PIPER IS SICK! by Barry

Piper shredding a toy.  I swear I did not
teach her to do this!

Mom said I should write a blog entry about my sister, Piper, because I have set a very bad example as a big brother, and that is probably why she got sick.  We're still not totally sure what is wrong with her, but we thought at first that she had something stuck in her gut, and that's why she kept puking all the time.  If you get something stuck in your gut, that is called "intestinal blockage."  And what we thought maybe was stuck inside Piper was a piece of the pink blanket that some of us dogs have been chewing on.

Of course, I'm the dog who most likes to tear things up and swallow the pieces, but Mel does it too sometimes, and so does Piper.  Mom thinks Piper must have learned this bad habit from me, but honestly, I never taught it to her.  She just started doing it all by herself.  Nicky is the only dog here who doesn't tear stuff up and eat it, but he gets in trouble in other ways, like by digging holes in the yard and eating the dirt out of the holes.

This is not the pink blanket.  This is a purple blanket
that previously got chewed up, mostly by me.

Anyway, back to Piper.  She started puking in the middle of the night Wednesday.  Or I guess you could say it was really early Thursday morning.  I had a little diarrhea problem that night, so I started whining and woke Mom up.  She hurried downstairs and let me and Mel go out in the yard.  But Nicky and Piper stayed in bed.  Then after Mel and I got all our pooping done, we came back in the house, and everybody went to bed again.

Then after an hour or so, Piper started puking.  This made me very happy, because I love eating puke.  So I immediately started cleaning up the mess Piper was making.  Mom was tired and sleepy, and since I was already working on cleaning everything up, she didn't even look to see which dog puked.  In fact, she thought maybe it was Nicky who puked, but that's silly because anybody with a good nose on them could tell that the puke smelled like Piper puke and not like Nicky puke.

Later in the morning, Mom was doing some yard work, and Piper came out in the yard and started puking again.  So that's when Mom figured out who was really doing the puking.  Piper didn't much want her supper Thursday night, but she ate it because Mom asked her to.  Then she threw it all up about 5 hours later.  Yum!  

Yesterday morning, Piper did not want her breakfast, so Mom called Dr. Patricia's office and made an appointment for 11:00.  Mom took Piper there and left her so she could get some x-rays.  Dr. Patricia thought she could tell right away from the x-rays if Piper needed surgery, so Mom was waiting for someone to call, but they didn't call for almost 3 hours.  Then they just said that Piper was doing okay and was getting IV fluids and that Dr. Patricia wanted to take more x-rays later.

An x-ray of a dog's gut 
with something in it 
that does not belong there.

So to try to make this long story a little shorter, Piper finally got to come home last night and spend the night here, but then she had to go back to Dr. Patricia's office first thing this morning.  The reason for this was because the more fluids she gets, the better things looked on the x-rays.  Dr. Patricia told Mom that the fluids make Piper's blood vessels swell up and that makes stuff start moving along in her intestines again.  And that's why we are hoping she won't have to have surgery after all.

Mom has always thought that I would be the one who got something stuck in my gut, but so far that hasn't happened.  I guess this just goes to show that I have better and more efficient intestines than Piper does.  And anyway, we're still not sure what it was that made Piper's intestines stop working.  It might have been the pink blanket, but it might have been a bunch of bacteria or something else.

The saddest part of this whole story, though, is that Mom has now put the pink blanket in the trash.