Clyde

I will put a warning here.. If you are not a dog (or animal) person, you will probably think we have lost our minds after reading this post.

My family has always had dogs and I can't even begin to imagine the amount of money we have spent on the animals throughout the years.  When they are sick or hurt, you know there is no way you can't help them, so the money just has to be spent. Luckily Lance is also a dog person, so I got to "adopt" 2 doggies when I moved to NC  2 1/2 years ago. Both are beagles mixed, Clyde is 15, and Bonnie is 13.  I like to call Clyde my little old man.  He is so pitiful and sweet, even when he drives me insane.  Bonnie, on the other hand, still is insane and acts like a puppy.. and she's a mean little thing!

Last week was an interesting week for Mr. Clyde.  On Monday Lance and I took the day off to run some errands, one being taking Clyde for his yearly check up.  We never took our dogs to the vet growing up unless they were sick, so this whole yearly exam is new to me.  Especially when I learned his "senior wellness checkup" costed us $525.00 for the day. Yikes.  So we leave Clyde there for the day and go about our errands.  Around 3:30 the vet calls stating everything looks great except for one little thing... in his routine x-rays they noticed a PENNY was in his stomach.  Now, this might seem weird to some people but with these dogs.. they eat EVERYTHING.  It's absurd.  We didn't think much of it, thinking it would pass, until she went on to explain the problem with pennies is they can get stuck in the stomach and cause lots of issues. Pennies made before 1982 are solid copper, so they only irritate the stomach, but pennies made after 1982 are zinc, coated in copper.  The zinc is very toxic and once it gets in their blood, it's bad.  So now we were on a mission to get that penny out.  Obviously the first action is to check his bathroom every day and see if it comes out. That was a job for Lance! Well of course by Friday there was no penny and this was our cutoff she wanted to recheck him.  Friday morning Lance drops him back off at the vet on the way to work and upon more x-rays, that dang penny was still in the same spot.  The vet then called to let me know and suggested giving him some ointment in his eye (crazy!) that makes him violently puke.  I knew it had to be done, but this made me so sad to think about.  She reassured me as soon as he was done puking, they give him an injection of something to make the nausea go away and him feel better.  Well, 45 minutes later I get a call.. Clyde threw up every last thing in his stomach BUT THE PENNY.  At this point the vet is very concerned and suggest we have either surgery (not recommended because of how invasive it is) or a scope put down his throat to dig it out.  Here's the catch.. the scope procedure is between $1,000-$1,500 and if it doesn't work, they take him into surgery immediately and end up doing that, plus adding on double the cost.  This is not something you want to deal with at work. I was back and forth on the phone all morning between Lance and the vet.  We finally decided to go with the scope in the end because she said the specialist doing the procedure was very confident she could get it, and he would only be under for around 30 minutes with no recovery time really.

Around 1:00pm I leave work early, drive across town to get Clyde (pay $300 for the checkup visit, uh), drive him another 30 minutes to a specialist, pay another fortune, and leave our poor pitiful dog for surgery.  I got home around 4:30pm and was beyond stressed from the whole day/week. Thank goodness about 15 minutes after I got home they call to inform me the penny came right out, and he only had mild irritation in his stomach since it was a 1979 copper penny.  He has to take antacids for a week, and then will be good as new.  We went to get him at 8:00pm that night once he was out of post-op, and all was well in the Rowland house.  All and all we spent around $1,800.00 last week on Clyde, but we have our crazy old man back, so it was definitely worth it.  I don't think he got the memo about Tilly coming soon and her being pretty expensive! haha

The famous penny

After his first vet visit

Just being pitiful

RIP - my sweet Molly who went to doggie Heaven the end of January.