Gracie's Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day

Gracie's behavior has been out of character for the last week or so. Item: when I took the dogs out for a walk, we'd get across the street and maybe a bit further, and then she'd sit down and refuse to go any further until I turned around and headed back home. Item: despite her usual "whither thou goest, there go I" attitude (especially when the kitchen is involved), there've been a couple of occasions when I've been in the kitchen and, despite even my calling for her, she hasn't come out of the bedroom. Item: on two or three occasions, she's suddenly, without warning or perceptible cause, yelped, leaped off the couch, and ducked underneath.

I wasn't sure I wasn't jumping at shadows, but on Wednesday I gave her a good looking-over. One of her ears had what looked like bug-bites, which I tentatively assigned to ear mites. When she sat down and refused to walk, she frequently licked her genital area and chewed a little on one leg, so I examined those as well. Now, she's my first female dog, and I hadn't been paying close enough attention to be sure what it was supposed to look like, but her genitals did look a little inflamed. So I logged on to Hawthorne's site and asked for an appointment, and today we went in.

The walk over was early enough that we didn't hit the worst of the heat, but she still had to be carried quite a bit of the way. (One of Hawthorne's desk workers drove us home afterward. Good people.) The vet took some scrapings from ear, genitals, and leg, and put them under the microscope. Verdict: Bacterial infection. Also, yeast infection. Also, allergic reaction of some kind. She gave me four kinds of pills that I'm going to have to feed Gracie for the next two weeks, at which point I'll bring her in for a progress check.

Poor baby. The saving grace is that (unlike Buster) she'll take pills directly from my hand and gulp them down, no subterfuge required. Two of the pills are to be given with food, so I tucked them into slits in a chunk of cheddar, which likewise went down easy.

I really should pay closer attention.

Pride

This is a silly, or gross, or both, thing to be proud of Gracie for. But I am.

Whenever I hear Gracie making gagging noises, I grab her, take her into the bathroom, and put her in the tub. (Easier to clean up, there.) Now, the vet warned me that one of her pills might make her vomit (in which case I am to switch from one pill, once a day, to half a pill, twice a day...), so I wasn't very surprised to hear her starting to gag.

She was already in the bathroom. Not as good as the tub, but a damn sight better than the living room carpet. She's figured it out.

(This happened twice tonight. Once is happenstance; twice is not, especially since her experiences in that room have largely been unpleasant.)

I suppose it's too much to hope she'll take the next step, of jumping into the tub herself.