Deseret, Cactus, & Texas: Christmas 2017

The picture below was from a much calmer and stress-free Christmas.

Christie, our younger dog experienced severe gastric distress on the eve before Christmas Eve and was vomiting and in pain. We had to take her in to the emergency animal hospital. They initially told us that the dog needed surgery to remove a blockage and the cost would be $4000. We told them that if that was the case, we would have her euthanized. This was the 3rd time in 2 months that she had a similar problem. Pancreatitis the first two times...but this time they didn't detect any of that in the blood test. When they heard we didn't want to have surgery, they said they could keep her on an IV and monitor her with X-rays to see if she improved on her own. We brought her in about 7:30PM on Saturday and weren't able to get out of the animal hospital until 11PM but left the dog. They said they would have answers in 12 hrs. We called Sunday (Christmas Eve) after church but they said they still had nothing definitive from the X-rays. They wanted to keep her another 8 hrs and take X-rays again. Each set of X-rays is $500. We said OK to one more set but no more and we were going to come take her home. Now the bill was up to $2000. We went down to get her at 10PM Christmas Eve and it was after midnight when they finally discharged her but she was acting fine like she had no more distress. They gave us a bunch of meds and showed us how to administer subcutaneous fluids. We went home and she has been acting perfectly normal ever since.

Earlier on Sunday we had a mostly music program but all the talks were tear jerkers and Felicia didn't feel like singing because she thought we would need to put the dog down. I sung in the Choir and then in a quartet doing Silent Night and had to sing a solo verse in German. It went fine.