"City of Bicycles" |
E.R. 21 September 2005 The house has been turned into an emergency room today. Pepper had a difficult night. After not eating anything for the better part of a day and a half (Ashley had said not to feed him after his bout of vomiting), he vomited several times last night, the last time at 3 a.m. (guess who didn't get much sleep last night!) He was very restless sleeping in my lap. Usually he just kind of "dies," cuddles in my arm and sleeps until Sheila wakes us both up at 6 a.m. Last night, however, he couldn't seem to get comfortable. He squirmed and squirmed and would jump down and vomit and then come back up again. Finally he ended up sleeping on the new dog bed that Ashley brought us to replace the one that Jasmine tore up.
I was getting very concerned about Pepper and contacted Ashley first thing this morning. She came over with her magic box of tricks. She immediately commented on how he had lost weight, which I could see myself. She injected him with 150 cc of water and left me with instructions to see how he does in the following couple of hours and if he seemed to be OK, I could give him a little bit of rice. The water definitely perked him up and next thing I knew he was racing out into the back yard to bark at the dogs in the house behind us. Over the course of the morning, I began to definitely see an improvement in him. The old perky Pepper was back. At noon, I cooked him up some rice, but he didn't think that was all that palatable, so I tried mixing it with a bit of chicken broth, but he didn't want that either. Then I found him out in the back yard munching enthusiastically on the grass and weeds. I may have found what has been making him sick! Through all of this, I've been trying to finish a rush job for the psychiatrist, who, in his 70s, seems to be becoming more absent minded than ever. He had two rush reports, one of which had to be finished today ("I guess I should have recorded that one first," he said. No shit. By dictating it second, that means that the non-rush report has to be transcribed first before I get to the rush part of the job.) He dropped off two tapes, one was dictation from patients he saw on September 19 and the other was supposed to be the tape with the two rush reports on it.. But as it turned out, the second tape only had one chart note on it, and the rest of the tape was blank. Now he's thinking that maybe he dictated his rush reports after the chart notes, which means that in order to find the "rush" report that is due tomorrow, I have to type all the chart notes AND the second report that is due "soon," but not "immediately." AND, since I was up half the night with Pepper's vomiting, I'm fighting sleep while I do it. Ashley wonders if perhaps the stress of being at Petco on Saturday,
where he was so upset at being in a cage while I was out of the cage, might have turned
his innards inside out (this happened to another stressed dog she knew). I don't
know about Pepper, but at the moment, I'm thinking of starting to vomit myself. |
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PHOTO OF THE DAY
The Porongurup
Mountains,
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Created 8/15/05
