Around a month ago, Bailey got very sick. We weren’t sure what was wrong and she quickly went down ill over a period of 24hours.
She started first with a tummy bug and then very, very quickly she refused food and went from bad to worse.
We drove around practically the whole of Kuwait at 8.30pm looking for a vets. We couldn’t find any 24hr clinics.
Eventually we decided that the car was intact making her worse. With the little medical experience I have, I decided that I needed to either a) get a homemade drip put into her (was thinking knitting needle a tube and me holding a bottle of sugar and water all night) or b) try another way to get fluids into her.
We couldn’t find a cannula type setup in the house so we decided to attempt to get fluids into her manually.
First attempt failed miserably. She could barely open her mouth.
She was getting worse. I figured she would be dead by morning.
I headed to the 24hr pharmacy at the end of the road and picked up some Paedlyte. Yes, the orange coloured drink that you can give to toddlers and babies for dehydration. We used a syringe and every 15minutes forced it into her.
She gradually started to accept the fluid, she obviously realised it was making her feel better.
At 9am, next morning, she was still alive. With just one hour’s sleep, we headed to IVH Wafra.
The landscape down there is surreal. The air is pure. You can’t smell oil and city fumes.
IVH is situated on the first turn in to Wafra on the right. It’s around 200 yards up that road.
The staff were friendly, Bailey was seen immediately as it was obvious it was an emergency. On first inspection the vet suspected poisoning. Yes, we know they put poison down on the streets here to kill / murder street cats and dogs.
I didn’t remember her picking anything up on the road but the vet told me that even smelling some of that poison is enough to make a dog very ill.
I was furious.
They tested her for parvo- the test came back very very slightly positive, the vet reckoned that was just because she had been vaccinated for it the previous week and as it is a Live vaccination it was still in her system.
She had several blood tests, her white blood cells were raised which showed her body was in defence mode. The vet gave her a 60% chance of making it through the next 24 hours.
She stayed around 5 days in the hospital and it cost a whopping 240kd… Yes, expensive but worth it.
The vets are fully qualified and all come from Spain or Italy. They called me with daily updates on Bailey’s status and I was allowed to visit whenever I wanted.
If you want more information on IVH the website is IVHQ8
