hot to trot

I woke up this morning and Lucky had pulled out the cotton and gauze around her pins. I thought this might be bad and called the vet. While waiting for the vet to call me back she started making a funny sound. She sounded like a pig grunting and like she was trying to clear her throat. I didn't think anything of it because she would quit as soon as she was no longer excited. By the time we went to the vet she was doing it almost constantly so the vet took her temperature and it was 104.5 degrees! (a dog's normal body temp is more like 101 degrees) The crazy thing is that it wasn't a really hot day or anything!

The vet put alcohol on her pads but that wasn't cooling her down, her temperature was actually going up, so they had to give her an IV. The vet said her temperature peaked at 106 degrees. I got to go back and see her on the table with the IV and I felt so bad! I had no idea, like I said it wasn't even that hot out. Now the poor pup has a shaved back leg from the surgery, a shaved stripe down her back where they started to shave for the surgery but changed their minds and a shaved fore-paw where the IV was. M. said she looked like a punk dog. he he he.

The vet wanted to keep her over night to be sure she was ok. She explained that because Lucky is overweight (she weighs 88 pounds and should weigh 60-ish, we'll work on that as soon as her leg is healed) It is already hard for her body to properly cool off. I learned that the most productive way dogs can cool down is by panting, pulling in cool air cools the body, but because she's fat her body needs a lot of cool air to stay cool. So when she couldn't get enough cold air she started to panic and her throat went into spasms, like a kid with asthma, which scared her even more and her body temperature rose as her stress level did. I also learned that at 107 degrees the cells start to die and emit toxic compounds into the body. Yikes! It makes living in the hot and humid Midwest seem stupid.

In the end we went to the vet to check her bandage (which was perfectly fine) and she had an IV with 2 bags of fluid, medicine to keep her kidneys from shutting down, a tranquilizer, antibiotics, and a night in the hospital. I have broke the $1,000 mark. Now she gets to sleep directly in front of a fan, the fan that was in our bedroom...