Nine Lives

Do dogs have nine lives? I'm beginning to think Homer does. Wednesday he scared the juju bees out of me!

He was fine in the morning and played outdoors with us after we came home from some errands. I wasn't paying a whole lot of attention to him, but it looked like he was just doing his normal yard exploration. We went in for lunch, I put Isaac down for a nap, fed Homer his lunch and got Jacob settled playing with his train tracks. About 1:00 Homer was standing by the door, asking to be let out. I noticed he was kinda shaky so I decided to watch him when he went outdoors. He was walking funny and I thought maybe he laid on his leg wrong and had 'dead leg' (can dogs get that?). Well, it got worse and worse as I watched and I knew it wasn't a case of 'dead leg'. It was scary! He couldn't walk straight, his legs would give out on him then one of his legs would shoot out straight to the side like he got electrocuted. Then he threw up. I called the vet immediately, but couldn't get in for a couple hours so decided to bring him to the emergency vet. I waited until my mom got here to watch the boys and then loaded Homer in the car. Not an easy task! I drove out to Grand Terrace only to discover that they are only an 'after hours' clinic and didn't open until 6:00 pm. Of course, I had already unloaded Homer from the car! So I loaded him back in and then called the vet to see if I could get in earlier since Homer was looking BAD. They said bring him right in.

The vet could see right away that Homer had gotten into something toxic and asked me about everything it could be. 'No, no, no' I said to everything. I mean, we don't have toxic things laying around because we have kids. Then she asked about trees and I said he eats the walnuts. Ding ding ding! Black walnuts can carry a mold that produces toxins. So they had to flush his tummy out using charcoal. When he came home he was so pathetic looking since he had been sedated! He's back to his old chipper self now and we've cleaned up all the walnuts so I am hoping we don't have a repeat of that. Very scary!