Happy 35th birthday to me. That's Mack sporting his super special e collar. Mack is fast approaching 8 years old and he has eluded emergecny surgery for an obstruction more times than I can recount. Seriously, he has more lives than a cat and a stomach of iron. On his worst day, he could out eat a billy goat. However, his luck finally ran out. On my 35th birthday, instead of going to see a movie with some friends, I made a run to the e vet with Mack. He just wasn't acting his usual jovial self, he seemed uncomfortable, he was shivering, but what really sealed the deal was his refusal of food. That is not the norm for my food whore.
Let me back track a bit and tell you what led to this e vet trip. 2 weeks prior, my hubby was doing laundry on his day off. He has a bad habit of sorting laundry on the bathroom floor and letting Mack free roam the house. The rule has always been Mack is to be locked up while laundry is taking place. His huge gullet can swallow anything you drop before you ever realize something was dropped. It will then reappear at 3am on the carpet, or out his backside resulting in poo patrol being more like an archaelogical dig. All sorts of things have made their way into the depths of Mack's gut- dirty baby diapers, toy rubber frogs, wooden puzzle pieces etc.. If there were an advanced degree for inducing emesis, I'd have a PhD! I came home from work and saw the laundry on the bathroom floor, the door open, and Mack out and I knew we were in trouble. It would just be a matter of time before I knew exactly how much. Later that night Mack puked up 1 lone sock and I thought we might be ok. Over the next few days he would hack now and again and I thought there might be more laundry lurking. Sure enough, 6 days later in the back yard 2 pairs of underwear and 5 socks appeared in a pile of puke. I was so freaked out but thought phew, that was the luckiest anyone on this earth could be. I was wrong. 5 days later we were at the e vet.
I won't go into my entire meltdown at the e vet but suffice to say there were lots of x rays, lots of gas dilated loops, a ginourmous bladder, a colon in the wrong place, no obvious foreign body. We watched, we waited, and I pulled the trigger knowing in my gut laundry was lurking. Mack had surgery at 3am for a lone sock lodged in his small intestine. It was not going to come out on it's own so I'm tahnkful we caught it before it did any major damage.
Since his escapade, he has been quite the naught patient. Last week I was at the vet 3 times in 4 days for a ripped open incision. We have gone through 1 set of staples and 2 sets of stitches while we wait for his incision to heal. Currently the incision is being slathered in Manuka Honey 16+ 2x a day in an effort to get it to close up. I'm also tranquilizing him in an effort to minimize any damage he could do while I am at work. Sigh. I am so ready to close this chapter.
