It seemed as though Dwayne’s tail was not in its usual upright position. He appeared to not be his usual perky self. Off to Casa Lupita clinic to try to find out what was bothering our poochie. Pedro our dogwalker seemed to think that Dwayne’s recent lack of enthusiasm for his daily walk was “in his head.”
Claudio who works at the clinic, does not have a formal veterinarian degree, does however run the clinic and is very good at diagnosing problems. He discovered that Dwayne has a gum infection due to the fact that he probably has not had enough big bones to chew on and keep his gums healthy. Ok, so he gets antibiotics, a shot and has to come back the next day to be sedated and have his teeth cleaned. Its also recommended that we take Dwayne to Managua to the diagnostic clinic to have his blood tested.
Saturday we get a taxi and pop both dogs in with us and off we go to the clinic. We decide to get both dogs tested and it turns out that they both have parasites in their blood. Quite a common yet potentially dangerous occurrence in dogs here. The parasites come from ticks. Even though we gave our dogs parasite prevention medicine and frontline tick treatment, seems that they both have high white blood counts. A few hours later, armed with a bag of different medicines for the two of them, which we realize will require a spreadsheet to check off their daily and weekly medications for the next month. What fun but luckily we seem to have caught this in time before the dogs have been negatively impacted other than Dwayne being anaemic. Hence the daily vitamin supplements!
The kittens (Salvador, Henri and Georgia) have all been adopted by new homes, leaving the chosen Frieda to remain in our casa with Pablo the main head cat. Frieda, formerly a very scared kitten who lived under the bed for a week, is now following Pedro up onto the roof tiles for some excitment and hardly flinches when Mango comes close. Nevermind that the cleaning woman thinks she is “fea” (ugly) I, think she is beautiful, sweet and smart. So, at most recent count, two dogs and two cats.