Hump Day

Today was a downer.

Stopping home for lunch today I looked at Oliver and was taken aback.
It looked as though the white of his eye was swelling slightly out of
his socket and over his pupil. Needless to say, I was completely
panicked. I called my vet and dropped Oliver off to be looked at once
Dr. Garcia was done with his ACL surgery.

I later called for an update. No biggie. It's allergies again. Dr.G
suspects he ate something and had a reaction to it. Since I started
giving him garlic pills this morning and spraying his body from the
neck back with lemon water - both in an effort to get rid of fleas -
it could be either one. Now, it's just a matter of figuring-out which
one.

Ah, the sleuthing never ends.

A friend had joked to me about getting health insurance for him and I
bawlked at it at the time.

I am balking no more.
Now, I am signing him up.

When I picked Ollie up and was chatting with the girl behind the
counter, he suddenly started making this horrid sound. A cross between
coughing-up a loogie (sp?) and gasping for air. And it was all done
loudly. 'Scared the crap out of me. I'd never heard him do it before,
but the vet tech assured me that it was just a sneeze, "Dogs sneeze
internally" he told me.

Weird. And not very productive, I might add.

On our way home, he started doing it again. But, he would start by
heaving as though he wanted to vomit but was holding it in out of
courtesy for my Honda interiors. Then, the hacking thing would start.
His rib cage is contracting and expanding in a desperate kind of way.
All the while, it does not seem that he is taking in air. At all.

As he has never done this in the past and he's suddenly doing it more
than just a few times in a half hour, I decide to take him, with his
slightly neurotic mother, back to the vet.

Dr. Garcia assures me, it's just a sneeze.
"But, he sounds like he's dying" I tell him.
Dr. Garcia agrees and tells me he thought the same thing the first
time he heard a dog do it while he was in vet school.

No death today. Melodrama and high vet bills?, yes. Death? No.

Sounds like a hump day.