Spring Wedding Moon
Over at Bergen Bark Inn in Evergreen we picked up the dogs. Gertie pulled the leash from hand she was so eager to get in the truck. Rigel bounded in. Kepler came up to me, rose up on his hind legs and greeted me with his gentle eyes.
Vega was reluctant. This didn’t surprise us. After our Latin American cruise she refused to look at us or greet us for some time. When we brought her home, she was slow getting out of the truck and only came into the house as far as the entry rug where she lay down.
I fed them, took some food over to Vega and she didn’t want it. Again, we thought she was sulking. A bit later I went back out to give her a treat. Her belly looked bigger than normal. They couldn’t have overfed that much at the Bergen Bark Inn. Could they? I felt her belly and it was distended, tight like a drumhead.
When Kate went out to check on her, she came back and said, “She’s going to need to be seen.” This is our second day back from Asia and only a half hour after we’d brought the dogs home. Kate called Sano Vet Hospital and got an appointment for after their lunch hour, which had started at 1. The appointment was at two.
April, the vet tech who was a former flight medic, called back ten minutes later and said, “Bring her in now.”
When we got to Sano, four young women dressed in blue came out, picked Vega up and swiftly carried her into the operating room. They love her after the struggle to keep her alive post amputation and spoke kindly to her. Vega weighs 100 pounds so this was not an easy task.
She had bloat. This is a canine emergency caused by a literal twist of the gut. The twisting causes blood flow to be cut off to the portions of the intestinal system below the place where the torquing occurs. The stomach and the intestines can become necrotic, their tissue can die.
Solution? Surgery. Palmini goes in, untwists the organs, then tacks the stomach to the abdominal wall so this can’t happen again. She’s resting well at Sano through the weekend, getting the sort of complex aftercare that we couldn’t provide here even with Kate’s medical skills.
Bad luck, as physicians say. Damned bad luck. But it looks like she’ll be ok.
