Sick as a dog!

My best friend has got billiary.

Poor Scruffy (not his real name... that's my pet name for him) is in so much pain he can hardly walk at the moment.

We rushed him through to the vet last week - and he curled up in a ball by my feet in the car - directly under the aircon airstream, and hardly even noticed the ride... except to get sick almost immediately... as he /always/ does in the car. The cold air lowered his fever considerably, and by the time we got to the vet I thought I'd been mistaken.

We took him to the state vets, and dear sister Amelia gave him such love and affection... and 8 seperate shots, plus a tasty vitamin drink.

She gave me 8 more syringes to puncture him with the following day.

Shame. He howled like a baby pin cushion.

I dunno though... if he's gonna be alright . . . I mean there was a noticeable improvement by the following day... but it's over a week now and he seems to be deteriorating a bit. We had to cut our usual walk short today because he was hobbling along like a crippled old dog. He's still eating though, which is good, but he doesn't particularly like the chicken livers I'm feeding him.

Thing is I don't know how long it'll take him to recover, nor how to treat him after those initial injections. The state vet was R120 for the consultation and meds... and I simply can't afford to take him to a real vet. Not that I think much of the so called real vets in Umtata anyway. When Shakira broke her tail he tied the bandage with a knot... and then gave her a pain killer injection after the fact... I only had R170 on me . . . and he took it all and seemed like he wanted to charge a lot more. I know in Durban a consultation was like about R300 at least. Oh well.

Can't find much info on billiary on the interweb... they don't seem to get it in the Northern hemisphere... the source of most of our intellectual capital. *sigh*