Long Weekend!

This was definitely a long weekend! We stayed at the den for days on end.
Now, I realize that as dogs our concept of time is not the same as it is for people. For dogs everything seems to take a long time; like when mother makes breakfast or dinner, it seems like it takes forever! I sit pretty, do my best dancing and gently tap her leg over and over in the hopes that she will hurry up with the food before I completely pass out from the hunger! And when mother leaves the den without us, Bea and I have to sit in our snuggle cave until she comes home, it seems like she's gone forever! Bea and I have a dance that we do to welcome her back home. Mother always appreciates the dancing and gives us all back scratches.
Anyway, I think this weekend was a particularly long one. This was due to the fact that we had a visitor at the den. I don't know much about her because mother and father kept the little one all to herself in the raining room.
Mother saw the little dachshund puppy, named Lacey, at the clinic last week and Lacey was sick, sick, sick. I didn't need mother to tell me that. The puppy was slow, and cold and her eyes seems to sink back in her head. The rumble sounds from her belly could be heard from the back of the clinic. She had long strings of cold drool hanging out of her mouth and she smelled of red syrup and liquid nuggets. Last week, there was a stiff, hard lizard that slept in the same spot upside down on our patio, and this Lacey puppy was starting to smell like that. Bea told me to roll on the lizard and that way we would never smell like that ourselves. Mother always yelled at me when we tried to do it though.
So Lacey stayed at the clinic the first day, but she had to be in the special room because mother said she had the Parvo. But despite the Parvo, when it came time to come back to the den, she brought the puppy with her! She didn't even ask me and Bea if it was ok. After all, it is our den too. But knowing mother even if we'd said no, she probably would have done it anyway.
The puppy stayed in our raining room all weekend. They took up all the rugs and made the whole place smell like soap. Mother and father would go in every few hours to change the papers, make sure that the water bag was still running in to Lacey's leg and give her pinch after pinch. Little Lacey was one tough cookie though because she never cried. Maybe it was because the pinches all went in to the same spot on her leg – where the bandages and tubes were attached. By the last day, it seemed like all of mother's work started to pay off. Little Lacey stopped gagging up the white foam and started wagging her little tail. I could hear her belly less and less and her heartbeat more and more. Pretty soon, mother was breaking out the food in the can – the stuff Bea and I never even get to have – and the puppy couldn't seem to get enough. After all that, you would think that Lacey would have been thankful, but yipe, yipe, yipe is all she would do.
So it was one long weekend for more reasons than one, and I'm happy that Lacey got over her Parvo, but I'm really glad to have her out of my den!

It's not as easy as it looks

This blog is the first sad story I've had to tell. You see, despite my happy-go-lucky life here at the veterinary clinic with my mom and dad, not everything that happens here is fun. Today was a perfect example of one of those days.
The morning started out as any other with dog and cat visits; lots of wagging tails and barking banter. Thankfully, we had completed our lunch trot around the building, making sure all the the right spots were appropriately scented, when the sick cat came in.
I know it was sick because he wasn't moving, or breathing, like any cat I had ever seen before. Instead of a normal cat voice, he had a low gurgle that seemed to bubble as he breathed. My mother and her team quickly surrounded him and soon, out came all the tubes and wires. The look on my mother's face was enough to tell me everything I needed to know. She was worried. What exactly what she was worried about I wasn't sure, but it's not often that I see her worried, so I knew it wasn't good.
Once all the machines were set up, the cats' breathing seemed to calm down, but then so did all the other parts of him. With each breath he seemed to be saying, "Rest, just rest". I don't think mother speaks cat any better than me because she did everything but rest. She kept looking first at the sick cat, then at some books, then at the machines and then back to the cat. Soon another cat arrived and red syrup was being taken out of one and then given to the other.
"Rest, just rest... just rest" was all that cat would say with each labored breath. Before long, that's just what he did. I heard his heart stop before mother did, and still the worried expression never left her face. I thought that she would have been happy that the cat got what he wanted. As she talked into the black button machine on the wall, I could see her sharing the story all over again.
It's weird that the cat was the sick one, but everyone else seemed to be feeling the pain.
That night at home the water came from mother's eyes, and I did my job and cleaned her face and let her hug me. Although I wish I could have done more to help her today, I know that my very presence that night was enough. After all, this is me we're talking about.