First, we expect Felix to be fine.
Last night, when we let the dogs out before bed, Felix picked something up off the ground and ran away to try to chew on it. It didn’t look like a stick, and I had a bad feeling, so I went to take it away from him. He was mouthing it and acting like it was his latest treasure. It was a little green ball, so I took it and threw it away.
Between going out last night and at 8AM this morning, he had found three such treasures, and we discovered our neighbor had put out rodent poison to get rid of the voles in his yard. The only problem is that when it rains, everything from their yard gets washed into our yard. So apparently the rodent poison all came in our yard!
He never was able to chew one up, but he did have each one in his mouth for about 20 seconds while I got it away from him.
I called the ASPCA poison control hotline, because I had heard that service dogs get to use it for free. It seems like I heard wrong. It is $95 normally to use the hotline! I said I couldn’t afford that, so they agreed to charge me only $25. They said that the poison was an anti-coagulant, and that if he ingested enough to make a difference, he wouldn’t show symptoms for 3–7 days. They recommended taking him to the vet to get Vitamin K-1 which would prevent him from possibly bleeding out, but also said that we could wait until Monday to go to our regular vet as he wouldn’t start bleeding until then.
Brad thought we shouldn’t go to the urgent vet and should instead wait until Monday. His reasoning was that the poison control people seemed relaxed about the timing for the start of treatment, it didn’t seem like Felix actually ate any (and he’d need to eat 1/2 a teaspoon to have significant issues), and it’d be cheaper at our regular vet. So we tried to do that, but I was miserable all day. I was so anxious and feeling terrible, and just waiting for Felix to start bleeding and die. I think he didn’t eat any, but there’s no way I could be 100% sure.
Then I let Felix out again to potty, and we searched the yard very carefully. After we searched it, he found yet another piece of poison!!! That was it, I couldn’t handle it anymore, and we went to the urgent vet.
Luckily they were not busy, and we were in and out in less than an hour! They examined him and said he isn’t showing any symptoms, but they also recommended Vitamin K to prevent bleeding out just in case. There aren’t any side effects from taking the Vitamin K if you don’t need it, so it is a pretty low-risk treatment.
I was so relieved to have a treatment on hand! And now the yard has also been searched by our friend Russ and Brad’s dad. Neither of them found any more poison in our yard, so hopefully it’s all gone.
Felix should be fine now that he has the Vitamin K in his system. He takes it twice a day for 30 days. I’m just very happy that he will be OK!
Unfortunately the tech who took Felix to get weighed was very smelly (deodorant type of smell), and got that smell all over Felix. So we had to give him a bath when we got home.
We got a couple of pictures at the vet’s office. I am wearing a rainbow mermaid dress (because we were supposed to go to Pride today before all this happened), and Felix is on my lap looking into the camera. Brad is wearing black and red (not his planned Pride outfit) and is using his power wheelchair. Behind us are large colorful pictures of dogs.
