Mostly just need to vent about this.But first some context to help understand the story: I have lived in Thailand for 15 years. It is very nice here. My wife and I have been married for five years and we have a wonderful 2 year old daughter.We bought a townhouse two years ago and during the remodeling, our next-door neighbor caused us a lot of problems. She would constantly call government inspectors to our house with nonsense complaints, forcing my then-pregnant wife to enter a house full of construction dust. However, after a final confrontation with the old lady about her behavior, we have managed not to talk to her at all for nearly two years.One other thing to help understand the context. In Thailand, street dogs are a very common thing. Most streets will have two to five dogs living on them. Some are a nuisance but others are quite nice and act almost like a shared pet for the neighborhood.I have my own dog (that I found inside a 7-11 after he got hit by a car), but there were two dogs living on our street too, Brown and Black. So even though we did not get along with our neighbor, we did kind of share the dogs (along with everyone else on our street). The old lady would sometimes let the dogs stay in the car park of her townhouse and I would often feed Brown.I actually liked Brown better than my dog (my dog is a lab mix, so he is a happy idiot) because he was smart as a whip, but unfortunately, he was also a stray-cat-killer and I had two cats in my house, so I couldn't adopt him completely. But he did adore me and was always eager to play with my daughter when we took our dog for a walk.OK, now the problem:Last week, my daughter had an eye infection with pus coming out of the corners of her eye. She likes to rub her eyes, so we assumed it was just some dirty fingers getting in there and according to the web, the best treatment was just to clean it and see if it got better on its own.And she has improved, but she seemed a bit more fussy than usual and she was taking longer than normal naps (3 hours!).Then on Tuesday, we came home and I heard a loud yelping coming from our neighbor's car park. It was Brown and he looked like he was in a great deal of pain. Since we don't talk to the old lady, I asked our other neighbors about it.The other neighbors told me they thought the dog might have been hit by a car. "So why didn't someone take it to the vet?" I asked, "why is it just being left there to die?"They didn't know, but they told us that the dog had been in there for two days. TWO DAYS!!Now I was pissed. So we rang the old lady's bell and made her open the gate so I could check the dog. He didn't seem injured but his eyes were all milky and he seemed to have brain damage. Did someone run over his head? Nobody seemed to know what had happened.My wife said the old lady seemed to be making excuses and making up a story about not seeing the car that hit the dog. So we think that she mistakenly believed she hit the dog with her car, and then just left him in the carpark to die because she didn't want to pay the vet bills to get him fixed up.I wanted to move the dog to the car, but I was worried about spine damage, so I found a wooden board and laid it down next to him. The poor dog actually struggled to stand himself up so he could get on the board. It broke my heart to see him do that. Even out of his head with pain, he still knew what I wanted him to do and sought to be helpful. What a great dog!I carried him to our other neighbor's car and we drove him to the vet. The vet said he wasn't injured, and that it looked like a viral infection. Oh oh.Over the weekend, he gets sick. Over the weekend, my daughter got sick. I did not like that coincidence.Here's a picture of both of their eyes. You can see the similarity in the infections.I left for a bit, but when I got back to the vet, the neighbor was wearing gloves and cleaning the dog's eyes while she waited in the queue. Why the gloves? Because the dog might be rabid.... shit.So after meeting with the vet and getting the dog tested for Canine Distemper (negative), we had to weigh our options. The most likely culprit was a bacterial infection that caused encephilitis (swelling of the brain), making the dog act weird and manic.Treatment was possible, but after having an infection fry his brain for two days, it was unlikely he would recover completely. Plus there was the specter of rabies. If he had rabies and licked my daughter's hand or face, it was possible he could transmit it. Maybe. The vet wouldn't say for sure.The vet, probably because she was a Buddhist, didn't want us to euthanize the dog. She suggested we take it home and give it medicine, and then if it died, we could check the brain for rabies. But no way in hell was I going to put medicine in a potentially rabid dog's mouth, plus we'd already been delayed a few days because the old lady hid the dog, so I didn't want to wait longer.So we had to put him down to get his brain tested for rabies. Then we immediately took our daughter to the hospital that night to start her rabies treatment.The next day, I had to go pick up the dog's head and take it to the Red Cross hospital, because that's where they do the infectious disease tests. After 24 hours, we got our answer. Yes, the dog was rabid.So that triggered a public health alert. The next day, a van full of doctors and nurses showed up and interviewed everyone in the neighborhood (except the old lady who was "conveniently" not home at the time). The also gave free rabies vaccines to all the pets in the neighborhood, and drove around with a loudspeaker on a truck to let everyone know. After that, they will sweep through every street within 3 kilometers and euthanize every stray they find.All of which, of course, should have been down DAYS EARLIER, but none of us knew their was a problem, because our f'ing crazy old lady neighbor locked an infectious, suffering, and dying dog in her carpark for two days. Right next to the cage where I keep my dog. And since she didn't tell anyone, we didn't connect the dots and guess that a dog might be responsible for my daughter's eye infection or that she might have been exposed to f'ing rabies.Right now, the only thing we can do is pray that we started the treatments in time. We cannot even be sure that my daughter had contact with the dog when it was infectious, but the eye infections are a coincidence we cannot ignore.I am just so angry right now, because getting the treatments started as soon as possible is key to making sure our daughter doesn't die a horrible death. And our neighbor selfishly kept the dog hidden from everyone, delaying the start of treatment for everyone.Oh yeah, and since I held the dog's head when carrying to the vet (because at the time, I thought it had been hit by a car), I may also be infected. So yeah, great...Oh and the other black dog is still missing. Who knows how many animals he might have infected because of this delay.Yeah, so to say I am furious is an understatement. via /r/Parenting http://ift.tt/2Ef5C3f
No comments:
Post a Comment