
As anyone who owns pets knows, they are lovely companions who give unconditional love and affection in exchange for food and a spot on the bed/couch/what-have-you. They are also ticking time bombs of stupid vet bills. This goes double for labs. When you own a lab, you have unwittingly signed up for an unknown number of visits to the vet for something stupid that they’ve eaten. Since labs seem to evaluate whether something is edible on the “Eh, let’s see what happens.” school of thought, this can get expensive. They also have impeccable timing, preferring to wait until after you’ve dropped a ton of money on cat vet bills and other miscellaneous expenses. They’re cool like that.
Yesterday afternoon T picked me up from work so that I could drop him off at a networking thing and then go do my usual post-work swim. (Usually, I walk to the pool and he picks me up from there after school.) Smokey Joe was panting a lot and acting neurotic, but I figured he’d gotten hot in the car and decided to just take the dogs home, since the weather was pretty warm still and I didn’t want to make them sit in the car for another hour. As I was driving, Smokey Joe’s panting was really excessive and I was getting more concerned. I fed him some ice cubes out of my water, but he still seemed agitated.
After we got home, the panting continued and he was just acting weird. Now it was decision time. Do we wait and see? Do we take him to the vet? Crap, our normal vet is closed – so that means the emergency vet. Crap. I decided to look up his symptoms online and see if I could get an idea of what it might be. The sudden onset of the symptoms was particularly worrisome. Not surprisingly, the internet was supremely unhelpful and gave me a range of possibilities from “He’s afraid of thunder” to “He’s having a heart attack.” There were a fair number of “dog ate something poisonous/bad” mixed in there, which seemed the most plausible explanation given the dog in question. This unfortunately meant going to the vet right away.
So, I called T to tell him that I needed to pick him up early, (I wanted him to be able to fill in the blanks of Smokey Joe’s behavior before he’d picked me up.) loaded Smokey Joe into the car and off we headed to the emergency vet. They of course had already met Smokey Joe from his “Puffy head/probably ate a bee or spider” incident. After examining him, the vet came in and said he was acting as if he were “high” and asked if he could have gotten into something. T recalled that he’d eaten “something” in the parking lot at school, which narrowed the options down to “anything college kids would drop in a parking lot.” Sigh. So, she outlined the treatment that she recommended: an overnight stay, ($) where they’d induce vomiting ($$) and fill his stomach with activated charcoal ($$$) and give him IV fluids ($$$$) and a tranquilizer so that he’d just sleep it all off. ($$$$$) $1300 later, we were on our way.
Smokey Joe is a part of the family and worth every penny, but it would be nice if he could wait to test this theory until after the boy is out of school and we have a little more in the savings account. (Okay, buddy? That’s a good boy! Now go get a job!) Meanwhile, I’ve got to overhaul the summer budget and figure out how to make up that difference. Looks like we’ll be camping at Pacific Crest this year…