A Vet for Rita and Boots

Rita is so used to us, mainly Vince, being with her every minute of every day, she is really struggling with us being gone so much. Monday and Tuesday nights she kept us up most of the night, going outside every half hour or so. Wednesday night she slept through the night but was not feeling good so I told Vince I was finding a vet and taking her. The first one I called was nice enough but they couldn’t see her yesterday . . they were booked but, if I wanted to pay the emergency visit fee, they could see her. I said “Let me check around and maybe I’ll call you back”.

I called another one, that’s only six miles from the house. The lady on the phone was super nice, said chihuahuas are her favorite dogs, and got me right in. That office has six vets and we saw a young lady vet. She and I talked about Rita and then she asked me where we were moving from. I told her Texas and she said “I’m surprised. I would have thought Louisiana. You have a Louisiana accent!” I loved her for sure after telling me that so I explained that Louisiana was my home but I’ve been gone for 23 years.

Back to Rita . . the vet was concerned that she might have diabetes. She said it’s common in older chihuahuas and with what I was telling her, she wanted to do blood work. She did but Rita checked out fine. Her blood work looked great; her weight was good; the vet was happy. I asked about getting heart worm meds and she said they require an annual heart worm check but I could get our local vet to send their test results but our local vet doesn’t do one every year. It had been several years since she had been checked. She stays on heart worm preventative so I wasn’t concerned but they did that since they had already drawn blood and she was negative.

The vet did give me an antibiotic to give her, a probiotic to sprinkle over her food, and told me to continue giving her the anxiety meds til we get a “routine” and she seems to be ok with it. Good luck with that.

Get this . . when we were at one of the vets treating her eyes (not the Brownwood vet I like), he asked what we were feeding her and I told him I made her food. He pretty much shamed me and actually made me feel like I was hurting her because I was making her food and “she probably wasn’t getting nearly all the nutrients a dog needs”. I had researched for a long time what to include in Speck’s food because he had so many stomach issues and had thrived on the homemade food. When Rita came along, I gave her the same thing and she had done fine with it. I had started mixing the homemade food with storebought food after the vet had admonished me about doing more harm than good. When I was talking to the vet in MO yesterday, she was telling me to give her low sodium chicken and rice til her tummy is better. She said I could mix a few peas and carrots with it so I talked to her about the food I had been making – ground turkey, chicken livers, brown rice, steamed broccoli, peas, carrots or sweet potatoes, calcium, ground flax seeds, boiled eggs. She thought that was an amazing diet and encouraged me to go back to doing just that with no other dog food added. How crazy is that? One vet tells me I’m harming my dog and the next vet tells me that’s a great food to give her.