ER Visit

If it's not one thing, it's another.

We met with Kelley the trainer again on Wednesday, and decided to slow things waaaaay down. We have new, simpler homework and are exploring medications. Meanwhile, Marlo is supposed to eat all of his food from frozen kongs, so that he's expending as much mental energy as possible throughout the day.

So we're committed to the new plan, but Thursday things changed. Marlo threw up in the hallway in the late afternoon. Dog vomit is a pretty normal occasional occurence, so we didn't worry too much about it. At 3 a.m., however, he was up and vomiting again. At lunchtime Friday, our hallway was covered with Marlo's bile and barf, and I received a panicked call at school from Mike.

I sped home to drive Marlo to the doggie emergency room, where they took some x-rays (for which our poor sep-anx dog needed sedation) and found a foreign object in his stomach. Best guess? Tennis ball, or a large piece of one.

And now we've got a frustrating choice. Either we do a quick and easy and oh, $3000 surgery to remove the object, or we keep him comfortable and pray he passes it on his own.

We opted for 24 hours of the latter. The vet gave him IV fluids, a nausea suppressant, and some pepcid to coat his tummy, and we brought him home last night.  We're now feeding him cottage cheese and white rice, and taking him out to see if he'll poo every few hours.

We're keeping a close eye on danger signs... lethargy, a return to vomiting, unwillingness to eat or drink, and lack of poop. So far he seems fine, save the pooping.

Never before have we rooted so hard for Marlo to take a crap.

We'll keep you posted...