You know your day has been odd when you don’t get around to brushing your hair until 2:00 o’clock in the afternoon. We got home late Wednesday night to find a note from our critter sitter saying she thought our collie Lody had diarrhea. Both dogs seemed fine and happy to see us. Yesterday Lody soiled in the kitchen, so I didn’t give her dinner. She got me up in the middle of the night, and was distressed enough that I regretfully shut her in the mudroom. She soiled in the mudroom, and I panicked when I found blood and mucous in the stool. Since this was about 5:00 am, I knew it would be a long wait before I could talk to my vet at nine. What I found in the mudroom this morning was very similar to what I found from our last collie Siobhan twenty-four hours before she died.
While I was waiting for it to be time to call my vet, my trainer called to say she felt too sick to feed the horses boarded at her place. She had been worried the night before, and I knew to expect the call. We think she has a cold, but ever since having the flu five years ago when she ended up on oxygen, she doesn’t do colds well. I told her I could go feed and then get back home for Lody to see the vet. She suggested I bring Lody, since our vet makes house calls, and my trainer’s place is closer. I hunted feverishly for a clean bra since my usual ones were in the wash, and left the house with Lody in tow within ten minutes of speaking to my trainer.
Fortunately, the horses at my trainer’s were all fine. I know the morning drill since I occasionally feed on my trainer’s day off. I called my vet at 8:30, because she sometimes answers that early. As it happened the vet was across the road from my trainer’s feeding her horses where she boards them and didn’t get my call. I finally ate breakfast. The vet called me at 9:10, and was checking out Lody by 10:15. I had calmed down by then, because Lody seemed remarkably comfortable for a dog I feared was a death’s door. She showed no obvious signs of pain or discomfort, as Siobhan had done. Lody even seemed a little smug that she had gone somewhere with me without Dudley for a change. She sniffed my trainer’s dogs, and made the acquaintance of my trainer’s new kitten. Usually I would have kept her isolated from other animals, but she had already been around my trainer’s dogs the day before.
When the vet arrived, poor Lody took one look at her, clamped her tail between her legs, and marched over to the door. However she stood quietly while the vet examined her, although she did try to slither away whenever we started talking. My vet didn’t seem too worried by what she found, and is treating her for a bacterial infection with antibiotics. Evidently, although the symptoms are dramatic, they are not necessarily life-threatening.
My trainer was feeling much better by then so she went out to clean the barn, and I went out to do what I could to help her. She insisted that cleaning the stalls was the easiest part, so while she cleaned I filled and cleaned water buckets, put in the evening hay and feed, and swept the aisle. My trainer was tired by the end of the stall cleaning, but everything was done and ready for the horses in the evening.
By then it was lunch time, so I drove to Noodles to get some lunch so my trainer wouldn’t have to worry about preparing something. We ate lunch, and I headed back home with Lody because I didn’t want Lody to get too tired. Besides, I had been in such a rush when we left I had forgotten that there were no riding clothes in the car.