Tuesday, November 16, 2010

When Max Met Chocolate . . . NOT a Love Story

We’ve been on an odyssey of sorts in the Picket Fence Post household since approximately 8:30 p.m. on Friday when we returned home (after being gone for roughly an hour) to discover that our 1½ year-old Havanese/wheaten terrier Max had managed to bust into the pantry (the door had been shut) and not only ransacked it, but unwrapped and ate a 3.5 ounce disk of concentrated cooking chocolate used to make hot cocoa.

And oh, the fun we’ve had since then.

The Spouse raced Max to the animal hospital, since our vet’s office wasn’t open at that time of night. (Of course this had to happen over a weekend. Of course it did.) Long and the short of it, Max was admitted to the doggie ICU overnight, hooked up to IVs and an EKG. His heart rate was really, really high.

The entire family went to the hospital to pick him up on Saturday afternoon and he seemed chipper, or maybe he was just psyched to get out of there because when he got home, it was a different story. Slowly, over the course of Saturday night, during Sunday through Monday morning, the usually effervescent, chipper pup continued to act strangely, shying away from everyone in the family, not responding to us, declining most food and all drink. He looked like a public service advertisement for canine depression screening.

By Monday morning, Max was re-admitted for medical care, this time to our vet’s office for the day after he was diagnosed with dehydration (what’s that about leading a dog to water . . . ) and he hadn’t been able to flush any remaining chocolate from his system. When we brought him home Monday night, it was with a plastic, transparent cone about his neck and cans of special food and a special powder to soothe the irritated, inflamed, bloody spots on his skin (belly and legs) where he’d had catheters and EKG pads and had bitten them.

He’s still not acting like himself, but at least he ate his breakfast. I’m also having to carry him outside, where he will eventually do his business. But this sulky, forlorn version of Max is breaking my heart.

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