We find out Sago's are toxic, day 2

It was day two and Lucky seemed OK first thing in the morning. He did not eat but drank a lot. I went upstairs to work and it was 8 AM.

About an hour later the handyman came over. Lucky seemed a bit lethargic. He did not greet him like he normally would. I tell him what happened and that it looked like Lucky still had a tummy ache.

I go back upstairs to work. I am a technical person and look up everything on the internet. But it is only NOW that it occurs to me to look up Sago's. OMG! What I find is scary but I don't get the impression it is life threatening. I call the vet right away and the tech says there's and appt at 4 PM or I can bring him in now if seems bad. I said, he just seems tired so I'd seem them at 4 PM. Obviously I just did not understand.

At 11 AM I take lunch and go outside with the handyman because we are going to the hardware store to buy things for the new deck, that would take 1 hour. I tell him what I found out about Sago's. He is a retired science teacher so he gets it. He says, "I'll work on other things so you can take the dog now, I think he needs to go now." Hmmm, I had checked on him 10 min ago and he was fine but now I'm scared so I go back in the house to get him and he can't get up, can't walk. We rush to the vet.

We love our vet, we go to Banfield and all the dogs are on a plan. There are usually 4 vets and we see two of them. Since I don't know if I need permission to use their names I will call them Dr. M and Dr. V. Dr. V had treated Koko since we got her and she treated Lucky when he was born. Somewhere along the line we got Dr. M for an ear infection that would not go away. Wanting to make sure we always saw the same person because these ear infections can be bad in cockers we ended up seeing Dr. M 95% of the time. When he is not there we always ask for Dr. V, we lover her too. Well we saw Dr. M when we took Lucky in and he explained to me how toxic Sago's are. He got him started on fluids and told me that Lucky would have to go to an ER hospital for the night since they only had someone on sight till 7 PM and he wanted Lucky monitored. Dr. M explained to me that there was no way to contradict the poison. All we could do was make him as comfortable as possible and do whatever we could to help him fight the pioson. I left Lucky in his care and went home in shock.

I got back on the internet and tried other searches. I got the ASPCA's warning and other web sites. I researched all day. Where were the success stories?

At 7 PM my husband and I went to get Lucky to take him to the ER. They were waiting for him. My husband asked the vet if she'd seen other dogs like this and did they survive. She said, she had seen too many and most did not survive.
Everything was OK until I had to sign the resuscitation order. We got three choices.
1. Do nothing (this was free)
2. Do what can be done up to $250.00
3. Do everything possible. (Over $500.00)

Now I don’t recall the exact wording but this was the gist of it and their were prices next to each option as I have done here (the first two are correct). I’m sure they have done this because people ask how much this will cost all the time. But it was not about money for me. It was about hurting him, prolonging the inevitable, making sure he did not suffer. I had went through this with my son but no prices had been displayed. My decision for Lucky was based on the same choices.

So this is the point where I breakdown, I start sobbing and can’t sign the paper. I had time to make this choice for my son but with Lucky there had not been enough time to understand if he could get better. I tell my husband he has to do it. Now you have to understand that my husband was already in shock about the estimated cost of 12 hours at this hospital (about $1500). He had never had pets as a child and complained about the dogs all the time but I knew his heart. So he signed for them to do everything they could to save him. We left and neither one of us got any sleep, we called the vet a few times to see how he was doing throughout the night. They said, he was doing well and even ate a little bit of food.