development corrupts

Brought Charlie, our mini-schnauzer to the vet on Monday.

I don't have many photos of him because he moves around too much for my phone camera to capture. His head is almost always blurry. *G* But lately I've been worried about him -- he's been listless, low appetite, and had been throwing up occasionally. We chalked up some of the listlessness to a tick infestation and concentrated on trying to get rid of the ticks. When we took him to our then-veterinarian, we told the vet about the listlessness, lack of appetite, and vomiting but the vet didn't listen to us at all :/ He gave Charlie a cursory once-over, injected something (didn't tell us what/why), made us buy supplements (didn't tell us what those were for), told us Charlie's resistance was low (maybe because of the weather?), charged us and that was it.

Charlie seemed to stabilize after that visit: maybe became a bit better, at least didn't seem to get any worse. Still listless and had little appetite, but was eating a tiny bit and not vomiting. Then we noticed that his eyes were clouding over, and then the vomiting came back :(

At that point, I decided that I did not trust our now-former veterinarian, and pushed to get a more professional one that my cousins had recommended, and that was where we went on Monday. Within twenty minutes of this vet getting his hands on Charlie, we had a tentative diagnosis of ehrlichia, likely from the tick infestation; within the day, we had confirmed that Charlie had a high level of infection. We're giving Charlie meds now and have adjusted his diet.

I am angry at the now-former-and-good-riddance veterinarian, but you know what? I am angrier still at myself for doubting myself and delaying further action. It's a good thing that we brought Charlie in to this second veterinarian when we did. He's young, and healthy, and still alert (growing more alert by the day \o/). But given a few more days or weeks, well who knows? He might still have been able to shrug it off on his own, or he might just have gotten slowly and steadily worse. There are no guarantees that we were early enough even now, but the vet tells us that he has seen dogs in worse shape than Charlie recover, so I've been crossing my fingers and holding onto hope.

So yeah. We're feeding him wet dogfood right now, and it smells just like liverspread x_x We give him about half a can a day, stick the other half in the refrigerator to keep until the next. I fear that someone will open the refrigerator, somehow overlook the label, and spread it on a sandwich :D

Before each meal are eyedrops. After each meal are three different meds.

And and and -- Today I looked into Charlie's eyes and they are unclouded, or well, are barely clouded. They are brown instead of milky blue. Eeek :) And he is jumping around a whole lot more, and playing too, and he doesn't appear to hate me for changing his diet or making him take pills, and I'm just so \o/