Coffee for Two

So here’s what happened today.

This morning, shortly after midnight, Radley–you remember Radley–woke up and started whining to go outside. This is a little unusual for him since he typically makes it through the entire night without difficulty. Lately, though, he’s been having some trouble urinating, which we chalked up to an urinary tract infection, an ailment he’s had once before. He just completed a round of antibiotics on Friday and we’d been trying to discern, without much luck, if it had helped him or not. Our plan was to check how it went for him when we woke up for breakfast and call the veterinarian to figure out how to proceed with treatment.

Instead, we were up with him through the early morning hours and he continually struggled to try and squeeze out even a drop of urine, the pain he was feeling as his bladder filled further slowly turning into agony. At four in the morning, we drove over to the overnight emergency vet. They confirmed that there was a stone in his bladder that had moved into his urethra and was completely blocking his ability to urinate. They gave him sedation, inserted a catheter (flushing the stone back into his bladder in the process) and drained his swollen bladder. When we checked him out of there at 7:30 in the morning, they told us to take him straight to our regular vet for the next steps.

“The next steps” meant surgery. Late in the morning, he went in for surgery and they removed the stone. He came through just fine, but Radley is high-strung little dog, fully adhering to the nervous traits of his breed. While they were keeping him fully hydrated with a steady injection of fluids (understandable given the ailment that got him there), we were confident that he wasn’t got to eat. We expressed that to the vet and, in what I suspect is a highly unusual move, they asked us to come in a try to get him to eat some dinner.

Radley would do a helluva job on a hunger strike. Treats, tuna, peanut butter–he was having none of it, showing a remarkable, almost supercanine ability to spit out any items put into his mouth. He looked, as we knew he would, as if he were trying to redefine the word “miserable.” The current plan is for him to stay there until late tomorrow afternoon. We’re planning to go back in the morning to try again to coax him to eat something. Otherwise, he’ll easily go forty-eight hours between meals, which doesn’t seem like a great idea for anyone, especially a creature who only weighs eight pounds to begin with.

He’s little, but he’s resilient. We know that from all our years with him. Still, it’s tough to think of him locked away in complete sorrow all night.

(Posted simultaneously to “Jelly-Town!”)