Sick as a Dog

Buoy went to the vet on Monday.  She’s a very itchy dog (her skin is exceptionally sensitive) and a few weeks ago she sliced her face scratching it.  We’ve been trying to keep it clean and help it heal, but whenever she scratches she just opens the scab again.  So I had to call in the big guns.

So the vet gives me a spray with antibiotics and steroids for the facial cut and tells me she has a slight yeast infection in her ears (VERY common for cocker spaniels) which is probably why she’s so itchy in the first place.  Then the vet asked me if I had any other issues/questions.  I tentatively mentioned something that has been going on for almost a year…Buoy wets her bed.

Now, she doesn’t WET wet her bed; she marks it.  Almost every night she spends a few minutes (usually after we’ve shut off the light) scratching and arranging her pillow and then squats and urinates a little somewhere on it.  Then she lies down and goes to sleep, occasionally in the spot she wet.

All I can think of is that she’s marking her territory.  And I’ve NEVER heard of a spayed female dog doing that…only male dogs and female dogs in heat.  Buoy has been housebroken for more than a year and always cries when she has to be let out.  But this “marking” happens in three places…her bed, our bed and the big pillow on the floor for her in the living room.

Anyway, I said this to the vet and she immediately got this look on her face and started to feel Buoy’s kidneys.  She asks me if Buoy ever wets herself WHILE she’s asleep (no), if she ever wets the floor or the couch (no) and if she drinks a ridiculous amount of water (no).  The vet tells me she wants to rule out any kind of infection so we need a urine sample from my baby.

Ever collected a urine sample from a dog?  I wouldn’t recommend it.

Since Buoy didn’t have to “go,” we went home and waited awhile.  The vet gave me a flat tray to get the urine when Buoy squats and then a test tube to pour it in.  I put on some plastic gloves and got down to business.  Buoy DID NOT appreciate having a tray under her tail and proceeded to flee and try and pee somewhere else, but I did get a respectable sample after three squats.

So I take the sample back to the vet and wait the 20 minutes it takes to test for infection.  Here’s where my story gets emotional.

My family lost our 16-year-old Lhasa Apso, the dog I grew up with, when I was 12.  After a long search, my parents chose a gun-shy Springer Spaniel puppy a hunter was selling for a song.  My parents especially loved this dog, Ripken, since she was there little girl when my sisters and I started moving away for college.

After seven years and a few occasions where Ripken would wet her bed while she was asleep, one night after dinner her kidneys failed and she died in my mother’s arms on the way to the emergency vet.  My parents blame themselves for not “knowing” something was wrong and still haven’t gotten over it completely.  After almost an entire dog-free year (something my family just doesn’t do) I managed to make my mother go out looking again and they’re now very happy with their Labradoodle Wrigley.

My Husband thinks one of the reasons I chose a spaniel while we were looking for puppies because I want to “redo” the Ripken thing and give it a happier ending.

I ruminated on this the entire 20 minutes I was waiting for Buoy’s test results.

The vet came back and told me Buoy is 100% healthy and has no signs of infection.  As I was breathing my sigh of relief, the vet told me not to get too excited, because this means Buoy’s marking is behavioral and we still have some work to do to figure it out and fix it.

So that’s my story.  Our vet is gonna do some research and try and figure out what’s going on.