Lamentations and Reassurances - The Dog's Bladder

Last night on our walk home, my husband was going through his Lamentations on the State of the Dog's Bladder. I was going through my Reassurances That We Are Doing the Right Things. It's a miserable dance, but not nearly so bad as what the dog is going through.

And one of the Reassurances was "she just got her second dose of the anti-inflammatory since we started it again" and how anti-inflammatories need to build up to work.

And the Lamentation was that the vet didn't give us more of that and "there isn't enough" of it in the current bottle.

I assured him that I have no idea how much in in the bottle. This was the point at which he learned that it's a liquid medication. (How he thought I was "putting it on individual pieces of kibble"... whatever. I know he hangs on my every utterance, but sometimes we are all so blinded by adoration that we miss details in the stories.)

Still, he was dubious about my assertion. "The dispenser says how many pounds the dose is for, but not how large that dose is."

"And somehow you can't tell what's in the bottle?"

"Right."

... and back to the general Lamentation that the dog is squatting every ten feet and not only is this inconvenient for walking, it's got to be very awful for the dog. Maybe she shouldn't go on walks. &c. Back to talk of volumes, frequencies, and durations. Better/Worse.

Is a longer course of the same dose of the antibiotic (they cultured and it ought to work on her bacteria) actually going to help or not?

Does it matter? They're culturing again and if she needs a different one, we'll know just as soon as we can. And her new food and and and and and...

The poor dog probably squatted three more times while we were working our way through that before one of us managed to change the subject.

This morning, I looked up the dose per pound and then figured out how much medicine she gets per dose. And then what the volume of liquid in which that much medicine is suspended. And thus how many doses are in the bottle. And how many we've given and so how many ought to be left.

I sent him all the math in a text message this morning. Reassurances.

So, good news. All of that high school algebra is still useful in the day-to-day when you can no longer just blindly stick the plunger into the bottle and hope what comes out goes up to the thirty mark.

Also, the dog has plenty of anti-inflammatory medication to get us through until the urinalysis results ought to be back.

The cat finds that the thousand times a day I take the dog out really provide him with opportunities for freedom. Not the thousand times an evening/night/early morning my husband does it. The cat practically never slips past him.