She's still our baby. Daisy is our beautiful Beagle/Dachshund mix. She was a rescue dog that I found on the side of the road in Louisiana. She came to me with worms and fleas, and more seriously she was heartworm positive and anemic. She was also carrying a litter of puppies, but I didn't know that for a week or two. That first few months were crazy. De-worming, de-fleaing. Birth! Lots of vet visits, a surgery to get her fixed, a really intense treatment to kill the heartworms that left her pretty much apartment-ridden for a month. Daisy went through a lot of poking and prodding and discomfort for a while there, but within 6 months, we had her in perfect health. The vet felt that she was only about a year old, so getting her back up to speed meant helping to ensure a long, healthy life for her.
Last December, I took Daisy to the vet right after Ryan and I moved here to Astoria. The vet said that she had a fatty cyst on her lower left side and we should watch it to see if it grew. Fast forward to July. I had noticed that the cyst had in fact grown, and was a little concerned about it. I hadn't liked the vet I originally took Daisy to here in Astoria, and I knew that in less than a month's time we would be on vacation in Illinois to visit my parents. There is a vet in my parent's home town that I had taken Daisy to once or twice before for check-ups while the two of us were living our nomadic post-grad school life. I decided to book an appointment for her there while we were on vacay. I really wish I hadn't done that now, but hindsight is 20/20, and this vet seemed reputable and capable...
When we - actually my mom - took Daisy to the vet in Illinois, they determined that the fatty cyst was in fact a hernia. They suggested we schedule surgery. Being the responsible pet-owners/parents that we are, we wanted to have it done as soon as possible and therefore, we booked it at the Illinois vet for the upcoming week. She came home the day after surgery - the vet kept her overnight for "observation" - and she seemed fine. I was surprised that they had sent her on her way with no meds or collar, but I figured the vet knew what she was doing. They gave us a sheet that said "Don't let the animal lick the surgical area." Well, she's a dog. Of course she's going to lick the area, and without an ecollar, you'd pretty much have to stay awake 24/7 and follow the dog everywhere to prevent licking. And even then, the dog would probably get in a stray lick or two before you stopped it. Ryan and I woke up in the middle of the night, the night that Daisy came home, to the sound of her vigorously licking her surgical area. The next morning we woke up to the sound of her vomiting. We immediately rushed her back to the vet's office and another Dr. (who didn't perform the surgery) asked where her collar was and seemed a little surprised that she wasn't sent home with one. This Dr. gave us a collar and gave Daisy a shot to calm her nausea and we took her home. She stopped licking herself and her stomach settled, and all seemed well.
I got her home to NY about 4 days later, and noticed that the area around her incision was pretty red and raw. There also appeared to be a dark area below the stitches, but nothing changed from day to day, so I didn't worry too much about it. I found another vet here in Astoria online - both Yahoo and Google had really positive reviews of Dr. Hatzidimitriou's practice at All Pets Veterinary Care. (That's what I should have done when I first moved here because the reviews of the first vet I took Daisy to here in Astoria were abysmal.) I made an appointment to have Daisy's sutures removed at 10 days after surgery.
Daisy and I both liked Dr. Hatzi and her staff right away. I could tell that the Dr. was a little worried about Daisy's incision area. She made a point to tell me to keep an eye on it and to call her if anything developed. Which it did about a day after she got the sutures out. A huge blood blister formed at the base of the incision, and then it burst, and all the way up the incision, it began to open. I took her back to Dr. Hatzi who began to treat her aggressively with anti-biotics and a routine of warm antiseptic compresses that she had Ryan and I repeat daily at home. Dr. Hatzi asked me for the records from the Illinois vet, and when she got them, was alarmed that the Illinois vet had sent Daisy home from surgery with no pain management meds, no anti-biotics and no ecollar after surgery. She stopped short of saying it was negligent, but she's pretty old school, and I could tell by her disapproving brow furrow and tongue clucking that she was unimpressed with the other vet's work. She also wanted to know what kind of sutures the vet used in the surgery, because Daisy might have been having an allergic reaction to them, and knowing what they were would help her decide a course of action to take. Strangely, that wasn't recorded in the Illinois vet's notes - another thing I could tell Dr. Hatzi thought was less than professional.
This went on for about 4 weeks. We kept shuttling Daisy in to Dr. Hatzi, sometimes because her incision infection looked worse, and sometimes because it looked like it was getting better. Dr. Hatzi wanted to err on the side of caution, because it's expensive to perform surgery, and also it's hell on the dog, so we tried as hard as we could to achieve a medicinal cure for the infection. We switched up to a stronger more broad-spectrum anti-biotic, we took her in regularly so Dr. H could drain the pus, we continued the compresses twice daily. Our life revolved around Daisy's treatments and meds. We would take her collar off of her when we did the compresses to give her at least 30 minutes, twice daily, of freedom from it. We bought her baby onesies and cut a hole for her tail so that she could sleep in them and not have the collar on, but Daisy is apparently the Houdini of dogs and managed to slip out of it (fully snapped!) the very first night we tried that. We really worked it. Finally after a month, Dr. Hatzi and we had to admit defeat and Daisy had another surgery.
Yesterday was surgery number two. I took Daisy to the vet for the umpteenth time in 30 days. Daisy really likes the vet office. Lisa the vet tech and the nurse really make over her, and she meets other dogs and CATS! in the waiting room. The waiting room experience is a real treat for her. Then there's the exam room. She immediately cowers and lays on the floor when it's time to go to the room. I carry her back in there, she gets poked and prodded and squeezed. Then she blames me for the pain, and we go home where she won't look at me for a couple of hours. Yesterday, she got a couple of shots and was scooped away for surgery. I felt uneasy the whole day. This whole process has been so exhausting mentally and emotionally. I came home and just couldn't keep still. I rearranged the furniture and cleaned like a maniac. Finally it was time to pick Daisy up. She was in so much pain, she looked like a doped up, angry mess. The nurse went through the meds and treatments Daisy would need: pain meds once a day after eating, anti-biotic pill twice a day, warm compress 3 times a day. No walking up stairs, no jumping, no licking, etc. It was a long list. I couldn't help but thinking she looked a lot worse and there was a lot more post-op care than there was in Illinois...
The nurse then told me that they didn't just cut out the infection, they also did an exploration of Daisy's hernia to make sure it was holding, and that the sutures holding it weren't infected as well. I will quote her exactly here: "We didn't find any evidence of scar tissue or any remnants of suture material." I was dumbfounded for a second. Did that mean what I thought it did? Did the vet in Illinois NOT perform a hernia surgery?? It's only been 6 weeks - surely there would have been evidence of hernia surgery - those sutures take up to 6 months to fully dissolve. Could it have been a fatty cyst as the original vet in Astoria suggested? Did the vet in Illinois simply remove a fatty cyst? Is that why there was no record of the actual repair in the vet's notes? Did they charge us for a hernia repair and then keep her overnight to hide that they didn't really perform one? The DAY after she had surgery for the hernia (or so we thought) Daisy was running and jumping and generally feeling pretty fine except for the irritation of the incision. Today, she couldn't run or jump if she tried, and all they did was explore around her groin area yesterday, not cut into it. She's three times as swollen, she's on pain meds, and because they performed surgery, she's on anti-biotics to ward off infection. Is it possible that the vet in Illinois misdiagnosed a hernia, opened Daisy up, realized it was just a fatty cyst, removed it, sewed her back up and kept her overnight to hide that she had a minimally invasive surgery and was just fine, and then charged us for the original diagnosis? This would explain the no meds, no collar - because they performed a minor procedure that wouldn't necessarily require all that. But because they didn't give her anti-biotics and a collar, Daisy was able to lick the incision and she either got an infection that way, or got a staph infection at her overnight stay at the vet, or because she was allergic to the sutures - although she had NO problems at all with any of the suture material used when she was fixed 4 years ago...
At any rate, I know that something was fishy about what happened at the Illinois vet, and I am so upset and angry about it. Not just that they defrauded us monetarily, but more that they have put this poor little dog, and the two of us through emotional, and in her case physical hell. We spent $500 on her "hernia surgery" and another $500 to clean up after it. Dr. Hatzi's nurse was really careful to go line by line and itemize all the expenses for her surgery yesterday to make sure that I understood exactly what they were charging me for, and showed me corresponding notes and the biopsy, etc. because I could tell she felt like I'd been taken to the cleaners by the Illinois vet and she wanted to make sure that I saw that this vet was on the up and up. They even knocked off a couple of smaller things to bring the overall bill down - because they felt badly about the fact that we were having to pay for the other vet's screw up.
The worst part of all of this is Daisy is a little scared of me. I have been the one who's taken her most often to the vet and it always results in pain for her, so she's now associating me with pain. Which SUCKS. She's clearly traumatized. Today she won't accept food from me, doesn't want me to touch her - she screams when I come near her - and she looks the other way when I look at her. If I walk towards her - she leaves the area. I have to carry her on the stairs to take her walks and she literally screams the entire time I'm carrying her in this high pitched loud squeal that makes everyone on the street look at me like I'm a dog abuser. That's bad, but what's worse is that I will have to spend a couple of weeks rebuilding my relationship and the trust between Daisy and me. That and her physical pain are the worst parts of this ridiculousness. She's a dog, she needs to be free from the collar, she needs to be active and happy and playful, and up until this ugly episode, she has been. This is a dark time for Daisy. It's a bit like a person suffering from depression. She's very low energy and low interest. I don't know how people with sick kids get through it. This is just horrible. The worst part is you can't explain anything to a dog. She doesn't know why all these things are happening to her - she's just suffering. She may not be human, but she's our baby. And we love her so... We just want her to be well.
