Our poor baby

Well just last week I wrote about how well Mallie was doing last week. 

That was Friday.

When we got up Monday morning, we noticed that she hadn't eaten her food from Sunday.  Not super unusual for her so we didn't think anything of it.  Monday night, still hadn't eaten, so Chris dumped it out and put fresh food in it.  Tuesday morning, it was still in there.  So Chris dumped it out again, and added some water to it thinking maybe it had dried out.  Still not interested.  At this point, we are thinking something is wrong with the food.

Our vet is a good friend of ours and helps us out a ton with our sheep stuff so she came over Tuesday afternoon.  Checked her vitals, everything looked great.  I had made some chicken the day before so she asked if she could have a little piece to see if Mallie would eat it.  She hesitated a little bit, but then ate it right up.  So we figured it was the dog food.  At this point she had been acting pretty close to normal.  A little later in the afternoon she started acting depressed.  That evening we were going to go to Wa* Mar* to get another bag of dog food, but by dinner time she was really lethargic and wasn't moving very quickly.  We tried to get her to eat some more chicken but she just spit it out.  About two hours later, we couldn't hardly get her to get up when we called her.

Oh boy.  

We were looking on the internet and trying to decide if we should take her in to the Pet ER clinic.  Most of the things we saw online pointed to Parvo.  She had been sufficiently vaccinated several months ago, but evidently it's still possible for dogs to contract.  So we left for the ER.

Got there, checked her vitals, all normal.  Decided to start with a Parvo test and sure enough,  Parvo it was.  Dang.  Vet suggested that they keep her because if we take her home there was only about a 40% chance of her surviving because the main cause of death is dehydration because they get scours real bad.  If she stayed she had over a 90% chance of survival.  IV fluids were needed.  We totally get that scours is a scary thing.  Been there, done that with sheep and cattle and we never put them in a vet hospital for 48 hours.  However, this is our baby, and we just couldn't risk it.  

(Not saying that we don't treat our livestock with IV fluids, if needed, just not at the cost that we paid for our dog)

48 hours later, we have a pretty happy puppy back in our back yard.  Thank goodness.  Still need to watch for signs of dehydration over the next few days, but she seems to be doing pretty good.

One of the things I HATE...dog hair!  Notice the towels all over my car. :)

Parvo is a scary and dangerous virus!  Make sure you get yours vaccinated when they should be.  Since she was up to date on her vaccines, it really helped her bounce back a lot faster.