Dog+Advil=Bad

A little background before I tell today’s tale:

I get really bad cramps at that time of the month. I have since I first started. I have also always kept an Advil tablet or two next to my bed since I realized that when I wake up at three in the morning it is easier just to roll over, pop the pill and get back to sleep. If I have to get up and get them from the bottle in the cupboard I am less likely to take one when the cramps start. That leads the the cramps getting so bad that I end up hoarking into the toilet for the rest of the day from the pain.

Having told you that…

This morning at five of eight I was checking my email as I tend to do right before leaving for work. I was just about to scoot into the bathroom to brush my hair when I heard crunch crunch.I whipped around and saw Pappy on the bed by my nightstand swallowing something. I did a quick search of my memory banks and thought  there had been a leftover advil tablet on the stand from my last period. I got up and inspected the nightstand…no tablet. It also looked like he had pushed around the towel that I keep on the stand protect the wood.

Now, Rob has a tendency to eat in bed and leave a few crumbs behind so it could have been a cocoa crispy for all I know. However, after a quick search on the Internet for the toxicity of ibuprofen in dogs Rob declared: “We have to get him to the vet!”

Given our dogs penchant for eating anything and everything, I have been known to google certain foods and toxicity in dogs before. There was an incident in Hollywood with some chocolate chip cookies recently and I remembered the websites usually give a ratio between the weight of the dog and how much they can ingest before it is toxic to them. The website that Rob found just said it was bad news all around and had to be dealt with within a half an hour to prevent any long lasting side effects including death.

We rushed down to the vets office(which is thankfully only a mile away…gotta love small towns!) and they immediately took him in the back to induce vomiting. I ran back home because we had forgotten to bring in an example of the pill and by the time I got back they had examined the vomit and said they didn’t find any evidence of a pill. But when I showed the vet tech the pill shape and color he took it and said he would go look again. I’m not sure if he was being extra thorough or it didn’t look like what he thought he should be looking for.

Rob and I sat in the waiting room holding hands. Rob cracking jokes to keep me from having a meltdown. The last time we were in that office together was when we made the hardest decision of our collective lives in choosing to do the humane thing and put Romie to sleep.

Finally the vet came out and she told us that Pappy had thrown up three times and the last time was just mucus so she knew he was completely cleaned out. She said in a few minutes they were going to give him some sort of charcoal treatment that would prevent any remaining chemicals in his system from absorbing or something like that. She said that they didn’t find a pill but if it had been bitten(crunch crunch) that it would have lost it’s shape of course and since it was the same color as the dog food that had come up it would be kind of hard to tell. She said that things looked very positive and that we should come back in an hour.

We got back home and Rob hugged me while I finally had a mini meltdown and then he headed to work. I sat around and waited…finishing a book that I was almost done anyway and then went back to get Pappy.

They said that he would be fine but to just watch him over the next two days since things like kidney problems took a couple of days to show up. Just to monitor his eating and watch for a couple of different signs.

We are home safe now and I am choosing to stay home with him today. Partly to watch over him and partly because of the horrible guilt I feel, having caused him such hardship today. What a horrible mother I am!

Lesson learned? Oh yes. No more shortcuts leaving medicine out for him to munch on.

Poor guy. I think I’m going to go curl up with him right now!