Tag: pill pockets

No, it’s not medicine, it’s a yummy treat!

It’s all about pills around the Lick house these days. Annie thinks they’re treats. Don’t tell her any different.

Post knee surgery, the dog came home from the veterinary hospital with six different medications to be administered at varIMG_20180831_083701117[1]ying intervals and frequencies. She had antibiotics, pills for pain, pills for inflammation, and pills for sedation. So many pills I needed a spreadsheet to keep them straight.

Some of Annie’s meds are chewable. Rimadyl, $90-plus a bottle, she gobbles down. Phycox chewies, which look like the old Rolo chocolate-caramel candies but smell like dirty socks, she snatches out of my hand. But most of her prescriptions are tablets or capsules.

Getting pills into a dog is not easy. It’s not like you can ask them to pop them in their mouth, swallow and chase them with a glass of water. No way. People say: Hide them in their food, coat them with peanut butter, bury them in cheese, chicken, or hot dogs. Maybe that works with their dogs, but not Annie. My dog can find the pill in any sort of disguise and spit it out, especially the capsules, which she can’t chew. It’s especially fun when she breaks the capsule open and scatters white drug powder everywhere.

You can buy a “pill shooter” to launch the medicine into the pup’s mouth, but aiming it into the mouth of a moving dog is a challenge. There’s also the method where two people hold the dog down and you force the pill deep into their throats, holding their mouth closed until they swallow. It works, but it’s not a good way to stay friends with your best friend. Also, there are no other people here.

Enter pill pockets. God bless the genius who invented them. What’s a pill pocket, you say. It’s like a circle of cookie dough with a hole in it for the pill. You insert the pill, smoosh the dough around it and offer it to the dog. She swallows it whole and looks for another one. Cephalexin, check. Tramadol, check. Trazadone, check. See you when you wake up.

Now how come dogs get to eat cookie dough and we don’t?

Never mind. I have purchased pill pockets in chicken, hickory, and peanut butter flavors at the Mini Pet Mart. None of the other local stores carry them. Walmart has an off-brand variety that Annie immediately rejected. I couldn’t blame her. Those pockets were hard and nasty. But at $12 for a bag of 30 and using an average of eight a day, we have gone through an awful lot of pockets, money, and trips to the pet store. For what looks like cookie dough.

Enough. I found a recipe online to make my own. All it takes is milk, flour and creamy peanut butter (the kind without xylitol). I wouldn’t get those perfectly formed circles like the store-bought ones, which list several more ingredients (rehydrated chicken, xanthan gum, “natural” flavors?), but maybe it would work. If Annie rejected them, I could eat them.

On Saturday, I made the homemade pockets. Easy enough, although I don’t see how they expect one to get 12 pockets out of one tablespoon each of milk and peanut butter, mixed with two tablespoons of flour. I got three. I put holes in them, added a pain pill and offered one to the dog.

She rolled it around the floor a while, then took it in her mouth with an expression of distaste on her doggy face like I had never seen before. Sheer horror. After she choked it down, I tried a bite. Oh. I apologized to the dog and offered her a meatball dog treat. Maybe we need a different recipe, something with butter and sugar. Meanwhile back to the pet store.

Until recently, I have always taken my own pills straight. Put in mouth, swallow, wash down with water, done. Most of the time. I have never been good with pills. I gag. I cough them up. I look at the big ones and wonder how I’m going to swallow them. Deep breath. Down the hatch. But not long ago, I bought a bottle of calcium gummies, orange and raspberry-flavored 500 mg. wonders that I actually enjoy. They’re loaded with sugar, and I question whether they’re as effective as the regular calcium pills, but they’re delicious. Like the dog, I always want another one.

They didn’t have gummies when I was a kid. I enjoyed the orange-flavored children’s aspirin Mom gave us. But the pills, ugh. We always got one of Mom’s homemade cookies after taking our medicine. How great it would it have been if she had put the pills in the cookies and all we tasted was cookie. But it took dog people to think of that.

Annie in donut 2018With luck, Annie will soon be back to one arthritis chewy a day, and I can recycle the spreadsheets and empty pill bottles. At what used to be pill time, she’ll hound me for those delicious doughy treats.

What is your go-to pilling-the-pet process? Want to come over and make pill pockets?

Here are some sites that offer advice on medicating the pooch.

https://www.petmd.com/dog/care/how-give-your-pet-pill

https://iheartdogs.com/8-creative-ideas-for-getting-your-dog-to-take-their-medicine/

The Trials of a Dog Wearing a Donut

Annie in donut 2018

Monday, 6 a.m.

I awaken for the umpteenth time and listen for the dog. I hear her shaking her head. Along with the big blue donut around her neck that’s driving her crazy, she has an ear infection, so neither one of us can sleep. Does she need to go potty? Is she licking her incision? Is she choking on the bandage she ate last night? If she’s quiet, is she asleep or is she dead?

Seven more days. I’m not sure either one of us will survive. Annie had her second knee surgery on Thursday in Springfield, Oregon, a two-hour drive away. They don’t do this complicated bionic procedure on big dogs here in Newport. Oregon Veterinary Referral Associates is very nice, full of kind, talented people. If only they weren’t so far away. If only the air weren’t full of smoke from the various wildfires. If only it wasn’t 90 degrees out and the air conditioner on my Honda “Toaster” Element wasn’t broken. If only Annie hadn’t torn her left ACL a year and a month after she tore the ACL on her other leg.

The surgery went well, they say. After three days, Annie is beginning to put some weight on the leg. Just now when I finally got up to stay up, I found her on the easy chair in the den. “How did you do that?” I asked. She didn’t say. The leg must have worked well enough to get her up there. By the expression on her face, she doesn’t know how she’s going to get down.

I’m afraid to look at her incision. The first night, she got to it in spite of the donut, and removed several of her stitches. I mopped up a little blood and applied a bandage. I rejiggered the donut, and she doesn’t seem to be able to reach the remaining stitches. Except for church, when the neighbor doggie-sat, I have been with her constantly. Once in a while, we go for a short walk. She scoots along on three legs faster than I can walk, stopping to sniff here and there and to water the grass. Mostly we’ve been sitting on the floor. I pet her belly while reading, writing, watching videos on my tablet, or just contemplating the shocking fact that under her fur, my dog has fat thighs like me.

Last night, since I was right there, I took off the troublesome donut. She stretched out, rubbed her head on the rug in ecstasy and went to sleep. For hours. I couldn’t bear to wake her. I slipped into the other room to watch TV, checking on her at the commercials. Sleeping, sleeping . . . No! I caught her sitting up, licking her incision, bandage gone, shit-eating grin on her face.

I put the collar back on and gave her more of her six different medications while praying to God that she will be able to digest and excrete the big bandage, just as she has passed and excreted all manner of other things, including parts of a nylon collar, rubber toys, and wood. Please don’t let her need emergency surgery to remove the stupid bandage which her stupid mom left unattended and which her stupid mom absolutely cannot afford.

I contemplated a future without her. No. Please God, save us from our own stupidity.

I have told Annie that she has to live until I pay off this surgery. At least. Aside from the bandage making its way through her digestive tract, she’s healing well. Her incision looks fine. Her appetite is good, and she seems relatively happy. Except that the donut is driving her nuts because she can’t scratch her itchy ear, lick her stitches, or lick her bottom. I’m hoping the drugs help.

During my off-and-on sleep, I had wild dreams. A dog got hit by a car. My hair turned into this big bushy thing that got bigger the more I tried to control it. I won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction. That was a nice one. But I’m as sleepy now as I was when I went to bed at 9:45 last night. Welcome to another doggy day.

If you have read my 2011 book Shoes Full of Sand, all of this may sound familiar. We went through two knee surgeries with Sadie, Annie’s predecessor. But Fred was here to help. They did the surgeries at our local vet’s office. Plus I was so much younger then.

On the good side, Annie’s a wonderful snuggler, and we communicate without words. I walk toward the door, suggesting she goes out. She stays put and licks her lips. No. I want to eat. I give her a pill in a chicken-flavored pill pocket, which she thinks is a treat. (God bless the people who invented pill pockets.) She interrupts my work to nose my sweatshirt and my shoes to tell me it’s time for a walk. I get up. She has me well-trained. Except that now she’s telling me she wants the donut gone. Not happening.

The car goes to the shop tomorrow for a whole day of repairs. $1,400. Turns out the air conditioner wasn’t all that was broken on the trusty toaster, which has covered a lot of miles this year.

God willing, we will survive this, but it’s going to be a long, long week.

 

 

It’s all about the dog these days

IMG_20170601_163600329_HDR[1]Life these days is a dance with a pooch, le pas de chien, the “pas de dog.” My partner, Annie, 74 pounds of Lab and pit bull love, is rocking a blue inflatable collar, a back right leg shaved from her privates to her ankle, and a three-inch incision closed with 13 staples. A surgeon in Springfield, Oregon, 100 miles from here, rejiggered her leg to fix torn anterior cruciate and meniscus ligaments. Annie spent two nights in the doggy hospital while I prepared for a long spate of caregiving, stocking up on groceries, washing her blankets, and clearing my schedule for two weeks of full-time Annie.

Annie gets 12 pills a day, organized in days-of-the-week pillboxes. Getting the pills down has been a challenge. I tried pumpkin (nope), peanut butter (yes), meat loaf (God, yes) and shoving it down her throat (projectile spitting). Yesterday a friend brought two packages of pill pockets from the pet store. Remember Rollo candies? They look like that except they’re made of flavored dough into which you insert the pills. Annie loves them. Pill time is now fun time.

Ask me what’s new. It’s all about the dog. It’s all about keeping her from licking her stitches for two weeks and keeping her from running, jumping or playing for eight weeks. Because she can’t fit through the doggie door with her big collar and I don’t dare let her loose in the massive yard with its multi-level decks, it’s about taking her up and down 97th Court on a leash every few hours and letting her into the dog pen whenever I think about it. She does surprisingly well on three legs, occasionally letting the injured leg down. She never complains of pain, but she does complain about being confined. The pen is bigger than many backyards, but she keeps going to the gate and whining.

It’s about me sitting in the dog pen with her because if she can’t go out, neither can I. It’s about watching her constantly, waking up in the night and listening for her moving around, jumping up from my desk to make sure she is all right. It’s about sitting on the floor with her head in my lap, telling her what a great dog she is.

It’s all about the dog. We are on retreat together. I’m enjoying the quiet time to read, write, practice yoga, and do my chores. Annie likes that we’re together 24/7. I like that the weather has been perfect so we can sit outside. There’s nothing like spring on the Oregon coast. The sky is cobalt blue, the robins and doves are singing, the neighbor’s rooster is crowing, and the rhodies are blooming. The air feels like a warm caress.

Annie’s X-rays look very much like my Father’s broken-leg X-rays, the hardware bright white against the gray of the bones and flesh. But Annie will be walking long before Dad, who is not loving his time at the nursing home. Meanwhile, like Dad, we go from room to room, go outside to sit in the sun, take pills, eat meals, sit quietly counting the days.

This morning, when Annie woke up at 4:40 a.m., I was not ready to be awake. I gave her food and water and took her out for a piddle. Then, God forgive me, I fed her a sedative in a peanut butter pill pocket and went back to bed. When I woke up three hours later, she was sound asleep, praise God. It’s going to be a long couple of weeks.

I thank all the friends who have offered their prayers, encouragement and pill-giving advice. This is not my first time through dog knee surgery. Our old dog Sadie had surgery on both of her knees. You can read about it in Shoes Full of Sand. It was harder in some ways. We didn’t have the inflatable collar, just the plastic cone, and I didn’t get much sleep. But it was easier because I had my husband Fred to help me. Now it’s just me and the pup doing our pas de dog.

***

Amazon is currently offering my Shoes Full of Sand book at half price. Click the link and give it a read.

 

%d bloggers like this: