Well I screwed up royally this past weekend. I had taken out some chicken thighs to de-skin and boil for Emily. Things defrost super slowly in my fridge so I had left them out on the counter. By the time I went to cook them the skins where almost room temperature to my touch. The thighs themselves where still a bit frozen inside. I took the skins off and had to keep sticking my hands under warm water just to get the skins off all the thighs. I was taking the skins off so that when I cooked the thighs they would be a little leaner for Ms. Em.
However........ I have always given the dogs fat and skin bits when I've been breaking up big pack, big pieces, deskinning or deboning meat. So I put the skin aside to put in Ollie's meals. He sees what Emily is getting and his plain old kibble just won't do. I have to add a little something to make it more interesting. Luckily it only takes a little tidbit of something yummy or a bit of meat juice and he thinks he's got a feast!
So I had this leftover chicken skin and Emily wasn't eating any veggies since her last chemo session on Tues (already know where I'm going with this??) so I thought, "hey, how about I mix some of this raw chicken skin with some veggies and maybe she'll eat it". Guess what? She picked out the chicken skin and left the veggies behind. (and you know she was thinking - "I'll show that crazy bitch!" cause she's a bouvier and I'm pretty sure that's what they think all the time anyway.)
So that was Saturday. Sunday she has some runny poo. I gave her some Kaopectate which is liquid and a nightmare to give. More ends up on Emily, the floor and the walls then actually gets down her throat. And then we had more runny poo. Notice how I'm calling it runny poo and not diarrhea? Yup, denial. It ain't just a river in Egypt.
She ate fine and everything else was good, including her mood. Monday morning I got up and Ollie had the runs too. Kaopectate for everyone! He had one more bout and he was done. Emily got worse. Still in denial. I should have called the vets by this point but I half assumed they were closed for Easter Monday. Monday night she went downhill fast, needing to go outside about every half hour, unsteady in her hind end, trying to lay out in the cold, damp yard. It was amazing to see how easily Ollie's healthy system could handle the bacteria versus Emily's immuno suppressed cancer system trying to handle the same thing. This is why we cook Emily's food or she gets fish directly from the freezer. The one exception is her chicken wings which go right from the freezer to the fridge to defrost, only a couple at a time and she's limited to 2 per day. So far they haven't cause her any problems and I had been watching that for the first couple of weeks.
We went to the vets Tuesday for Emily's week 7 treatment and agreed with the vet that it was not wise to overload Emily's system that was already dealing with diarrhea by subjecting her to chemo. So due to my stupidity Emily has to wait a week for her next treatment.
Moral of the story is Cancer dogs are immunosuppressed. All the precautions I've read about are worth taking. Period.
Luckily one dose of the Metron and she's doing great. So we caught it soon enough that her system hasn't been totally taxed.
Trying not to add to the dog's suffering,
CJ, Emily and Ollie
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