Just about each and every autumn in Chez Harrison, we get a little mouse activity. To remedy this, I will put out bait and traps both. Usually I throw the bait around the basement in areas where the dogs can't find it, and under the kitchen sink where there is a garbage can full of tasty treats for a hungry rodent. For some reason this year, I put a bait block in the bottom of my pantry which was stupid on two parts. A) There was no evidence of vermin in the pantry, so why the hell would I want to lure them into an area where I keep my food? B) The dogs are constantly looking for any container of food carelessly left open by the minors in the household. This is why Clark weighs 125 pounds-way too many opportunities to eat an entire loaf of bread (or two, if I've recently stocked up at the grocery store) in one sitting.
So, I'm in the habit of checking the baits and/or traps in the morning when I wake up, and in the evening when I return home from work. Generally, after one week, there are no more mice and I'm good until the following October. Yesterday morning, I carefully placed a bait block in the pantry. A little voice(aka common sense) told me, "Don't do it, Amy. You know how those dogs get when an opportunity presents itself." I ignored the little voice, and set about on my mission to eradicate mice. I returned home from work, checked the bait and noted that the visitor to the sink trash can would soon be buying a farm. I then checked the pantry. No bait. Hmmm, maybe the visitor pushed it further back behind the coffee urn or crock pot. I made a mental note to check it after supper.
Nori continued to sniff around the pantry all night long. After supper, I cleared out the pantry and found no evidence of the block I had set out earlier. shitshitshitshit. I told Steve, "I have a bad feeling that Nori might have eaten the mouse poison I put in the pantry."
He responded with my least favorite expression, the one that is a combination of disbelief and profound disappointment. "Why would you put POISON in the pantry where we keep our FOOD?"
I called Nori over to my side and pried her jaws open. Her back teeth were caked with the telltale green of mouse bait. fuckfuckfuckfuckfuck
At this point, I became hysterical, convinced I had both killed a dog AND put our family in mortal danger. "I didn't put the bait anywhere near the food! It was down by the appliances and pans!" I was shrieking and my mouth was dry. I called the emergency vet, they insisted I must bring her in. Oh, and by then, it was ten o'clock. I began the Google search, looking up the side effects of poison ingestion. Not pretty, internal bleeding, hemorrhaging, painful death.
pleasegodohpleasedon'tletmehavekilledthissweetlittledog
So, I threw Nori into the truck for another trip to the vet. We arrived and a family was in a group embrace in the parking lot, sobbing loudly, no doubt over the fate of their own beloved pet. I was trembling at this point. Nori? Ecstatic to be at a location with lots of potential friends! Jumping up and down, straining against her leash. We went inside and I gave the receptionist all the pertinent information. She put us in a private room, away from the cat who had some horrible respiratory distress, the standard poodle who ate a pile of wood chips and was coughing as if he had croup, and the malamute who kept making the loudest dry heaving sounds I've ever heard. I continued to listen to that sound through the door for the next hour and a half as I sat on a very hard plastic chair waiting for a doctor to examine my hyper (and oblivious to her fate) little girl.
The doctor came in, I admitted to being the worst dog owner in the world and awaited his judgment and wrath. He wrote down the offending poison-bromadialone, and told me he would check to see if she would need the Vitamin K injections to offset the certainly fatal ingestion or if we should attempt to induce vomiting. Ten minutes later, he returned and announced she would have needed to ingest 100 grams of bait per kilogram of her own weight in order to be in a real health crisis. (one gram equals a raisin...she's fifty-five pounds...one kilogram is about two and a half pounds...)I attempeted the algebraic formula and metric conversion in my very clouded brain and looked at him with a befuddled expression, "Layman's terms?"
"She would have needed to eat 100 bars of the bait to be in real danger of developing an anti-clotting issue."
*blink*
What?
One.hundred.bars?
So, I just threw down one hundred DOLLARS and two HOURS of my life that I'll never get back, and you could have told me this on the PHONE? Don't you think you should keep a little flow chart or reference book at the receptionist desk that would spare this kind of trip? Fifty-five pound dog ingests less than a gram of a toxin. Meh, don't worry. Keep a close eye, if she starts to bleed out her eyes or butt, give us a call.
No, I didn't say any of those things. But when he asked me if I wanted to spend another $100 on the vitamin K regimen, "just to be safe" I told him to bite me.
Okay, I didn't. But I really wanted to.