Bill Arnold's Daily Straydog Log

FRIDAY June 16 2006

NOON POST

Melissa reports ...

   Blue has post neuter surgery complications

     We noticed earlier in the week that Blue's scrotum seemed a bit swollen. After checking with Morton Clinic we were told Blue was a bit older than we had thought, and sometimes it takes longer for this swelling to go down in older dogs. We have watched this throughout the week, and it seemed to have gotten worse, so we called the clinic first thing this morning and made an appointment for 10:30.

     It appears Blue has some type of bacterial infection that we will treat with Cephalexin, which we had already started due to his kennel cough and his nose secreting thick mucus. We are to keep Blue on Cephalexin for another seven days and this should take care of the problem. If Blue is still looking bad in the middle of next week, we will call to talk to Dr. Morton again.

   Update on Blackie

     As of Thursday morning Blackie was still not looking very good. He had not eaten Wednesday afternoon and wouldn't eat Thursday's breakfast, so he went to the clinic be checked out at the same time we took Blue.

     Poor Blackie had to have blood drawn and after moving during the first draw and popping the needle out of his leg, the tech had to switch to the other leg which didn't cooperate too much. Finally, we had to go to the neck, and while I held our poor muzzled boy, Laura, the vet tech, held his head up and Dr. Morton shaved a bit of his neck to get the remaining needed blood out of his jugular vein. Fortunately, this last attempt was completely successful.

     Blackie also had to have a urinalysis done, and he cooperated quite well for this one. After reviewing these results along with the bloodwork, everything looked really good, especially for a dog his age. What the doctor felt happened was that Blackie was receiving too much antibiotic and cough syrup, and it made him ill because of the dosage. We were instructed to take him off all medicine for the day and see how he did throughout the afternoon. I am happy to report that Blackie ate all of his lunch, and enjoyed his afternoon park time.

     We now have the correct cough medicine dosage for a 16-pound dog, and if antibiotics are needed, we will switch him to Clavamox, which is about one quarter of the dose he was receiving from the other antibiotic.

     Everyone was quite happy to see Blackie back to his old happy self this afternoon.

   Russell is rushed to Dr. Morton's clinic

     During the early morning kennel sweep, it was reported that Russell had severe diarrhea and was not feeling well at all. I had a sample pulled to take with me so Dr. Morton's office could do a fecal check while I was there with Blue and Blackie. The fecal was negative.

     As we were finishing with Blackie, I heard the vet tech on the phone saying the fecal was clean and go ahead and head their way. When she hung up, she told me Russell had a very heavy diarrhea flow and he had collapsed so Juana was on the way with him.

     I had to take care of a couple of errands and arrived back at Dr. Morton's shortly to check in on Russell. They were running bloodwork on him, and I offered to stay at the vet's so Juana could get back to Straydog with Blue and Blackie.

     The bloodwork was really good except the one elevated number was the EOS, which indicated some type of allergic reaction. Dr. Morton explained to me that it could be a reaction to anything (something he ate--possibly a bug or something that blew into his kennel, etc.), and there was no way to know what it could be. Russell is on an antibiotic and Carafate, a pill that has to be mixed with water and given in a syringe, which will coat his stomach. Dr. Morton said to let him know tomorrow if Russell still was not feeling well but he felt that within 24 hours, he would be back to himself.

     We tried putting him in the hospital trailer to keep him out of the heat but he definitely wanted to be outside so we put him back in his kennel, figuring the stress of being in unfamiliar territory would be tougher on his system. We will call Dr. Morton's office on Friday with an update on Russy.

   Kennel construction

     Hope and Bojangles are making awesome progress with their mange and now that both have full coats of hair, they are ready to move outside. We have had to reconfigure a kennel and will be moving these two along with their cousin, Lacy, on Friday.

     We tried taking Hope and Bojangles out to see how they would get along with Shep, Beauty and Ranger on the other side of the fence line, and it seemed to go okay after initial interest from Ranger toward Bojangles. There is a huge sandy area, however, that Bojangles was having a great time digging into, which would put him in the next kennel so we have to bring in some blocks to deter any escapes and put up shade boards for sun protection on Friday in order to get these doggies outside so they can run around. These kiddos are high-energy Aussie mix puppies that are full of fun and want to get into everything. We hope to start taking them to Adoption Day very soon so they can find their forever homes.

   Three New Cases of Kennel Cough are Reported

     Penny, Scooter and Annie all started coughing today (Thursday), and they have been added to the cough syrup list starting Thursday evening.

   The new plan for cough syrup dosing is to add it to the food

     We are going to add the cough syrup to the dogs' food tonight (Thursday) to see if they will eat their dinner. We now have 25 dogs on cough syrup (one less than before as Blackie has been taken off the list temporarily), and going to each kennel to do this adds a lot of time and work to an already busy day. If this works tonight, we will start giving it to them in their morning and afternoon meals until we can get through our outbreak of kennel cough.

   As reported on our Friday morning radio report, mixing the cough syrup in with the dog food didn't work

     Juana reported on the Friday morning radio report that the dogs who are coughing knew the syrup was in their food and wouldn't eat dinner last evening, and the feeders had to hand feed the dogs to get them finally to eat. So we go back to forcing the cough syrup in them with the above pictured syringes.

Foster Mom Nancy reports via email ...

As Melissa reported in one of her entries [on the Daily Straydog Update], I picked up Rusty and Precious from Straydog a couple of weeks ago after visiting family in East Texas. They were CRAZY--jumping and nipping. We had still been working on that with visitors, but I thought they were so over that with me. They were like a couple of kids that had been at their grandma's house too long. They did redeem themselves, however, on the way home. I had taken them on short car rides, but never on a trip this long. They stayed quiet in the backseat the whole way, except occasionally Precious would stick her head between the seats to lick my ear.