Just When We Were Looking On The Bright Side...

The last paragraph on my last post I wrote about how hubby had his trusty companion Raj by his side to help him through this hard time. Well on Sunday night, Fathers Day, we raced our precious boy down to an emergency vet clinic to treat him for tick paralyisis. After noticing a limp which we thought was from him hurting it when playing that afternoon, we thought we would play it safe & search him for ticks. For over an hour we trawled with a torch through all his fur, in his ears, nostrils, every flap in his mouth, his bum but to no avail. We put it down to a sore leg but thought we should monitor him. An hour later, he was staggering across the house & we knew he had to go straight to the vets! By the time we got there he had a very rapid heart beat, a temperature, no swallowing reflex & lost the ability to stand up.

Removal of a small tick on his chest which WE found while in the consultation room resulted in two nights of monitoring & treatment including sedation, an anti-tick poison serum, a tick bath & a shave. Raj is now at home recovering & has a great new hair do which has him resemble a schnauzer, but both my husband & I are still so terrified of how close we were to loosing him. The local vets said they had 14 tick effected admittances over the weekend which is a warning for all of you who take pets for walks in or around bush in tick effected areas. And we were worried about snakes!