Death on Toast
So, last night, turned the light out a little earlier than sometimes, because I ride Connie Tuesday mornings. Darkness had slept floppy-dog-style all evening, no colicky restlessness, so I assumed he was better: better either because the homeopathic remedy I’d given him last time was working this time too, or better just because he was better, from the ‘take two aspirins and call me in the morning’ school of medicine.
Less than an hour later, urgent and pathetic howls from the hellhound crate.
And again, about an hour and a half after that.
And again, at about 6 am. At which point Chaos, who was fine all day yesterday, begins squirting, and Darkness is now squirting bright red blood–not emergency haemorrhage blood, just I’ve-had-the-squirts-for-almost-twenty-four-hours-and-my-gut-is-sore blood. Oh yes and they’ve started throwing up.
I manage to wait till 7 to call the vet. My homeopathic vet is only him, not a clinic, so I page him, and when he rings me back I say, Oh good, you are an early riser. No, I’m not, he says.
Oh.
But he suggested a couple more remedies to try, and if those didn’t work, take him–them–to the standard vet and fill them up with drugs, and we’ll worry about side- and after-effects later. When you’ve got a severe acute, the time it can take to figure out the individually correct remedy–especially with a non-speaking patient–can be seriously counterproductive.
There’s another drawback to treating bad acutes homeopathically, which is that you’re probably repeating your dose frequently: and there isn’t a lot of point in trying to go back to bed if you have to smash to powder and administer two more pills in another ten minutes. And another ten after that. And–not in all cases, but this is a fairly standard treatment plan–you give a remedy about an hour, which is to say five or six doses, to do something, or not. And what I found out is that either remedy would keep them quiet and not too unhappy so long as I was whipping it into them every ten minutes, but fifteen minutes after the last dose they were out in the courtyard, squirting again. And I am ruining the local water table with bleach as disinfectant.
Somewhere around here I ring Jenny and cancel my riding lesson.
So then I ring the standard vet clinic and ask for an appointment: two hours to wait, so, yes, I keep giving them the homeopathic remedies every ten minutes for my own sake as much as theirs–I’m so painfully overinvolved with my hellhounds that I keep having to remind myself that I’m not the one who’s ill*–and I can’t bear those miserable little faces looking at me and expecting me to fix it. I’m so sleep-deprived however that I’m setting a timer to tell me when to give them the next dose, and they’re also getting different remedies because one works better for one and a different for the other, so then I have to remember from one moment to the next, which remedy I’ve already given and to which dog . . . and then I forget to set the timer again . . . Meanwhile, I have the radio on, because I usually do have the radio on, and something terribly familiar is playing. Eventually I unstick enough of my brain to make an identification: Beethoven. One of the symphonies. But which one? Five? Six? No. Not nine. Not three. It must have been a good ten, fifteen minutes in–I was out in the garden cleaning up for a lot of it, okay?–before I finally twigged: Dvorak. New World Symphony. Told you I was tired.
. . . Hellhounds are now full of drugs and quiescent. They didn’t have lunch at all; had a little chicken and rice in a lot of stock for supper, since they won’t touch their electrolytes. They’re not dehydrated; they pass the pinch test (although they’re probably fairly tired of me nipping the backs of their necks), although they should be. I have some kaolin-based pro-biotic stuff in a huge plunger thingummy that I’m supposed to shoot down them three times a day: it’s beef flavoured . . . beef being a notorious allergen for dogs, but it’s all fake anyway I daresay, so what the heck. Sigh. This is why I like homeopathy, when you can make it work: no weird chemicals.
I, meanwhile, between worry and sleep shortage, am death on toast. You will forgive me, I hope, for signing out a little early today. And there’s such a dazzling range of things to worry about too: I have a radio by my bed, and I’ll tune it to Five Live or the World Service before I turn the light off tonight: a friend suggested I leave it on as a murmur in the background and hypnotise myself to snap awake at the first mention of ‘decisive Obama victory.’
Meanwhile, because there aren’t too many laughs tonight**, let me leave you with something Hannah just sent me:
http://www.videosdaily.net/videos.aspx/video~5738/Digital_TV_Conversion_For_Old_People/Funny_videos/
You under-30s will smile disdainfully but us over-50s laugh till our ancient ribs creak and our tiny shrivelled brains rattle around in our skulls.
* * *
* At least not yet. You never know how many bugs cross the species boundaries, and how many don’t. Not till it’s too late. And I don’t really fancy bathing in bleach. Or gargling with it.
** I was considering renaming the blog the McKinley Soap Opera, but then I thought no, wait, we’ve got the drugs and the mysterious illnesses and the mood swings and the screaming^, but you have to have constant, graphic and gratuitous sex too, right? So I guess not. Any constant, graphic and gratuitous sex around here I’m going to keep to myself.
^ And the demon-possessed computers. There must be computers in modern soap operas. Surely.
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