🐸 Sapo 🐸 going into surgery

Hey! Thanks for reading! Just a reminder that I wrote this some years ago, and may have much more complicated feelings about this topic than I did when I wrote it. Happy to elaborate, feel free to reach out to me! 😄

🎵 The song for this post is The Message by Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five.🎵

The little broseph is going into surgery tomorrow morning. Here he is at the vet's office:

The little broseph

I'll start by saying it's a minor operation, on the order of getting a dog spayed, so we expect a full recovery.¹

On Tuesday night he vomited, was very low-energy, and shaked a fair bit. The next day on his walk he had diarrhea. I kept waiting for something to "pass" (or be vomited away) but he seemed largely unable to keep food down.

Still, his appetite and energy grew back to seemingly normal levels. By Thursday, he was still vomiting, and the kibble looked largely intact.² Doing a bit of research, it looked like repeated vomiting could be the result of some pretty scary stuff. One theory was blockage: that he'd eaten something inedible that was preventing the kibble from entering the intestines.

We scheduled a vet appointment, and tested this by feeding him chicken broth and soft potatoes, both of which could "slide" past any blockage. He kept that food down, and X-Rays at the vet confirmed he has something in his stomach.

Karen and I have no idea what the blockage can be: Sapo is pretty good at not eating non-food, and the blockage was a perfectly round object, like a ball (which we don't play with). We anticipate learning what happened after the operation.

Big thanks to the very fine folks at Heart of Chelsea Animal Hospital for yet another great care experience. They've been Sapo's vet since October 25, 2015, the day after I adopted him 🙂 And, of course, Badass Brooklyn Animal Rescue for bringing us together.

1. ^ My wallet, on the other hand…

2. ^ If you want to know a bit about Dog Life, here's a detail: our other dog, Rocco, would sometimes eat the vomit since the kibble was largely intact and undigested. It made spotting the vomit harder because we'd come home from work and smell it, but not see it. Dog ownership is glorious, you see.