Well that was Christmas that was!

Well Christmas started as it meant to go on. My daughter rang on Thursday from Devon to say she wouldn't be coming to stay for Xmas that afternoon as she had just run into the back of a 4x4 with a large towbar and spare tyre which had not done her radiator and bonnet a lot of good! Fortunately her dad came to the rescue and got her back to his place and then bless him, drove her all the way up here that evening so she wouldn't miss out on the family festivities.

Mark came up on Friday afternoon and helped us clear out the spare room so they could sleep in there the rest of their stay. Its such a relief to have that room sorted out. We had to get rid of an awful lot of rubbish to make space for the two beds.

Friday evening was interesting too! I'd popped up stairs fot the vacuum cleaner for the spare room and checked on the pupsicles and they were fine. Half an hour later Ian went up to be greeted by the sight of the two of them sitting in their crate surrounded by bits of gold foil with an air of innocence on their faces. On investigation he realised that this was the remains of a whole bag of chocolate coins that they had somehow managed to drag into the crate and extricate the chocolate from the wrappers! We knew chocolate was not good for dogs, but not how bad, so I did a search on the internet to find it can be lethal! There is a substance in chocolate which they cannot digest and is absorbed by the liver and then recycled constantly around the dogs system building up toxicity which can eventually be lethal, giving them a very unpleasant death. Fortunately we knew roughly how long it must have been since they ate it and how much (approx 65g!) so rang the vet straight away.

Of course it being Xmas Eve the only vet on duty was the other side of Bournemouth so we bundled them both into the pet carrier and raced across town. The vet was waiting for us and rushed them straight into the surgery to induce them to vomit up what they had eaten.

Fifteen minutes later he brought them back into the waiting room and informed us that Pepsi was the main offender as he seemed to have eaten most if not all of the chocolate. So poor Max had had to be treated for no good reason, but we couldn't have taken a chance as we simply didn't know who had eaten what. As Ian was paying the bill - a painful £94.00! - I heard Pepsi retching and dashed to get him out of the crate just as he threw up over poor Max's head. We pulled him out far enough to put some paper down under his head to vomit on but then to add insult to injury he started to get diarrhea out the back end which as he was standing just in front of Max again poor Max bore the brunt. We hauled Pepsi out onto the floor of the waiting room and there followed a merry game as we tried to get him to stay still so we could keep the mess he was making to the paper towels we were putting down. Alas it was not to be! I have to say the vet and his assistant were very good about it all. They even took them away again and cleaned them up as best they could.

Of course as soon as we got them home again we gave them a bath each. Max was the first to get the treatment and then it was Pepsi's turn. On coming back into the study with Pepsi we found that Max had crapped in his crate and so it was back in the bath again! This is not what one particularly wants to be doing on Xmas Eve!