Sheep Guarding Llama

Oreo was on the news in New York City again this morning.  He is becoming a famous dog.  We didn’t get to see it but the animal hospital told us.

At 8:00 Dominica talked to the technicians at the hospital and they said that Oreo was doing well and in good spirits.  He was still on the IV and the vet was due to make rounds fairly soon.  We would hear more then.

At 8:45 the vet called Dominica to let her know that Oreo’s blood work had come back okay and that his kidneys and liver appeared to be functioned more or less as they should.  He is still on the IV as they are still concerned, but nearly as much, about some impaired kidney functions but it would seem that he is not in any great danger at this point – very likely.  They need an additional urine sample before they can let him go because they need to know more about his kidney problems but they expect that he will be able to return to daycare either late this morning or this afternoon.

Nutro claims on their recall information website that there are no reported cases of animals becoming sick or dying from consuming Nutro’s products that are a part of the Menu Foods recall.  This is completely a fabrication.  I have reported our dog’s illness to the FDA.  I also reported by phone to Nutro who was not taking calls at the time but instead claimed to send you to their answering machine.  But there is no answering machine – they simply disconnect the call.  I also contacted them, five times, via their web site’s email functionality.  I filled out the entire form giving them all of the information that they asked for.  Their email system does nothing.  It simply takes you to an error page telling you to try again or to call them.  They have disabled all immediate means of communications between any potential complaints and themselves so that they can continue to claim to their customers that their products were not actually affected by the tainted Menu Foods products.

Nutro is lying.  Stop buying Nutro products.

Dominica and I stayed up last night down in the Media Center in our apartment and watched the Channel 4 News for Manhattan.  They did a close up of Oreo at the Rutherford Animal Hospital and even announced his name.  He was on once as the star and in another shot he was sleeping in his cage in the background.  He was quite the star and oh so cute.  They definitely picked him out for effect – so cute but clearly scared and shaking.  The footage was taken while we were just pulling up in the car so he hadn’t seen us for a couple of hours.

Dominica and I went to the Rutherford Animal Hospital and spent about an hour visiting with Oreo.  We are very scared and he isn’t too happy about the situation either.  He was in pretty good shape while we were visiting with him.  He has been on the IV getting rehydrated for over an hour so he was a little bit more chipper although he has been generally healthy so far.  We wanted to spend some time with him too so that he would be more comfortable being stuck at the hospital all night.  And we wanted to see how he was feeling.

The word from the veterinarian was that his general and kidney bloodword were looking pretty good.  His urine specific density is low and the vet is somewhat worried about that and there is concern about his liver as whatever is contaminating the dog food is starting to show up in livers now.  But that blood work has to go to another lab and will not be available until tomorrow.  So we won’t know anything about that until tomorrow.

Just as we were getting to the clinic we saw the Channel 4 News crew leaving the hospital.  It turns out that they were filming Oreo for the eleven o’clock news.  He is so cute I guess that they couldn’t resist.  So now everyone in the New York Metro area (well at least those that watch the local NBC news at eleven) will see our baby in the hospital.

We aren’t likely to hear anything more tonight.  Hopefully we will have some good news from the vet in the morning.  We can’t wait for our little boy to come home.  We are asking everyone to keep him in their prayers.

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.