Trauma and Drama in Puppyland

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

Friday morning I took Brody in to the vet for his second round of puppy shots. They went OK, I guess. I saw a new vet today (there are three in the practice and this is the third one I’ve seen- she rates an “eh”) He’s healthy enough and he’s growing good. Plus he has no internal parasites. All is well. (They have a laser for his nut-ectomy surgery. The upside is no stitches. (Plus various and sundry other health benefits.) The downside is it’s an extra 50 smackers. I think it’ll be worth it, the no stitches to have chewed out. We’ll see what we see when it’s time for things to be removed.)

All was well until we got home. He wasn’t crazy about getting his shot, but when we got home, he started running around rubbing on things like he did when we first put the collar on him. It looked like he had to “go out”, so I took him out.
He didn’t have to “go out” after all. Outside I took a look at him and his eyes were really puffy. They were swelling something awful.

Great. He was having a reaction to his shots- most likely the “lepto” portion of the show. (I said something not so nice when I saw his eyes were all swelly.) Back to the vet. Pretty quickly. (I did not ram anyone off the road. No matter how stupidly (slowly) they were driving. Go me!)

One of the things I had to get taken care of before I went back to the vet was get the boys back in the car. That meant they had to find their shoes again. They were home for about 5 minutes, so who knows where their shoes got to. On their feet? It is to laugh.

Usually it takes them five or ten minutes to find their shoes and a couple more to get them on their feet. Today, with my loving direction they were shod and in the car in 2 minutes. (Army Drill Instructors would have shied away from me.)
So back to the vet with my increasingly swelling puppy.

“My dog just got his shots (they remembered- it was only 10 minutes ago) and now his eyes are swelling shut. He’s having a reaction.”

And they took him to “the back” and did vet stuff to him. They gave him a Benedryl and a shot of something else to help with the swelling. I had half of a Prednisone (it’s a steroid) (some people don’t know that) to give to him Friday night and the other half for Saturday morning.

After we got back from the vet (again) he was doing OK. The swelling went down. Not like dooooop (that’s the medical sound of swelling going away- like on cartoons) and the swelling was gone, but little Brody-dog was way better than he was. (His eyes and his lips swelled up a lot.) He was beat though. He slept pretty much all day Friday since we got back from the vet the second time. Except when he got up to pee. Or didn’t get up, depending. (We changed out the bedding in his crate about four thousand times Friday.)

But Saturday afternoon, he was back to normal. As normal as he gets anyway. By Sunday he was 100%.

Since that wasn’t quite fun enough, today I’m watching the neighbor kids. There are three of them. One’s a girl and one’s still in diapers. On top of my two darling progeny. Four boy kids, one girl kid, (Soupo is the oldest of all the kids) three dogs and a cat- all mine for the day!
Pray for me.
-Rue.

2

Rue DeDay is Daddy Daycare. There’s something downright frightening about this prospect, yet it’s certainly not without huge comic potential.

3

Poor Brody! I’m glad he’s ok. Give him extra ear skritches from his Unca swampy, ok Rue?

If it’s a nice day (meaning if there are no kinda bad things like lightnig strikes or tornadoes) I say keep the humanlets outside. Even if it’s raining. Just give em a bar of soap. The other parents will appreciate the extra cleanliness. Really. Trust me. Why is it you have suddenly become the neighborhood nanny btw?

There was a ton o’ rain this weekend. I stopped measuring in inches late Saturday afternoon. It got to be more like feet and yards then. Yesterday was real fun. I kept goin’ outside and letting water out of the pool. Yet again I appreciate having a privacy fence around my backyard. See, what I did (over and over and over and over) was go out on my back porch, take off the shorts and tshirt I was wearing, change into a bathing suit and go out in the rain to let water out of the pool. “Silly swampy,” you say, “why didn’t you just take an umbrella?” “Well,” I reply, “With 20-25 mile an hour winds with gusts up to 35 mph, an umbrella does not do a heck of a lot of good.” So, my way was better. Then, I’d go back to my back porch, take off my bathing suit, dry myself off (I thought to have a big beach towel out there for just that purpose. Plan ahead. That’s my motto.), put my shorts and tshirt back on and go back inside. ACBG was working all day yesterday so he missed the show but enjoyed the blow by blow recap when I talked to him last night. This was an ick weekend. Not only because of the rain but because he worked all weekend, so we didn’t see each other except a little while Friday night. The upside is my house is clean cause I cleaned it up Saturday.

Oh and we have flood and tornado watches today. WOOHOO!

4

Careful . . . he may remember this and fixate on the vet’s office being a horrible place.

When I took Bean in for her puppy shots, she had a bad reaction to one of them. She screamed like she’d been set on fire. The vet placidly said, “Sometimes that one stings a bit.” She was acting like he’d injected her with acid!

She’s nine years old now, and is still terrified of going to the vet. She trembles like a leaf in the breeze as soon as the vet-office-smell hits her nose.

My suggestion is that you take Brody back there often, just to be weighed. Take lots of treats. Play with him in the waiting room. Have the nurses give him treats, and, if they have time, examine his ears, play with his feet, and then cuddle him. Try to make the vet’s office FUN, or you’ll have a terrified dog for the rest of your life.

5

I had the same thing happen with #2 dog, Jade. Seeing a dog with a head swollen up like a pink tennis ball is not a pretty sight. She doesn’t get Lepto anymore and I space out her other shots a couple weeks apart. You might want to consider this for Brody. Also, after a couple of years you can ask the vets office to do titres on the different vaccines to see if he really needs them at all. The sleepiness was probably from the Benadryl and the wee wee from the Pred. It does that.

We barely knew that old Dennis was around in our neck of the woods. Not much wind and not much rain. Course there’s yet ANOTHER tropical depression forming out there that will take…oh, about a week to get here. Great. Next week is beach vacation week. :frowning:

And just to make things interesting my car decided to do something wonky on Saturday. It was raining so I had the wipers on along with the AC and my tape player. All of a sudden there was a “ding” and all the displays went all blinkery. Mr. McD took the car to the dealership and they did diagnostics and drove it around but couldn’t get it to do it again. It was okay this morning when I drove to work but I don’t like it when all the displays go all blinkery! GARDEN TRAVELER, wasn’t it you who had the weird thing happen with your car when it rained? And what was that so I can tell them to check it on my car?

swampy “blow by blow” description. <snerk> :wink:

Tupug

6

AWWWWW poor puppy.

Obviously, since his existence is so tenuous, we need

PUPPY PICTURES

not like you have your hands full today…

7

Electrical gremlins in a car - the funnest problem you can have. Good luck with that one, Tuppy.

Good Monday, y’all. Hope everyone is doing okay after the storm this weekend.

I was checking my MySpace spage, and in the new members area, I saw one for Britney Spears. I guess it had to happen sometime. I saw Alexis Bledel on it a few weeks ago.

8

I’m finally back to work today! First time this month. And of course there’s a pile of stuff waiting for me. Woo.

While I was out last week, officially now the Week from Hell, my home computer died and I burned my little toe badly enough that it blistered. How did I burn my toe you ask? Well, here’s a fun story. I was making bread (which fortunately did turn out well despite the toe burning), but it rose a bit high so I needed to take the rack out of the oven. I set it on the floor, leaning up against the refrigerator. Then - just moments after taking it out of the oven and placing it there (you’d think I would still remember that it was there) - I leaned over to get something and caught the hot rack between my little toe and the next toe, making it difficult to get my poor burning toe away from the uber-hotness. ::sigh::

No puppy stories from me, but the little terror kitten that I’ve been kitty-sitting for the last two weeks went home yesterday. I picked her momma up at the airport and took the two of them home. My cats are very glad to have the apartment back to its normal quiet state. They can walk around without being pounced on all the time now. Little do they know though that Little Terror is probably coming back in September for two months! ::evil laugh::

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taxi there’s an object lesson and a moral in your post somewhere, but dang if I can’t find it. Something about bread rising too high and toes on hot racks. Maybe another MMPer can figure it out.

Puggy I was hoping somebody would <snerk>. :smiley:

10

Ewan McGregor is my friend. I don’t care if it’s really him. :slight_smile:

This weekend I had the dubious honor of being part of the grownups at a backyard barbecue. One of my friends’ parents went away for the weekend, and he and his college-age sister had a kegger/pool party to celebrate. Naturally, all the guests divided themselves by age, and I was actually shocked to realize that I wasn’t part of the young, fun group.

On the other hand, I think our group was probably more fun. We got to make up cute nicknames for the kids whose names we weren’t going to bother to learn. (One kind had a blue polo shirt and was henceforth known as “Best Buy,” there was another who became “No Eyebrows”, and “Guido Lifeguard” was cute, but looked awfully dumb.) We totally outdrank the college kids, and they even declined a game of Flip-Cup to determine who was cooler overall.

And then I went into the hot tub in my underwear, because I couldn’t be bothered to walk all the way up to the house for my bathing suit. And people think anybody this close to 30 doesn’t know how to have a good time.

Oh, and then I went home and threw up a lot. sigh

11

Many dogs do react to the lepto but some also react to the preservatives in the vaccines. Some vets got away from vaccinating for lepto but then lepto starting making a comeback. Since Leptospirosis can be zoonotic it’s just a good idea to at least give the vaccine a try, just watch for signs of reactions and schedule your vet appointments at a time when you can watch the dog and take the dog back if it has a reaction.
I have had headaches for two days thanks to Dennis and his stoopid hurricane barometric pressure foo. Hurricanes with the same names as my brothers have to be bad news.

12

It poured Friday, but this weekend was gorgeous, so I turned off the air and opened up the house. But then it was so hot last night I had a hard time sleeping which never happens to me; I’m famous for being able to sleep anytime, anywhere and deeply enough it’s hard to wake me up. So I am really dragging this morning, although I’ve had plenty of caffiene.

FWIW, I don’t like the Dunkin’ Donuts Coconut Iced Coffee. Bleah. And I should have had them add a shot of espresso.

Glad to hear Brody is doing better, poor baby. You know it’s bad when a terrier is lethargic.

13

Ohhh, no no no. Coconut iced coffee is one of the worst ideas I’ve ever seen. Go for the caramel, next time.

14

This just in from the Piggly Wiggly:

A man walked into the store with his zipper down. A lady cashier walked up to him and said, “Your barracks door is open.” Not a phrase that men normally use, he went on his way looking a bit puzzled. When he was about done shopping, a man came up and said, “Your fly is open.” He zipped up and finished his shopping.

At the checkout, he intentionally got in the line where the lady was that told him about his “barracks door.” He was planning to have a little fun with her so when he reached the counter he said, “When you saw my barracks door open, did you see a soldier standing in there at attention?” The lady (naturally smarter than the man) thought for a moment and said, "No, no I didn’t. All I saw was a disabled veteran sitting on a couple of old duffel bags.!!!

Where are you gt? I gots an appointment at the dealership tomorra mawnin’ and I wants them fellas to check that there “doobiater thangamabob.”

15

If that’s true, I need someone to figure it out before I go burning any more toes! :eek:

16

You burning your dogs?
For the humor impaired, ‘dogs’ is a slang expression for feet…

17

When cook bread, bring shoes.

18

There’s not enough <snerk>s in the world to cover this statement by Swampy.

19

Dear Brody,

In a couple of weeks Mr. Rue is going to take you back to see your vet, Dr. Moldfinger. Dr. Moldfinger is going to stretch you out on a cold, steel slab and point a large, throbbing laser at your testy culls. Your testy culls, were they to have the ability to speak, most certainly would yelp out “Dr. Moldfinger, do you want us to talk?”, at which Dr. Moldfinger would callously reply "No, little nutsac, I want you to die! (replete with horrific laughter)

Now Brody, listen to me and listen to me carefully… when they put you on that slab, son, start yelping out “Grandslam! Grandslam! Grandslam!” for all you’re worth. Okay? Shall we say your word is your bond? It’s the least I can do for you and your little friends.

Your Buddy,

lieu

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Rue: Being A Child in the donkeyhouse, I am usually not required to accompany our dogs (or cats) to the vet. Therefore, I have nooooo clue what you’re talking about with the shots and swelling and things. But I feel your pain nonetheless.

swampy: I’m completely confused by why you have to put a bathing suit on if you have a privacy fence. It seems like it’d be infinitely easier just to go run at the pool naked. :confused:

Draelin: What is Flip-Cup?

And also, to everyone, before I posted this, the old MMP was above the new one. :dubious: Not saying that it’s a bad thing, necessarily, but we’ve got to schedule the old one to die off by Thursday at the latest.