Sick as a Dog

Anyone who ever spends even a small time around my dog will learn something very quickly about him - he LOVES food. From the normal dog loving foods like kibble, steak and bones, to the obscure foods a lot of humans will turn their noses up at. He will drool when he sees me start to peel a banana in anticipation of the bites he knows I always give him (I refuse to eat the pointy ends of a banana). And when I start to cut up Brussels sprouts, you can forget about even trying to get his attention away from my cutting board.

So when Bosco stopped eating and refused any sort of food for the first time in his LIFE, yes, we began to get more than a little worried.

It all started Thursday evening. When we arrived home from work Bosco had thrown up all over the house. We chalked it up to the 2 lb of chicken he had stolen from a plate in the sink as it thawed two days before. Although he was still throwing up a bit, he seemed to get better by Friday afternoon when Brian came home early from work to check on him. We decided not to take him to the vet as he even started holding down some rice and plain yogurt. By early Saturday afternoon he was showing  signs of an intestinal blockage and had taken such a drastic turn for the worse that we decided he needed to get into the vet right away.

We rushed him to an emergency vet in town where we proceeded to spend the next several hours waiting, waiting, waiting & finally running a barrage of tests including abdominal x-rays.

While nothing seemed glaringly wrong in the images, between the gas patterns in his x-rays and the blood work, it was decided that he had an intestinal blockage of organic matter that wouldn't show up in the imaging. So Bosco was to spend the night being medicated & (more importantly) rehydrated. At midnight another set of x-rays was done. Same results with no movement. It was decided over a middle of the night phone call with the ER vet to do one more series of images in the morning and if nothing moved, that exploratory surgery would be needed.

My heart dropped into the pits of my stomach when my phone rang the next morning. Just shy of his 6th birthday, I was starting to really worry about the possibility of losing the giant black dog that's seemingly been through it all with me. Thankfully the news the vet had to give me was, although not great news, it was positive. He still refused to eat or drink and had not gone to the bathroom yet, but gas patterns in his bowels were shifting, meaning, things were starting to move! X-rays were taken every 4 hours for the next 12 hours. 

Late Sunday night, nearly 36 hours after taking him to the vet, Bosco was allowed to return home. 

It took a few days for the big man to finally start acting like himself, but he's thankfully back to normal, minus the shaved cuff he now sports on his ankle.