Mattie at the Vet’s Office before her surgery

What a weekend. It’s been pretty tense around here. Mattie the dog started going downhill over the weekend and completely lost her appetite. She wasn’t moving around, she was listless and didn’t even want to go out. As soon as my Vet’s office was open, I called them and made an appointment.

Mattie is an old dog, a Shih Tzu I found in my parking lot. She was dirty, matted and had multiple infections. 600 bucks later, I had a dog on my hands instead of this limping train wreck: 

Mattie, minutes after I found her in the parking lot.

Like the fungus they found in her ears, she grew on me. I grew to love her. She’s old, stately and quiet. More like a cat, she prefers to lie around, yet she perks up when there’s food around. She’s a good dog and even goes on appearances with me when it’s possible. Here we are at a Petco kissing hands and shaking babies for BIRD TALK:

This weekend, that wasn’t happening.

I got her into her Vet and Dr. Bob Schactner started working, trying to find out what the issue was. We figured it out. After X-rays, we knew she had something in her intestinal tract, but we didn’t know what. Mattie doesn’t play with toys and she’s old so she isn’t much for doing much investigation. She goes out, does her business and we go back home.  But there was something stuck in there. Bob went right to work. Time for surgery. We were hoping Mattie would live through it. She’s no spring chicken, but whatever it was, it had to come out.

I went home to wait and worry. Bob said it would be about an hour. An hour passed. An hour and a half. At two hours I was wigging out. But finally he called. Mattie was stable. He had found one nasty looking hunk of something in her bowel just beneath her stomach. And it had perforated her bowel in two places. The object to the right of the quarter is what he pulled out of Mattie’s gut:

We have no idea what it is. It’s not metal, but it has the consistency of plastic. But it stinks to high heaven and seems organic. God knows where she picked it up or even what it is. Mattie is in the hospital on an IV with antibiotics and fluids with glucose.

She had a tough time snapping out of the anesthetic:

 

 

Here is John, a vet tech that helped Mattie. (Yeah, I know…he’s hunky) :


And she’s still not out of the woods. She survived the surgery and she survived the first night. She’s a tough little dog but I’m still worried. I want her around for a good while longer.

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