My Furry Baby

Izzy, alive and well and snoozing away

So here's the setting for tonight's story: I am on labor and delivery at Grady right now, on the night shift this week.  These shifts last about 14 hours, from 6pm to 8am, with a usually pretty busy service of laboring patients, deliveries, c-sections, OB emergencies.  For some reason I was convinced that I was on days this week instead of nights.  I was so confident that I didn't even double-check the schedule on Sunday night.  So I showed up for my first L&D shift 12 hours early.  Better than being 12 hours late, I suppose.  

I was immediately corrected by my classmate whose shift it actually was, made fun of by the third year signing out, drove back home and tried to sleep through the day so that being up all night wouldn't be quite as painful.  But alas, I tossed and turned for hours in the bright daylight of my room, dozing and having brief bizarre anxiety dreams.  Definitely NOT restful.  Finally I just gave up and got out of bed, deciding to just make a big thermos of coffee and hope for the best.  The night went ok... I am guessing that no one ever feels like the first day of any rotation went really awesomely well.  At best, you are just trying to figure out what's going on, how things are done, where things are, what the personalities are on the team, etc.

Anyway, needless to say, I was exhausted and feeling rather brittle by the time I made it home at 8:30 the next morning.

I walked into the house and Izzy greeted me at the door, which is never a reassuring sign when no one is home.  Both my roommates' cars were gone, so I knew they had already headed to work.  Izzy is only about 10 months old at this point and not really reliable being left alone, so usually we try to make sure that she is either left out in the yard or put in her crate if everyone is leaving.  I dropped my bags and headed back to the kitchen/living room, surveying for trouble as I went walked down the long hall that goes the length of our house.  Everything seemed to be in place until I saw it on the sofa: my very recently-new, nearly-full cardboard container of chocolate calcium chews, empty.

I immediately burst into tears.

Izzy just looked at me, with her big floppy ears all perked up, doing her adorable quizzical head-tilt, big brown eyes meeting mine.  I freaked out, imagining her imminent death due to hypercalcemia.  I called my vet, whose office wasn't open yet.  I called the emergency clinic whose number my vet's away message gave me.  The emergency clinic operator told me that they were closing since it was time for regular clinics to open and that I should call my regular vet.  I called back a second time and got the away message again.  I left a frantic voicemail.  I googled "my dog ate an entire container of chocolate calcium chews" and got a surprising number of hits.  I ended up on some website where you could chat live with a vet, who would answer your question for a mere $35, which I paid.  The online vet basically told me that as long as my dog was generally healthy, I could expect some upset stomach but that she would be ok.  I then found a much more detailed and reassuring response to my exact question from my previous Google search.  (I clearly don't make the smartest decisions concerning spending unnecessary money when under duress.)  After all of this, Izzy still looked like she was just fine, and I felt much better about just watching her and seeing how she did for the rest of the day, so I calmed down, collapsed into bed and passed out.

The short version of the rest of the story is that the next day, she was pretty miserable for about 24 hours, vomiting a couple of times and shitting out those silver foil wrappers all over the back yard, but she has since made a full recovery and is back to her cute energetic self now.  I know she is just a dog, and maybe there are those of you out there who think that it is silly to get so worked up over a pet, but I have been surprised since adopting her how much my little buddy has come to mean to me.  I am thankful for the love and companionship she has brought to my life, and I am so grateful that she is ok.  :)

roomie Elena enjoying post-work snuggles on the sofa with Izzy and Luna