Adventures in Dogland

I had a very good entry yesterday ( and since I wrote it on my damnable phone, it disappeared into the ether). I wrote out the whole travale of Rockets injury and my  super quick education in doggy first aid and why exactly a trip to the vet is so expensive - Answer, a dogcentric bandage will run you $5! for a bandage, before the vets mark up! If you buy something specifically engineered for the pet market, its going to be expensive because dogs and cats lick everything and everything that touches them has to be lickable and suitable for healing tissue damage and stick or not stick to fur. You can't really use a people bandage on a dog because of the fur issue and fur is a major issue in doggy first aid. There is also the compliance issue and dogs are non-compliant in a big way.

There is "non-compliant" and there is Rocket. There was a bandage on Rocket, it was a very nice vet applied bandage and it was so nice that lasted over night - which is almost a milenium in dog bandage time. I was also Eyes On the dog for the first 24 hours - nice work if you can get it , but time moves on and I had to leave him to his own devices. I did tell him to leave it alone and I would give him a cookie when I came home! Whee!

He tore it off  immediately and spent the day licking, biting and generally making the wound worse. The next day I took him back to daycare so they could take over the Eyes On role and while he was there, the daycare guy found blood in his stool! and made another call to the vet, and so I made another trip to the pharmacy and he's on more antibiotics, he's like a holstein now! and so now I had to worry about him bleeding from both ends - front foot and well, the other end.

And so he decided that too much attention was being paid to his ends. he decided that he didn't have to go to the bathroom anymore and would just be bleeding from the front end for a bit thankyouverymuch. For three days. I should add that I was feeding him less because of the whole blood-in-the-stool issue and for at least a couple of days, I was a little late in feeding him anything at all so his schedule was a little bit off and of course, two rounds of antibiotics, so maybe it wasn't entirely his fault he just stopped for a few days. He finally became unstopped and stopped bleeding, at least from that end.  We both feel better. At least about that end.

I decided that he wasn't going to leave  his other end alone, so I pulled out his  very humane blow up E-Collar. Its very nice and if he had messed up a back foot, it would have worked out, I think. However, he messed up a front foot and the blow up collar doesn't work for injuries on the front of the dog. I think they should have mentioned that somewhere "Only good for injuries occurring on the back end of the dog, not for use on injuries occurring on the front end of the dog"  It turns out the humane collar is so humane, like many humanitarian gestures, it hardly effective at all and may do more harm that good. It mostly makes you feel better about your dogs injury, it does not aid in the healing of the injury.

So after going through multiple bandages and watching the wound, if anything, get bigger, I pulled out a vintage E-Collar from a dark corner of a dark closet. It was my late nephdog Gootches and most likely was also used by Daisy at some point along the way, probably at many points along the way. So its venerable and has some family history to it - its a family heirloom!

Its awful and the dog hates it and its kind of bent up and makes me feel bad but it absolutely prevents him from destroying the bandage and messing with the wound. If I hadn't been such a pansy at the beginning, the wound would be almost healed up and done by now and he would be out of the E-collar and back to his happy self.

And someday, I will pass it on to my niece or nephews dogs...

I just looked at the date and January 5, is the anniversary of Texs' death. Sigh.