four days overdue, juno and rat poison Sunday, February 3, 2008

Here's a quick update from the Blackney household.  Meg is now four days overdue... it seems that no one told Memphis he was supposed to have a January 30 birthday.  Yesterday I finally got the old kitchen counter out of our front yard by using a chainsaw (it was fun.)  After dumping the remnants in the dumpster at habit, Meg and I went to eat at Whole Foods and then went to see JUNO (really good movie).  Meg was having contractions through the entire movie... pretty exciting.  After the movie we got in our cars to head home and start monitoring LABOR!!! Finally!

But wait just a second... We open the door and let the dogs out to do their business and I see that one of the rat poison boxes (supposedly INDESTRUCTIBLE) was in shreds on the love seat in our sitting room.  (side note:  Meg saw a rat in our house about 3 weeks ago so we invited our PET  FRIENDLY pest control agents out to take care of the problem.)  Needless to say this put a halt to the contractions (thank God!) and we immediately induce vomiting with both Sal and Charlie (not very fun!)  After doing this we took the dogs to the after hours emergency vet where both Charlie was given medicine to make him throw up... which he did (half of the block of rat poison came up with his dinner.)  

While all of this is going on, we are waiting to find out which of the two kinds of rat poison it was.  1 kind is basically an anticoagulant - this is the "good" kind... it's a blood thinner and can be treated with vitamin K injections and doses.  The second kind is bad.  It attacks the rat's brain (dog's brains too) and can be lethal.  As fate would have it the kind of poison our PET FRIENDLY pest control agent used was the second kind.

We've spent the last 24 hours aggressively treating Charlie and the vet feels like he is going to be okay and we are thinking he will be too.  Only one more charcoal treatment to go for him and then he can get back to be being a healthy dog.

Are we really ready to be responsible parents?  I still think we are, but I won't lie I'm not looking forward to the first EMERGENCY we have with little Memphis.