cone head pug: a poopy post

I was on quite a roll with regular blogging, and then… life got in the way.

We took Mimi Pug in for anal gland removal surgery and tooth cleaning and extraction last Wednesday, and I’ve gotten very little done since then.

(I’ve been wondering if I should write a more detailed post about the anal sacculectomy surgery and recovery for other people considering it for their dogs. I might do that. If I do, you don’t have to read it. It’s a poopy story!)

The tooth extraction was postponed, but the gland surgery went well. The vet confirmed that one gland in particular was much better out than in. The recovery was a bigger deal than we had anticipated though. I have been keeping Mimi company on the couch for the last 10 days, making sure she doesn’t over-exert herself, and most importantly, doesn’t do anything to prevent her incisions from healing. She’s wearing an Elizabethan collar, her “cone of shame” to make certain that she can’t chew out her stitches, and she needs to go out for potty walks several times a day. We’ve had quite a few poop accidents and one of my tasks has been to clean her butt to make sure her incisions don’t get infected. Yuck! Watching her drink out of a glass is endlessly amusing, but feeding her kibble by hand got tiresome very quickly.

We’ve also had a bunch of medications to make sure she takes – one for inflammation, one for pain, and another to prevent infection, as well as her usual antihistamine. Mimi is usually so good with pills, to the point that she thinks they’re treats and gobbles them down. But not with these pills. The first night was a real battle, and we lost. Even cheese wasn’t working. I had to pull out the big guns – spam. Thank goodness that worked. I was at my wit’s end. Since then I’ve had more success – hiding the pills in tiny Pill Pockets, spam, or cheese, trying to change it up and use as little as possible, because she’s probably allergic to all of those things.

Mimi’s cone is fairly small, like she is, so we haven’t had too many problems with her knocking things over. But she does tend to bump it into walls and door frames. And our legs have been scraped up a little bit. She likes to stand right behind me with her face a few inches from my legs, which means that the cone end is digging into my skin. She can’t see us standing or sitting behind her and she’s missing her face cuddle time. We decided that giving her a break from the cone would just make it worse to put it back on, and honestly, it isn’t bothering her that much anyway. Of course she’ll be glad to have off! But it’s not really causing her discomfort or anything. Making sure she doesn’t damage her stitches is so much more important.

This week of caring for the dog coincided with me catching a cold. I haven’t had a cold in ages – I literally can’t remember the last cold I had, but I’m thinking it was about 18 months ago. But wouldn’t you know it? The sore throat and sniffles started the same night Mimi came home, and then I was laid up on the couch with her. I have a well-researched strategy for dealing with colds. You can minimize the snot-producing immune reaction with an antihistamine, but it needs to be the kind that makes you drowsy. So for the first few days of a cold I take Benadryl every 4-6 hours and nap a lot. It works really well, but no matter what you do, a cold will always last about 7 days. I always joke that you can get rid of it in a week if you treat it properly or 7 days if you just let it run its course.

I couldn’t get out of walking the dog 3 times a day (6am, noon, 5pm at the least), but she was slow moving most of the time, only picking up speed later in the week as we both started feeling better. Mimi must be the only dog in the world who is not happy to go on extra walks. One is her ideal, two she will tolerate, but the third walk of the day is more of a drag, literally. I also spent the week walking over to my friend’s house to look after her hens and her garden while she was out of town. That amounts to an extra mile or so of walking every day, although I did find the least hilly shortcut I could. So even with all this couch lying laziness, I have managed to hit or exceed my fitbit goals almost every day – 10,000 steps/5 miles, 30 “active minutes” and 15-25 flights of stairs/hill climbing. Over the last 9-10 days I have walked 105,500 steps, or about 43 miles!

(Yeah, I got a fitbit one and I love it. I thrive on quantifiable feedback. I love getting my green smiley faces each day. Knowing the true extent of my inactivity on lazy days is a good wake up call too.)

After a week of poop and snot and too much time on the couch, I was really glad to get out of the house for some library work yesterday. And I put away all the laundry I had done the previous day (clean! blissfully clean!) and tidied up some messes (of the non-potty variety) that were getting on my nerves. Our house is still full of supplies for our business, which is something I can’t control. Hubby is really good about keeping most of it neatly stacked against the walls. But I’m the only one who can do something about my piles of procrastination! I took care of the sideboard, putting away a bunch of things that I could have put away properly the first time. I have a couple of “projects” out that I need to finish, but getting that space cleared off and dusted made me feel so much better.

Before Mimi goes in for her massive 16 tooth extraction next month I will make sure to get the house clean and picked up. I don’t think her recovery will be as bad as this one was, and I don’t plan on being sick again. But it helps to have everything in order before the stressful times hit. Keeping things neat and tidy, well organized, and simple every day means that even when things get a little out of hand, nothing gets too bad. Even if there is poop!

Thanks for stopping by. I’ll have something a little less poopy to talk about next time.

Jo:)

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