Elvis the Cat

There's nothing especially feline about our dog Elvis, except that he seems to have nine lives.  These incidents are all from ages 1-1/2 to 8 -- count along with me:

1.  Shortly after finishing his show career (at not quite 2 years old) he had a seizure -- a full-blown, flopping on the ground, incontinent, eyes-rolled-up seizure, for about a minute.  It freaked us out, as you'd imagine.  The emergency vet diagnosed it as epilepsy.

He got into a pattern of having clusters of these every 4-6 weeks, for a couple of years.  The specialist vet we were referred to ultimately got him onto the right doses of a couple of meds he gets with every meal, and now he's been seizure-free for over 3 years.  But early on it could have killed him.

2.  I still haven't broken him of his habit of stealing food off of the kitchen counters.  One time he got a bag of chocolate chips and ate over a pound -- he got sick as, well, a dog.  Our vet kept him hydrated with an IV, and in a couple of days he rallied and was able to come home.

3.  While running through the woods up in Wisconsin he managed to run right into a barbed wire fence, cutting his foreleg badly.  Despite all the bleeding we were able to get him out of the woods and to a vet up there, where he was stitched up.

4.  He got into some kitchen garbage and managed to chew up and swallow some chicken bones, leading to surgery #1.  We took him in right away, which was a good thing, as the x-ray showed some menacing jagged pieces working their way through him.

5.  Surgery #2 came after he'd gotten out of the yard and into the garbage across the street at the senior citizens' home (we later learned).  It took a couple of days before we noticed he was under the weather; when it was clear he was really sick we took him in, and the x-ray showed a digestive obstruction.  He had eaten a plastic glove, the kind you see cafeteria workers wear, and it had balled up inside his intestines and blocked everything.  We talked to our vet about installing a zipper instead of sewing him back up, but it wasn't feasible.

6.  That's too bad, as surgery #3 came last summer.  He got out of the yard, and apparently into some garbage -- yes, a recurring patern.  After a couple of days he showed the telltale signs, and we took him in, and an x-ray showed an intestinal blockage, and we grudgingly agreed to surgery, which removed a corncob, and saved his life yet again.

7.  Sort of the same story this past fall, except he managed to pass whatever it was making him sick, and didn't need surgery -- just a couple of nights at the emergency vet.

So I guess he's got two lives left.  During the last couple of these incidents I really waffled on taking him in, vs. "letting things run their course".  But he's a member of the family, especially as far as the kids are concerned, so that would have seemed really harsh.  My other rationalization is how much better this is than having a sick kid; that works for me, although if I ever added up the bills  I'm not sure it would...

Pat