I was awakened at 3:30 a.m. this morning by my three-year-old basset hound, Chloe. It had been a late night with my ten-year-old son up until 1:30 a.m. and my husband at work. Chloe was walking across my bedroom floor, choking and wheezing. She sounded like one of my cats does when she has a furball. I flipped on the light and saw Chloe heaving her chest, coughing. She looked up at me with pleading eyes. “Do something, Mommy, help me.” I froze. What do you do for a dog that is choking? I didn’t have a clue.
I’ve been an RN for twenty-five years—most of which has been high adrenaline making ICU and Flight nursing. I could handle pretty much any human emergnecy there was. I had spent years caring for the near-dead, helping to bring them back to life. I did the Heimlich maneuver on my own mother, in a restaurant a week after I graduated from nursing school, when she choked on a raw oyster. I had taken courses in what to do in emergencies when adults, children and babies cardiac arrested or stopped breathing because of choking.
But what do you do for a dog? I’d given anything to know. I’d take a dog CPR course if there were one available. Chloe is three, absolutely healthy, and will get into anything in the trash and eat anything that vaguely resembles food. She’ll steal food off the counters, the table, your plate if you look away and she’s within a few feet of you. Other than her compulsive stealing of food, she’s very well-behaved and listens to us, especially me. So when she looked at me, her tail still wagging, I felt helpless and totally worthless to my sweet baby girl.
I got out of bed and rubbed her throat and stomach. After fifteen or twenty minutes, she stopped coughing. I looked in her mouth, it was clear. She wasn’t drooling. I wished so much I had a stethoscope to listen to her lungs. But she curled up next to me and fell asleep. I sat, with an Ambien in my hand, wondering if it was safe to take it. I wouldn’t be able to take her to the Emergency Veterinary Clinic if I took it. I looked at my sleeping dog, who looked like nothing at all had happened and swallowed the pill. I called my husband at work, as a respiratory therapist of all things. He didn’t know what he would have done either. That comforted me somehow. I’m not the only one who felt helpless when one of our pets get sick. I lay my head down and went to sleep.
This morning, Chloe was up and outside playing when my husband woke me up. Chloe was fine, he reported. She ate her breakfast, had some water and went outside. I, on the other hand, woke up with a massive migraine headache. It reminded me of when my son was a baby and he’d get sick at night while my husband was at work. I was all alone and I was the one they turned to, to help them or comfort them. It’s a lot of responsibility, human or dog. I’m just glad Chloe is okay and I’ll be calling my vet on Monday to see if there are CPR courses for dog owners. I want to be ready if this ever happens again.
