A Nightmare

There are three things in my life that I am terrified of:  having my dogs hit by a car,  a house fire with my pets in the house, and poisoning of my dogs .  So far, none of my dogs have been hit by a car.  I’ve already lived through a house fire. Then this past spring, I lived through one of the worst experiences of my life with my dogs, antifreeze.

I got home late from a surprisingly dogless afternoon and let the crew out before dinner. After a few minutes of stretching their legs I called them back for dinner, which was inhaled in seconds.  And as Labs, they soon went into a food induced nap.

While I was sitting in my recliner, reclined and half asleep, a loud crash startled me out of my half slumber.  Thinking that it was just one of the dogs falling off the couch while they were asleep, which they've done before, I didn't think anything of it.  Until Deacon crashed loudly into the crate behind my chair. That had me leaping up to find out what the heck was going on.

Deacon was standing there swaying as if he’d hit his head and had his bell rung.  I tried to get him to walk it off, to see if he could regain his balance.  But he didn’t, it just kept getting worse. He stumbled around the living room getting more ataxic by the second. He was knuckling over, crossing his back legs and when he stood in place, he just swayed like a tree in a high wind.

 I could feel the bile burning the back of my throat, the nausea was so overwhelming.  This wasn’t a seizure, which was bad enough. No, he had to have been poisoned.  And the only thing that makes a dog stumble around like a sailor on a three day binge is antifreeze.

I called one of my team mates (she’s a licensed veterinary technician and she also worked at an emergency clinic) because, while I can keep my cool and work on anyone else’s dog in an emergency, I immediately turn into a quivering pile of Jello if my own dog is in trouble.  Unable to string two coherent thoughts together, let alone think of what I am supposed to do next, she, surprisingly, understood what I was trying to say.  Me, I wasn't real sure I was making any sense. All I could hear was my heart beating in my throat and then the overwhelming urge to puke. 

I finally got myself together enough to get Deacon into the truck and headed down the road to the Shenandoah Valley Emergency Veterinary Clinic.

Danielle met me there, I calmed immeasurably; something about shared terror.  We were the only ones in the waiting room so there was no waiting.  I told them to not even examine Deacon, just do the damn antifreeze test. Because I knew in my mind it was going to be positive, even though my heart refused to believe it was a possibility. 

Five minutes later, and I was right. They whisked him to the back to get him started on his three day treatment.  And I headed home to come down from that incredibly stressful evening.

I settled in to finish the rest of the “Big Bang Theory” dvd, when Darcy comes stumbling into the living room.  The first thought that went through my mind was, “You have GOT to be kidding!”.  And called Danielle on the way down to the clinic. It seems that I was winning the unlucky lottery, because Darcy also tested positive for antifreeze.  At first, I thought I was over reacting, taking her to get tested for antifreeze, that she all she really did was get her toenails stuck in the carpet and that was why she stumbled. Nope, that wasn’t the case, so she got to spend the rest of the weekend as Deacon’s roommate.

Two in a row; that was too much of a coincidence.  I asked the DVM that was taking care of my two if I could take home the rest of the antifreeze test strips test the remaining three dogs. Not really believing that they would test positive.

Danielle followed me home to help me draw blood on the dogs left at home.  By this time it was past midnight.  Neither one of us were very coherent.

Every. Single. One. Of them came up positive.

All I could do was sit there and stare at the test results in despair. How could this happen, WHO could be so cruel to do this to my dogs? While I was paralyzed with disbelief, Danielle jumped into action. She drove back to the EC and started grabbing things off the shelf, the most important: a bottle of Everclear grain alcohol, I'll explain why later.

She may have been half asleep but she knew what we needed to turn my dining room into an emergency clinic treatment room.

That began the 3 longest days of my life.  Basically, it was either Danielle or I up the entire time.  Monitoring the IV lines, switching bags back and forth, taking them out to pee, cleaning up after them when they couldn’t make it out, replacing IV lines when they pulled them, cleaning up the blood from the catheters when they pulled the administration sets out, cleaning up the vomit. Tally was the worst, even in her drunken haze, she still managed to rip not only the extension set from the catheter, but the entire catheter out of her vein.  Blood went everywhere. I couldn’t have done this without Danielle! 

There are three stages to ethylene glycol (antifreeze) toxicity.  The first stage is drunkeness. EG acts just like alcohol, so if the dog drinks enough to be poisoned by it, there is enough to make him drunk.  The dog then appears to recover before heading into stage 2.  At this point cardiac symptoms appear.  Third stage is when we vets usually end up seeing them.  This is when the kidneys have shut completely down and can't produce urine anymore.  And there is nothing that can be done at this stage.  Kidney failure is complete and irreversible. 

To treat EG intoxication, you need to understand a little of how it works in the body.  Because it isn't the antifreeze that is toxic, it's the metabolites that are deadly. In particular, the final metabolite called Calcium Oxalate.  That nasty by-product settles out in the kidney and destroys them.

EG is an alcohol, very similar to regular alcohol.  In fact it is so similar, that several Austrian wine producers added it to their wines to make it sweeter and heavier.  Austrian wine scandal  When first ingested, ethylene glycol will cause the animal to appear drunk (first stage).  It then latches on to the enzyme, alcohol dehydrogenase (ADH), which metabolizes regular alcohol into fairly innocuous by products.   But when EG attaches itself to ADH all kinds of badness ensues, by-products produced include metaldehyde (a cousin of formaldehyde) and worse, Calcium Oxalate crystals.  The good news, though, is EG is basically harmless if it passes through the kidneys unmetabolized.  And in order for that to happen, it can't get attached to ADH.  That's the reason for the Everclear, 190 proof clear grain alcohol.  Regular alcohol has a higher affinity for ADH than antifreeze, that means that the dogs have to go on a three day drunk to keep that enzyme occupied and let the antifreeze pass through unchanged.

You can't make a dog drink enough alcohol to treat the antifreeze, so I had to make up an IV infusion, using a formula that gave me 20% alcohol in an IV bag.  For all 5 dogs, I ended up using almost an entire liter of Everclear.  It sounds simple, just get your dog drunk and let the antifreeze pass through.  The problem is I could over dose the dogs and then I'd have to deal with alcohol poisoning.  And having them drop into an alcohol induced coma that could kill them too.  There is a safer way of treating, with a drug called Antizol.  But just my luck, it was on indefinite  back order.

It was a harrowing three days, but we all made it.  The dogs with an incredible hangover and Danielle and I with severe sleep deprivation. It took several days for my house to lose the moonshine stench, and I swear I could smell the grain alcohol on their breath for days. Even their poop smelled like grain alcohol.   Two days after everyone woke up from their hangover, all their blood work was normal. 

It was kind of anti-climactic, but I am ok with that.

Darcy, Tally,Cora, Finn, Deacon

I never did find out where the antifreeze came from.