It seems to me that if she was so worked up, the least they could have done was come and spoke to me or my mother. We could have sat with her until the medicine kicked in, and helped to calm her down. Instead, they left her in a room by herself and turned off the lights, thinking the dark would settle her down. Of course, the dark, strange room only freaked her out more. She apparently was trying so desperately to escape, that she threw her head in to the wall, and busted her little lip up! So not only did Tabby come home completely zonked out from the sedation, but her poor little tongue was sore and her lip and face were swollen and bloody. As my mom said "Poor little Tabbers looks like she was in a bar fight!"

By the time we got home, it was almost 2:30am. After taking a long hot bath and getting a bowl of cereal, it was about 4am before I got in to bed. At around 5:30, Teddy woke me up right in the middle of a dream. I could feel his cold nose on my face and I just moaned for him to go away, but of course he wouldn't. Finally I got up and went downstairs, and instead of leading me to the door to go outside, he led me to Tabitha's bed. The poor thing was worried about his little sister! Tabby had apparently begun to come out of the sedation and was freaking out a bit. She could only manage to lift her head up, but she was whimpering. I sat with her for an hour while she fell asleep. Of course as soon as I tried to go back to bed, she started whimpering again. Thankfully at that point my mom came down with her. Another hour after that she was asleep again. She woke up whimpering again around 9am, but by that time my dad was up and he calmed her down.

Oh yes, and how could I forget, the mention about me working at Blue Lake? It occurred while we were sitting in the waiting room. The elderly woman and her granddaughter (who looked like she was in her late teens) were talking. The girl in an audible whisper mentioned that "the girl in the pink sweatshirt [me] looks familiar. I think maybe she worked at Blue Lake!" In which the grandmother said very loudly "Yeah, she looks like one of those Blue Lake people!" I just tried to pretend like I didn't hear it, by burying my head deeper in to my book. At 1 am, and being covered in urine, I really just didn't feel like looking up and being friendly!

That was our Easter adventure... because of me and my mom being exhausted, we've decided to skip out on the extended family get together and have a nice big dinner here.

You Are a Flowery Egg

Fresh, funky, and well dressed.

What Kind of Easter Egg Are You?