And I often think too, that if someone was to look at Ian when we come back from the vet, and he is there sat at the kitchen table, chopping up said tablets into little chunks and putting them in bags, that it is a good job no one else can see because I am sure that this would look highly suspicious.
…and then yesterday, to cap it all, a fly on the wall would have seen Ian drilling out the center of tiny dog biscuits with his drill, ready for adding crushed tablets to the hole in the center and sealing it with flour paste. Just how suspicious would that look!
The drilling out of the center of tablets was for Horace. He just will not eat anything other than his dog food. This week we’ve tried him on chicken, chopped ham – even dog chocolates. But he carefully eats around all the treats – leaving everything except his biscuits.
It’s important he takes his medicine and we can’t hide it in a treat, he won’t let us put in in his mouth – and given that we now know that his jaw is loose we don’t want to force anything. So we’ve ended up having to grab him, stick on his lampshade collar so we can hold his head still and then inject the crushed tablets and water into his mouth. You wouldn’t think giving tablets to such a tiny dog would be so difficult!
But the problem was that this was starting to make him distrustful of us. We’d tried a number of approaches. Ian had tried soothing him first and then popping his collar on, we’d tried just grabbing him when he wasn’t expecting it, doing it after food… and while we were successful in getting the medicine into him, there was a danger he was going to distrust us and that would be a terrible thing for the little boy. And given that we’ve only just got him eating well, we didn’t want to stop that by his associating eating with being force fed tablets.
Hence the fact that Ian tried drilling out the centre of Horace’s dog biscuits to add the tablets to it.
However, we found that he does get excited at food times when the others do, and does seem to anticipate food. And now I hold him when he eats he is a lot more focused and while he does scatter his food a bit, it’s not as bad as it was before. So we tried adding his tablets to just a few dog biscuits and found that he eats them up with those biscuits. I then add more biscuits, so if he was thinking about spitting out the tablets, he doesn’t and swallows them with the others. I need to watch carefully, as he does drop things, but so far this appears to be working – and is so much easier than drilling out the center of dog biscuits!