A Rough Night...

...and a rough morning. Abby kept us up all night last night asking to go out and fussing and generally being uncomfortable. She would go outside about every hour to pee and have diarrhea (though not too bad, just really soft). This was torture for all of us. No sleep was had and much worrying was done. I took her temperature at about 2am or so and it was 102.1 - okay. Then at about 5:30am it was 103.1 - a bit high. Then at 7:15am it was 103.6. I had spoken with the Referral Center at 5:30am for advice and they said that they should have her blood results from yesterday, in this morning, so that might provide some insight.

I decided to wait until after the emergency hours to bring her in, so she and I went for a ride at about 8am. We arrived and waited a while, but they were great about getting us in. Abby was shaking, very quiet, and looked really uncomfortable, but otherwise okay (greeting people, wanted to greet dogs, etc.) She was a very much subdued version of her usual self. After talking with the doctor, we decided to do a couple of X-rays to make sure that there wasn't something in there that shouldn't be (for example, about 4 days ago, someone in the house chewed up a plastic fork used to distribute wet pet food). We also decided to do a urinalysis, mainly on my request because she had a nasty resistant UTI last year and she had been peeing and drinking a bit more.

So the X-rays showed nothing unusual and we don't have the urinalysis results back yet. Dr. Boria said that he was not too concerned (in stark contrast to me). It seemed that might be a good sign, since he does this a lot and I do not. When she was "in the back" of the hospital in a cage, I could hear her barking which I took as a good sign - "Don't leave me here! Don't leave me here!!" When they brought her out they said that she had also been jumping around and didn't look like anything was wrong. Soooo....we left with a prescription for Flagyl (metronidazole) which is an antibiotic that should also help relieve her diarrhea. When I got home I put a fleece shirt on her since the doctor had said that she might be shaking because she was cold (chills from the fever in the extremely air conditioned hospital). Since I did that, she hasn't been shaking, or at least it's so dramatically reduced as to not be readily noticeable.

Fast forward a few hours, her temp was still reading 103.6 - good that it had not increased, but she doesn't want to have anything to do with food. That means shoving lots of pills down her throat and she's quite clever about hiding them from you and then depositing them on the floor later. A lot of pills means - 3 K9 Immunity capsules, 1 cephalexin capsule, 1 fish oil capsule, 1 Tranfer Factor tablet, 1 metronidazole tablet, and then a partridge in a pear tree. Poor girl...

Thankfully, she is now sleeping comfortably on the floor in front of the window seat and has been sleeping (with a couple of moves, but no fussing) for about an hour or two, I think. Dr. Boria did not seem to think that this was related to the chemo or to the antibiotic, but to something she may have (shouldn't have) eaten. The good news is that her blood work from yesterday came back entirely normal with regular white blood cell counts. Definitely good news.