So, What Did You Do Last Night?

Not much? Dinner? Watched American Idol?

What did we do? So nice of you ask. Well, Charlie and I had leftovers for dinner (baked ziti for me, pork tenderloin and mashed potatoes for Charlie). I had a meeting to go to and got home around 9:30. It was looking to be a pretty quiet night -- Charlie and I both had long days and were looking forward to getting a good night's sleep.

When we were just getting into bed, Hadley started having these weird scratching and itching fits. Y'all know about her cone of shame, so we thought she was just annoyed by her cone. We removed her cone but that just caused her scratch even more. We're not talking just scratching her ear, we're talking spastic scratching and thumping her leg and barking at us from her crate (which she never does).

Charlie noticed that Hadley's noninfected ear was really red and I noticed that her eye was looking puffy. While we were holding her down she was still trying to scratch frantically. Then we saw a rash on her stomach which looked like hives. Plus she is panting really hard. As we're noticing all this, Hadley's face proceeds to swell up to look like this (sorry, it's blurry, but it is SWOLLEN:


Her jowls are three times their normal size, her eyes are almost swollen shut, and her ear flaps are seriously thick. This leads us to call the emergency vet (which, FYI, is in Yorktown, a good twenty minutes away from us). The vet says to either bring her in and they will give her some shots to deal with it or we can give her 3 benadryl and hope for the best.

Well, I don't like waiting and I start to panic thinking that it might be anaphylactic and by the time we realize that, Hadley won't be able to breathe and we won't be able to do anything.

So we all pile into the car, Hadley on my lap while we attempt to keep her from scratching and she is miserable. When we got the vet, he talked to us for awhile and told us her heart and lungs were fine and that she was probably bit by something, given the fact that her face swelled up to three times its normal size. He gave her two shots: an antihistamine and a steroid. By the time we left, Hadley's face was starting to look better and she was even wagging her tail a little bit.

She is fine now. She slept ALL DAY yesterday (the antihistamine makes her drowsy and the steroid makes her really thirsty), but she's back to her normal spastic self (still wearing the cone).

So, like I said, not very exciting :)