Mar 21, 2008

Long overdue update, and Mollie goes to the hospital!!

After spending 2 weeks in Santa Fe, including a great seminar at the Santa Fe Photo Workshop,it was time to head towards Tucson for our Life on Wheels conference. We decided to stop in Silver City, New Mexico and spent Sunday just looking around and relaxing.

Sunday evening Mollie was being extra feisty and getting into things she wasn't supposed to. We had some leather gloves laying in a basket on the floor and she pulled one of them out and began to chew on it. When we noticed what she was doing we took the glove from her and realized the nylon care tag inside the glove was in shreds. Mollie seemed to have something caught in her mouth and John saw a string wrapped around her tooth. He started pulling and ended up with 3 foot long string that she had swallowed. We couldn't believe it! Little did we know that this was only the beginning.

Monday morning we left Silver City and drove southeast about 1 1/2 hours to Benson, Arizona.

And soon our week began to get interesting.

Monday evening Mollie came down with a severe case of diarrhea. John was up during the night either taking her out or cleaning up messes when she didn't make it outside in time. We figured she had gotten into something during one of our walks.

Tuesday we arrived at the Pima Community college in Tucson for our Life on Wheels conference. This is a series of seminars aimed towards people who either live full time in their motor home or are planning to. There were people there who were just learning and haven't yet purchased anything, people like us who go on extended trips, and people who live full time in either motor homes, 5th wheel trailers, or travel trailers. There were at least 50 of us dry camping in the parking lot and more who either stayed in local rv parks, or hotels.

Mollie continued to have intestinal problems and started vomiting as well. Tuesday night was a repeat of Monday night. Not much sleep. The seminars started Wednesday morning and we were attending classes all day. Wednesday night Mollie was no better, in fact she was worse. She was restless all night so we once again we didn't get much sleep.

By Thursday morning she would not eat or drink anything. We decided that this was serious so we found an animal clinic that could look at her right away. They ran tests and x-rays and it was decided that she had a blockage in her small intestine. After some serious discussion with the vet, we decided to have them operate on her. She was seriously dehydrated and they started her on an IV before surgery. Since they weren't going to operate until late afternoon, we left her in the care of the vet, who promised to call us when the surgery was over, and headed back to the conference.

Around 4:00 the vet called letting us know that the surgery was successful. Mollie had apparently swallowed some thread and a small stone. Some how it all got wound up together and caused her intestine to bunch up so nothing could pass through. If we had waited another day or so to go see the vet little Mollie would not have survived.

It's now Friday and we finished the LOW conference at noon. Mollie can't come home until tomorrow but they encouraged us to come to the clinic to visit her for a few minutes. It was so good to see her but she's still on IV fluids and pain meds so she was a bit "out of it".

This afternoon we moved the RV south to Amato, about 40 miles south of Tucson. If everything goes well we will drive the jeep to Tucson in the morning to pick Mollie up and bring her home.

We had a great time at the conference, but we are both beat and ready for a little less activity.

But we are thankful for a great ending to the week.