poor lillie

last night andrew and i came home to lillie having pooped in her crate. now, if you don't know my dog, you would have no idea how absurd this is. but this dog has made it an unfortunate 17 hours one time (due to a miscommunication between me and my roommate at the time) without being let out of the crate. no accident. not even a dribble of pee. so when andrew said she'd pooped in her crate, i knew it was a problem. he took her out to the bathroom and she had (sorry for the grossness) bloody diarrhea. of course, this is after all normal vets are closed, so we called the emergency after hours place. i knew that diarrhea could wait, but the blood part bothered me. lillie has a tendancy towards skin and ear infections due to her allergies, and she has had limping issues in the past due to the fact that she's crazy hyper sometimes, but this particular issue is a new one.

we decided not to wait until this morning to take her in, and headed to the emergency clinic. there were tons of people there, and it seemed, not many people working were in much of a hurry. there was one yellow lab that had gotten a puncture wound in her side while her owner was at work - she was fixed up relatively soon after we got in, but her owner and the tech spent literally 20 mins trying to figure out how to work the e-collar. ::sigh:: then there was an owner of two rhodesian ridgebacks who were his self proclaimed spoiled pets. the male had attacked the female for the third time (why this didn't seem to be a problem to him, i do not understand). his assistance was required to hold the dog to be able to suture her up. lillie, since being attacked by gus, andrew's father's dog who is part ridgeback (and a mean son of a gun), hates - i mean HATES ridgebacks. though she is friendly to everyone and all other dogs, she began growling the second she saw the ridgeback. while sad because of how traumatized she is, we both had to laugh at how smart she is to distinguish the breed. the next dog that came into the clinic while we were still waiting to be let into our room was a small doodley-mix-of-a-something with a recurring skin problem. why you would take this to an emergency clinic, i have no idea. the people were strange and informed me that they had been feeding "hills prescription diet c/d"... c/d isn't for allergies. z/d is, so i thought maybe i didn't hear her correctly, but she snobbily spit out once again that he was on c/d... perhaps that's the reason the dog still had the allergies! but what do i know?

then we went into the exam room - success! no. waited in there for so long, lillie tried to poop on the floor. we told them she had to go, and they sent us out with a bowl for collection. i was pretty disgusted at the time because that, as i recall from working at a vet, is the technician's job, not the customer's job. but we complied. after waiting another 20 mins or so, the doctor came in, gave us metro (an antibiotic that i knew we'd get) and we were on our way. $130 poorer and about 2 hrs after we came in. now, that's not too bad of a bill for an emergency place, but i really could have just done everything myself a lot faster if only i had access to a microscope... float solution... dye... and of course access to doctor-prescribed drugs. i seriously just need to go ahead and get a vet degree or something.

anyway, that was our adventure last night. we came home and i made lillie some rice and andrew some blueberry muffins, we watched the recorded season premier of grey's anatomy (which wasn't all that great, especially since some of its most interesting cast members have been dropped from the show), and went to bed. this morning lillie is still not up to snuff, but i think she'll be fine soon. [pictured here is last season's cast of grey's... still with all the cool characters]