Day 12 - Tuesday, January 20th, 2009

Yesterday was not a good day.

Lana woke up, went right back to her bad bathroom habits and refused to eat breakfast.
She also refused to eat her favorite treat duck jerkey and the no-fail Cheez Whiz.
That's when I became worried.


I was off due to Martin-Luther-King-Day and luckily able to watch Lana all day.
She acted bizarre - grazing grass and henbit leaves like a cow, then going over to raiding the houseplants which I had to put out of her reach.
Earlier in the morning we had caught her eating a decorative plant outside which she immediately vomited back up so it must have been toxic.
We then covered up that plant so Lana couldn't get to it, so she went into the back yard and started chomping down on anything green she could find.

Before anybody wonders - I do feed her supplements like enzymes and powdered barley grass. Any attempt of bribing her with food was fruitless and given her low weight I called our vet and asked if they had a high-calorie paste like Nutrical which they did, so I went and got some. Lana hated it, but by now she was pooping pure grass and I was getting desperate. I'm thinking she must have eaten something slightly toxic first thing in the morning which upset her stomach and made her act strange.

After spending the day trying to get Lana to eat and rescuing the houseplants she finally settled down in the living room and slept for 3 hours straight. I think the Nutrical paste might have soothed her stomach and given her some peace.

When I let the dogs out before going to bed Lana ran straight to one of the wooden posts on our patio, wrapped herself around it and began scratching her sides and face on the wood.
Weird!

She then had some diarrhea (great!), went inside - and ate a whole bowl of dog food!
I was very relieved and called Tom, telling him to take Lana out when he came home and again before he went to bed, because of the diarrhea.
That led to her now being afraid of him (who wants to be taken out of a warm bed and into the cold outside in the middle of the night), but avoided any accidents.

When we got up this morning, Lana was eager to run around and wag her tail. This time she didn't pee in the house, but waited until we went outside, and then waited impatiently for her breakfast. She again ate a whole bowl of food - whew, she was out of the woods!
Our walk went fine, she ate the duck jerkey, and I slipped her some Cheez Whiz just to make sure she was back.
That she was!




When I came home from work today there had been no accidents in the house, and I've never seen her so excuberant and excited.

Josephine had her vet appointment today, and I took Lana along to introduce her to the vet. I asked the doc to take a quick look at her, and she found that Lana had an ear infection and impacted anal glands. That was taken care of, and even though that was a little painful, Lana was very forgiving and socialized very well with the other, bigger dogs.
In fact it was quite the party in the waiting room.
She weighs 8.4 pounds and is still about 4 pounds underweight, but I think we're getting there if there are no more incidents with those devious plants.
She's going to get her teeth cleaned in two weeks so she has some time to recover between anesthesias.

I spent some time in the kitchen when we got home, and there was no pacing - Lana ate another bowl of food, then immediately went to lay on her bed in the dining room to snooze.
My clicker finally arrived, and tomorrow we'll start learning that cats can be your friends if they are not accosted by a curly-haired creature with a Hollywood name.