What Goes On Behind the Brown Door…

We got a call a couple Sunday evenings ago asking if Bettina could come and donate some blood.  The Emergency Vet sounded a little desperate for someone to bleed into a bag for them so I figured why not.  I fed the kids dinner, settled Blue into his crate, turned on the webcam and headed out with Bettina in tow.

We got to the emergency vets and the parking lot was full up.  That is a bad sign with respect to getting in and out in a timely manner.  I squeezed into the last parking space available and we went in.  All of their exam rooms were full up and there were a couple people waiting out in the lobby on the hard wooden bench for their turn to be seen.  While we were there 3 more people came in. 

So stoned she forgot she had a biscuit
in her mouth.

We took our place on the bench from hell.  It was about 45 minutes before they took Bettina in.  The vet tech told me they were going to type and cross match her.  They typically do this just before they take her blood so I handed her over and considered myself lucky that we only had to wait 45 minutes considering the queue of injured pets to be seen.

After I had sat out in the lobby for about an hour I started hearing a moaning howl followed by some indignant whining.  I would know Bettina’s voice anywhere.  I asked the front desk lady if that were Bettina making all that noise and she told me it wasn’t.  As I sat there, the noise continued and got louder.  The howls got more strident and more frequent.  I looked at the lady at the front desk and she went out back to check.  She came back out with a sheepish look on her face and said she had been mistaken, that it was indeed Bettina. 

Bettina doesn’t love getting sedated but I had never heard her complain so much about a blood donation.  As I sat there and listened to her heart breaking howls I began to imagine all sorts of terrible things going wrong with this donation.  I started to feel like a terrible mumma handing over my sweet baby to undergo what sounded like 8^th circle of hell type torture.  I kept looking at the lady at the front desk.  She was smiling weakly at me.

I began weighing the pros and cons of blood donation and considering whether the good deed was worth the pain that Bettina seemed to be going through.  Why would I voluntarily force my poor dog to do this.  She didn’t really have a choice.  I was mentally preparing what I would say to the blood donation coordinator on Monday when I called her to let her know I just couldn’t put my dog through that again.

In the meantime, Bettina was howling and whining louder and louder.  I reached a point where I was considering just going in there, putting a stop to whatever they were doing and taking her out of there immediately.  Each howl was stabbing at my heart.  I felt terrible.  My eyes started to tear up until finally I looked at the lady at the front desk and said, “I think it would help if I went back there and sat with her.” 

Stoned or not, Bettina never met a biscuit she didn't like

I was determined to get her through this and we would never go back again.  The lady at the front desk went out back and she was gone for a bit.  This made me even more nervous.  I was debating just busting through the door to the back room and liberating my hound super-hero style.  Just as I was preparing to get up from the bench, out came the lady.  “Oh they’re going to start the blood donation now, she should be done in 30 minutes.”

Miss Thing had not been crying because she was in pain, or had discomfort during her donation.  She was not being tortured under sedation.  She was raising a god awful ruckus because they had needed to put her in one of the kennels in the very back while they handled the rush.  She was very indignant at having been left by herself in a crate.  And she was telling us ALL about it.  A few minutes after the front desk lady told me her donation was about to begin, her highness shut her pie hole and was silent for the rest of the donation.

In about 30 minutes they brought her out to me, a little woozy and sporting a lovely pressure bandage around her neck.  The vet told me that they actually had a patient in house who was getting a Bettina transfusion at that moment.  That was the first time we’d actually been there on site when her blood was needed.  I sheepishly took her leash in hand, wished the transfused pup a speedy recovery and told them we’d see them next time.