We had quite the eventful evening with the puppy last night. And I don’t mean oh-that-was-exciting! eventful; I mean oh-that-was-scary-(and-expensive)! eventful.

My parents are closing on a house today in my town today (yay! They will be so close!), so yesterday I helped them with the final packing and loading push for their move. I left the pups at home since we would be opening my parents’ front door a lot, and they live very close to a main road.

I was gone for a total of about 6 hours, which is a long time for me to be away from the pups, but Brian’s mom had come over at one point to let them out, so I knew they had had a bit of company during the day.

When I got home, I noticed that Ryder and Tansy’s big bag of dog food was on the ground. (Jethro has his own puppy food, which was in the pantry.) The bag had been up on a stool in the kitchen when I left in the morning, so I thought it was odd, but there wasn’t any food spilled on the ground and the bag still seemed full, so I just put it back up on the stool and didn’t think much of it.

Around 7:00 pm, when it was time to feed the dogs dinner, I noticed that Jethro was just kind of sniffing his food, but not eating it. This was odd. He usually devours his food. Then I noticed that his belly was very big. Like, really bulging and distended.

I know I can be a bit of an alarmist, but I was worried about my little Jethro. I know that bloat is a very serious condition in dogs, and that things can go downhill quickly if a dog has it, and I was scared that that’s what he had.

Brian was about 10 minutes away at a pub he hangs out at after his Thursday night runs. It is his one night out every week, and he always looks forward to it, so I hesitated calling him – but Jethro just wasn’t acting like himself. So I called him and told him to come home.

Brian came home right away, took a look at Jethro, felt his stomach and said, “Let’s take him to the vet.” Brian is my go-to calming force, so it was unsettling to hear the concern in his voice.

The ride to the emergency vet took about 15 minutes, but it felt like 15 hours. We even got stuck behind a backhoe with its hazards on for a few minutes, of course. On the way to the vet, I called ahead to let them know we were coming, and what was going on. I was obsessively checking Jethro’s gums to see if they were getting pale (another sign of bloat), but luckily they weren’t.

When we got to the vet, it was pretty quiet. We signed Jethro in and he was taken in the back right away. Brian and I sat down and I noticed that they had the May issue of The Bay Magazine there. I had written an article for the publication and hadn’t yet seen it in print, so I was at least able to take a look at it and show it to Brian, taking our minds off of worrying about Jethro for a few minutes.

They took some X-rays of his stomach, then the vet tech came over and asked us if he had eaten a ton of food recently because his stomach was FILLED with it. My mind went right back to that big bag of dog food I suspiciously found on floor when I had gotten home earlier. It hadn’t seemed like a lot of food was missing from the bag, but then again, I hadn’t really pay much attention to it at the time because the bag wasn’t tipped over at all.

We all concluded Jethro he must have knocked the bag from the stool to the ground and eaten until he felt sick. The poor little guy!

The vet said he would somehow need to get rid of all that food, so to take him home, keep a close eye on him, and be prepared to pick up a lot of digested food from whichever end it came out. Developing bloat was still a concern, so no excessive water drinking, no breakfast, and no playing or roughhousing. Oh, yes, that last one should be very easy with an 8-month-old puppy!

Thankfully, Jethro had an uneventful night and his stomach was considerably smaller this morning. As I type this, he is resting on his pillow and seems to be just fine. We will continue to keep a close eye on him – and we will keep our little hound far, far away from big bags of food.