Tidbit Thursday…just because I couldn’t think of a better title and because the post has little tidbits of this and that.

First things first, there will be no Follow-Up Friday tomorrow, instead I have a special post planned for Lost Pet Prevention month. When working on tomorrow’s post I realized I had a number of things to share about lost pets, so I will have two or three more posts about lost pets throughout the month.

Then on Saturday, I’ll have a post about something blogging related that I’m really excited to share with you.

Because there will be no follow-up tomorrow, I wanted to give a brief update about Delilah and how she’s doing.

Delilah got her first dose of antibiotics and Gabapentin around 12:30 Monday afternoon. The instructions said every 12 hours for both, but I wasn’t going to get up right after midnight to administer her second dose of antibiotics so I checked with the vet’s office and they said I could give them to her around 10:30 with a little bit of food.

The dosage for the Gaba was three every 12 hours and I really felt three were one too many for her. Then around 9:30 that night, she started going to the door every few minutes and squatting with no results. I decided to give her two Gaba’s when I gave her the antibiotic. The good thing about the Gaba was it worked almost instantaneously for her, so she was able to get a good night’s sleep.

My thought was why not reduce the Gaba from three to two, and give them to her every eight hours vs every 12? She’d still be getting the same amount in a 24-hour period, but it wouldn’t knock her out. Besides the Gaba seemed to wear off between the nine and ten hour mark, so why have her be uncomfortable for those in-between hours.

The next morning she got her ‘meatball’ with the Gaba in it around 6:30 am. My original plan was to leave the back door open for her to be able to get outside in case she had to potty, but Tuesday turned out to be super humid, so I turned on the air and took my chances. I figured she made it through the night okay, and I get out of work at 2:00 pm, so why not roll the dice? As it turned out, she did fine.

Meanwhile I’d heard from Jan K at Wag ‘N Woof pets and found out that her Sheba had pretty much the same situation the day before. Jan said, “It looks like we’ll be having similar posts tomorrow.” ‘-)

It’s always great for me to read about someone else’s experience because even though Jan and Sheba’s experience was similar, there was a slight difference because Sheba has a cancer diagnosis and I know how excruciating waiting for that vet appointment was for Jan.

I won’t lie and tell you that the minute I saw the blood in Delilah’s urine that my brain didn’t go there. Because it did. I was terrified that I’d be leaving the vet without her that day, and I can only imagine how terrified Jan felt on Sunday as well.

One of the things I learned from Jan’s post was that her vet CHECKED the urine for cancer cells and thankfully found NONE. I didn’t have a clue that the vet could check for that.

Well you know what happened next…I got right on the phone with my vet’s office and asked them if MY vet had checked for cancer cells. My vet wasn’t scheduled to come in until around 1:00 pm, but the tech took a message and said she’d get back to me. I also shared my thoughts on switching up the dosage of the Gabapentin.

When the vet’s office called back, they said they didn’t see any cancer cells in Delilah’s urine and it was okay to modify the Gabapentin dosage to two every eight hours. Which is what we’ve done and it seems to help immensely.

Delilah is on a 21-day course of antibiotics but I plan on trying to cut her Gabapentin down to one every eight hours beginning on Sunday. A week after that I hope to cut the Gaba out all together.

She is handling everything very well. I’m keeping her walks on the shorter side, partly due to the heat and humidity we’ve been having and partly because of the sedation aspect of the Gabapentin. She still stops to tinkle a lot on our walks, but both the dogs have always done that.

The key is that after Tuesday night, I haven’t seen any more blood in her urine and she seems like her old self again.

Phew, I guess that wasn’t as brief as I thought it was going to be. 😀 Thank you again to everyone who commented, texted and messaged me on Monday, this community is really the best!

Comments

comments