when it rains, it pours

Well, this weekend was certainly fun for this family. NOT. lol. I guess the sayings Murphy's Law, when it rains it pours, etc are made up for a reason! Let's rewind to a couple of weeks ago and start with Maverick. He was fine one minute, I let him outside with Sydney to play, the next minute, he came inside, laid down for a nap, then all of the sudden started yelping everytime he moved again. It immediately reminded me of last year when he did the EXACT same thing and I had to rush him to the emergency vet at 4am. It turned out to be pancreatitis and after LOTS of IV fluids, anti-imflammatory meds, and some pain pills, he turned out to be ok. We were instructed to give him NO human food as the fats in them can trigger his pancreas to inflame and start the process all over again. We have been doing really good with him and haven't had any flare up's until this point. So, here I go calling all the emergency vets in town. Wouldn't you know, this all happened around noon, which is apparently lunchtime for every single vets office in town and NOBODY was in the office. Finally around 1pm, I get ahold of a vets office about an hour away who can take him immediately. So, I take Avery up to Matt's work (thank God he can watch her for me) and off to the vet I go. We will just say I spent FOUR hours there. I was just a little irritated. However, his flare up was NOT pancreatitis, weird huh? Exact same symptoms, exact same everything actually and nope! They even ran a test that tests specifically for pancreatitis and it came back negative. Turns out, it's his liver! His enzyme counts were really high for his liver and the vet isn't sure if he just has an abnormally high enzyme counts (she said some dogs do) or if it really was just a flare up. They gave him IV fluids again and some pain medicine. I was told to feed this special food (Science Diet ID) that is specifically made for dogs with sensitive digestive tracts. He also has to take a Vitamin E supplement daily to help his counts out. So, I brought him home and we did everything they've told us and haven't had a flare up since! He has to go back to the vets office next month for a re-check and some more blood work. If his enzyme counts are still abnormally high, then they are just going to diagnose him with abnormally high counts lol. If they have come down, then I guess we just keep doing what we're doing? Either way, it will clear some stuff up, so we'll see what happens!
Fast forward to this Thursday. I wake up with a sore throat (awesome). I've had a really really long history of strep throat since I was little. In fact, I don't get sore throats, it goes straight to strep. It's fun, really. So, I pretty much felt like crap the whole day. I could feel my fever coming on and my throat swelling up. I took some advil hoping it would go away. So, Avery is down for a nap and I'm sitting out here in the living room relaxing when I notice Sydney acting funny. She starts puking up the worst smelling stuff I have ever smelled in my life and then runs outside and has tons of diahrrhea (I know, it's gross, stop reading now if you have a weak stomach haha). Poor thing just couldn't stop. We put her in a crate on the floor Thursday night to sleep instead of in our bed and every few hours she'd start scratching the cage until we let her outside, where she'd proceed to do it all over again. Friday morning rolls around and she's just acting SO funny. She would sit in the middle of the living room and just stare at something and not move. The final straw came when I fed the dogs breakfast and Sydney didn't even touch her bowl (if you know Sydney at all, you know this is EXTREMELY abnormal for her)! She is usually pushing Maverick out of the way to eat his food AFTER she has ate hers. Then, she proceeds to drink the entire bowl of water. When I refill, she drinks that bowl too. I know something is wrong by this point, so I call her local vet and thank goondess they are open and say I can bring her in right away. So here I go, still not feeling great myself, with a baby, and a sick dog up to the vets office. They run some tests on Sydney and find out she has intestinal bleeding :( They have no idea what caused it (it could be a number of things). She had lots of blood in her stool. The vet told me she had this condition that I still cannot pronounce (it was about 1000 letters long) where basically her body was pulling water AWAY from her intestines and the intestines were just secreting blood. Her body was trying to get rid of all the excess water it was pulling out, hence the vomiting & diahrrhea. In turn, she was VERY thirsty, explaining the excessive water drinking. So, method of choice to fix all this was to leave her at the vet hospital overnight. They would do "intensive" fluids on her & keep her levels monitored. The vet told me if we had taken her home or not brought her in at all, she would have "crashed" shortly after. I got in the car to leave and burst into tears. I was so upset that she was THAT sick and we had no idea.
At this point, I'm so exhausted, I go home, put Avery down for a nap, and lay down myself. It was only about an hour later, my phone rings and it's Matt. His shop at work was working down on Piney Green Road helping people with the tornado damage, and somehow he cut his finger open. He was on the way to the doctors office. Two hours later, he was on his way home complete with 4 stitches! It really was an awesome Thursday in this house, let me tell you.
So-UPDATES! Sydney came home yesterday (friday morning) and the vet said she's doing MUCH better. She ate lots of solid foods and "came out of the critical phase quickly" his words, not mine. She's back to her healthy happy self and running around like nothing happened. Matt's hand is healing up well and he should get his stitches out next week sometime. I'm still feeling pretty crappy but I did go to Urgent Care yesterday and get some meds, so I should be feeling better soon!

I will post more picture of our photoshoot here soon, they came out SO good!