March 19, 2007: Oreo Ate Contaminated Dogfood!

Today we discovered from Menu Food’s newly expanded list of contaminated pet foods that Oreo is one of the dogs affected from the new recall that happened over the weekend. We don’t know how bad he is yet. He seems to be mostly healthy but he has been “going outside” more than twice as often as he used to starting on March 3rd – which coincidentally is the same day that he fell off of the futon. That raises the questions: Did being sick cause him to fall off of the futon? Did the fall make him have to go outside more often or did the dog food? Have the several “accidents” that he has had in the past week been caused by a kidney infection?

So far the need to be taken out more often is not listed as an official symptom of the tainted dog food but it seems that it could be very likely and because of the extreme hardship that it is for us to take him for a walk, especially in winter and especially since his fall he hasn’t been to daycare nearly as much, might make us notice the issue much more quickly than other dog owners. One of the official symptoms is vomiting which he has done twice this past week. Fortunately he has not lost his appetite nor is he acting strange so we are sure that everything is okay but you know how we worry about our baby.

So Dominica took off from work early this afternoon to rush Oreo to the Rutherford Animal Hospital to get some emergency blood work done to determine if anything is wrong. We will be in Geneseo this weekend and he could visit his normal vet there but we didn’t think that it would be wise to wait at all at getting his blood work done due to the sensitivity of the situation. We are very worried about our little boy.

Dominica got Oreo to the hospital at half past four and they quickly determined that he was in trouble and that he would have to stay there. Oreo is being put on an IV to keep him hydrated and they are doing emergency blood work to determine how bad things are. We are really scared.

I left work at half past five and raced home as quickly as I could. Dominica was a mess. She had been crying for hours. I got home and we dug out Oreo’s old blood work so that we could take it to the hospital so that they would have a baseline to compare his blood word against. As requested by the FDA, I called in to let them know that Oreo had had contaminated food and was sick. Then we rushed out to the hospital to see our little boy.

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