What I didn't tell you is that she had been really picky about what she ate while she was in the cone. She refused to eat her dry kibble, even if I hand fed her one piece at a time. So I had been mixing treats into her dry food in an attempt to get her to eat it. We occasionally give her a chicken hot dog as a treat, mostly to hide pills in, but once in a while I use tiny bits mixed with her food to get her to eat her kibble. Normally she's fine with it.
This time, not so much. That night she was really uncomfortable, constantly moving around (translation, I slept fitfully myself, awake every time she shifted). At 3 am she sat upright and started panting, so I sat up too and tried to soother her. That's when she barfed in my lap, on the bed, on the floor, in the cone ... everywhere. It was fouls smelling, acrid stuff, and it took everything I had not to throw up too. But Luna needed me, so I held it together, comforted her, cleaned up her cone, and gave her water to rinse her mouth out. Then I set to putting everything in the wash, including my comforter. Luna was exhausted, and she slept the next 4 hours fairly peacefully. I can't say the same - I spent the rest of the night watching Luna sleep, petting her sides, trying to ease her quick, shallow breaths.
At 7 am, it was time to get up. We have a home care worker that comes at 7:30 to help dad shower and dress (more on that during a future post), so it's important for me to get Luna out to go pee and back locked up in a room before the PSW gets to the house. On her best days Luna is anxious and reactive with strangers, and on her worst days her guttural growling and snarling makes it sound like she'd happily eat you if that pesky door wasn't in the way. But that morning, after she came in from outside, she ran directly up to my mother's room and wouldn't come off the bed. She looked up at me with mournful eyes, begging to be left there. I was stupid. I caved, even though it occurred to me that cleaning up barf in my mother's carpeted room would be difficult. I checked Luna over - no shallow breaths, no open panting mouth - she looked okay. I decided to risk it.
I absolutely SHOULD NOT HAVE. 45 minutes later, after the PSW left, I went to see how Luna was doing. That same acrid smell hit me as I opened the door. I found Luna cowering on one corner of the bed, trying to make herself as small as possible. On the other corner of the bed was a huge pile of vomit, as well as another, even bigger one, on the carpeted floor.
It took two hours to clean everything properly. I had to do a careful, three stage rug cleaning, and wash all the bedding, including the mattress cover, which did its job that day in a big way.
I had already been booked in with the vet to recheck Luna's biopsy site, so I laid down some towels in the back of the car and hoped she would make it to the vet without barfing. Once there, the vet pronounced her eye to be 75% healed, so I'd continue another week with the cone and eye drops, and then do a final check in with him before removing the cone. I asked about an anti-nausea shot to help with the vomiting, which he thought was a good idea. Another $150 and we were on our way home, with Luna looking much better.
Since she still wouldn't eat her kibble with the Cone of Shame on, I had been mixing it up with wet food until I finally hit on one she loved - 95% duck. Imagine my surprise then, when two days after clearing the barfing, she had explosive diarrhea all over my bedroom. It was disgusting, and it continued for three days before I took her to the vet. He gave her meds to combat the diarrhea and reminded me that it could be a flare up of pancreatitis. She's prone to pancreatitis attacks because of her rough upbringing (more on that later; I promise I'll do an origin story on Luna very soon!), and I had been so careful for the last three years that I had almost forgotten I needed to be careful with feeding her too much fat. It turned out the diarrhea was all my fault, because 95% pure duck for every meal has a shocking amount of fat in it. I switched food to the vet prescribed gastro until the cone came off four days later.
She was so happy to have it off, and frankly so was I. Having to monitor her water intake so carefully since she couldn't drink with the cone on her own was more stressful than I would have liked, and having the vomit and diarrhea on top of that was pretty terrible for all of us involved.
She still has two tiny stitches in her lower eyelid, but other than that, she's fine! Well, I still have to worry about controlling the allergy that started this whole slide into insanity, but for now, the current regimen of pills and eye drops seem to be working well enough.
With the generosity of you folks, I've raised the $1100 I needed to cover the biopsy for Luna. The related vet bills, including pre-surgery blood-work, and post surgery check ups, meds, and eye stains, cost another $1000, but I think I can absorb that into my monthly budget over the next ffour months. I'll sell some hairsticks to cover some of it as well. But I really wanted to offer my sincere thanks for you guys helping me cover the $1100 for the biopsy. :) I'll be taking my fundraising pin up girl set down off etsy this weekend.
In the meantime, the printer I use to print on Tomoe River has been broken for a week. I've had to source a second printer, which wasn't easy, and it broke today as well. I'm feeding each sheet in one at a time, so I've got about an 80% success rate of printing the sheet properly, but it's made getting orders together 1000x slower than normal. My apologies to the people who are still waiting (three people whose orders were supposed to go out yesterday). I've got another repair guy coming Tuesday morning to hopefully, finally, get things fixed. Until then, I'm holding off on picking the raffle winner for March, since I can't print anything anyway. Check back Tuesday for the raffle winner announcement.
Lastly, I finished two more new sets - magical watercolour ink & pens. :)
Magic Beyond Words
Thanks again, everyone! Have a great weekend.
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