The Sawyer Saga

First off - I just want to say thank you so much to everyone who was thinking and praying for me and Sawyer this past week. It was definitely a rough one and I really appreciate it! Secondly - this is a shout out to Hans & Traci. I am so sooo sorry about Lola. My mom just told me (for obvious reasons). Lola is my aunt and uncle's dog who recently died from ingesting rat poison...which is what Sawyer was being treated for. Obviously my mom waited until after Sawyer was released from the hospital before she told me what happened.
So here's the whole story for those who want to know (if you don't, feel free to skip this post - I promise less depressing posts tomorrow). Last Tuesday when I picked Sawyer up from daycare he was so depressed and he was moving really slow. The attendant told me that he wasn't eating and he didn't play at all but just laid in the corner of the room. All of these things were extremely strange behavior for him. However, other than that there was nothing crazy going on that we could see. We walked home (extremely slowly) in the hopes that he would get hungry enough to eat. That didn't work and he just looked so miserable. I debated about going to the vet, but I decided to wait it out until the morning and then if he still looked bad I would take him in. Well all that night his breathing became severely labored and he and I both didn't sleep very much.

About 20 minutes before the vet opened I called to see if I could just walk in. Fortunately they were able to get us seen right away. Nothing stuck out to the vet right away so they decided to do an xray to make sure there wasn't something lodged and do some blood work for toxins. After the xray, the vet called me in and said he was really concerned. Sawyer's lungs weren't expanding all the way and the heart was fuzzy in the xray meaning that there could be liquid in his chest cavity. He sent me to the ER for pets so that I could get a more detailed diagnosis.  So we got in a cab and headed to midtown to the ER. They told me that they wanted to keep Sawyer over night. They were going to drain the liquid from his chest cavity and then depending on the type of liquid they could determine the cause and get a better treatment plan. At this point I was pretty much a wreck.

I went to work and a couple hours later I got a phonecall saying that they had removed blood from Sawyer's chest cavity which gives us one of two options: poison or cancer. Hopefully it was poison. And then I severely broke down at work. The vet's office said that they would keep an eye on him but they were bumping him up from the medium ICU care to the highly critical ICU. A couple hours went by and they called again and said that his blood levels were spiking really low and that he needed an emergency transfer of plasma and blood. They still hadn't gotten his blood results back about toxins, but they were 90% certain from his symptoms that he had ingested rat poison. They wanted to start treating him as if that were the case - and if they had waited he probably wouldn't have made it.

That night when I went home sans puppy, I searched the entire apartment and then remembered that about 6-7 months ago we had a mice problem and we had bought rat poison pellets and stuck them in the radiator in one of the bedrooms. Then I remembered that Sawyer had broken into that bedroom the night before he got sick and was under the bed by that radiator. We pulled the bed back and sure enough - there was the pellet container...completely empty. I called the vet and she was so relieved to hear that it was definitely rat poison. I was able to read of the ingredients and the guidelines for treatment for ingestion by pet. Thankfully they were able to use this information to guide their treatment for Sawyer.

The next day, he started to do so much better. He responded well to both the plasma and blood transfusions and his blood was starting to coagulate again (that's what the rat poison does, it interferes with the blood so they basically bleed to death internally). They wanted to keep him one more night to make sure that his levels looked normal two nights in a row before they released him.

Long story short, I was able to pick him up from the hospital on Friday and he is almost completely back to normal. His energy is up and he is playful and happy and as cute as ever. His eating habits are still a little off, but I think that is expected after almost dying last week. I am so grateful that he is ok and still alive. He is such a huge part of my life. Thanks again for all your thoughts and prayers last week, I really appreciate it!!