This is Jack. We found him in our landlady's yard a couple of years ago. We had to walk to her house for something, and there he was, laying on his side rubbing his face with his paws. He was very shy but friendly...and filthy, emaciated, and covered in ticks. He...NEEDED US! So I turned puppy-dog eyes on Joe, who said we weren't getting a dog and then lured the dog back to our house with Kraft singles and pieces of ham. Joe got the dog into our house by tying a belt around his neck and dragging him up the stairs of our back porch. The dog was traumatized.
After he was dragged into our house, he apparently gave up on life; he just lay there sleeping, ignoring us as we picked off over a hundred ticks. After that, we gave him a bath. That was his first fun-filled night with us. Next step: get him to a vet.
That weekend, we got in the car and forced him to get in, too, even though he was scared. (He was scared of everything, though.) We put him in the back seat, assuming he was like a normal dog and would calm down and look out the window and just be a nice, normal dog. Instead, when the car started moving, he freaked out and started running around. He trampled me, ripping a hole in my jeans and somehow smearing poo on my shirt. We had just pulled out of the driveway, had twenty more minutes to drive, and already I was gagging, almost hysterical, and he was going insane. Eventually, he just smashed himself as far as he could into the passenger footwell, shaking and cowering and drooling (all over my pants) despite my efforts to calm him.
We got to the vet. My pants were saturated with his drool. I asked if they had any shirts for sale. They didn't. We found out that the dog (who we named Jack after a short trial run of the name "Tick") had Lyme's. We got some anti-heartworm medicine, anti-Lyme's medicine, and anti-freak-out-in-the-car medicine. Important detail: the anti-freak-out-in-the-car medicine was called Acepromazine. We referred to it as Ace.
Around that time, I called a no-kill shelter to see if they'd take the dog. We didn't want a dog, I didn't even LIKE dogs, and we especially didn't want this motion-sick mutt who, when we were at work during the day, tended to go around the house destroying the things we loved. There was a months-long waiting list for a spot at the shelter, and I put him on it.
We had to go out of town shortly after we "got" Jack, and we couldn't take him with us, so he needed a car ride to someone who would watch him. Per doctor's orders, we gave him an Ace two hours before the car trip. The effects were visible half an hour later. He became lethargic, the skin below his eyes started to sag, he could barely walk straight, and he had trouble navigating stairs. When the time came to put him in the car, I got in, then Joe put Jack in and closed the passenger door. Jack crammed himself into the footwell. We started moving. I watched Jack, and, miraculously, he stayed put in his not-so-happy place at my feet. And...there was no drool. Not a drop.
From that day forward, Jack [well.......we] relied on Ace for calm, drool-free car rides. Jack [we] was practically addicted to the Ace effect when it came to car rides.
A few months passed, and I got a call back from the no-kill shelter. At that point, we no longer had an intact couch; about a third of our movies were housed in clear cases, their originals long ago having been chewed up; we had learned to close the bathroom door before we left the house so the dog wouldn't get into the razor blades; and I'd cried over the loss of a favorite pair of shoes, the ones I'd worn to our wedding, which, like so many other things, we had found strewn about the living room floor in tooth-mark-dented pieces. The lady on the phone was telling me they had room for the dog I'd called about, and asked if we still wanted to bring him in. I looked at him. He was curled up in a ball, sleeping on the couch he eventually destroyed. I told the lady I'd have to talk to my husband about it.
Fast-forward two and a half years. We slowly learned to Jack-proof the house every time we left it. Around the time we moved to a new place, Jack stopped destroying our things (mostly.) A few months after we moved, Joe left for Basic Training and I was left with the dog. Jack kept me company. I finally decided (after, like, eighteen months of having him around) that I wanted to keep him. Ten months after our first move, we moved again, away from our families in Virginia to our first post in Georgia.
That brings us finally to December 2010 and the poisoning incident.
We were going back to Virginia for Christmas. I made boarding arrangements for the birds, but boarding arrangements for Jack were just cost-prohibitive. Our only option was to bring him with us. That was a total of 20 hours in the car - from Georgia to Virginia; from Fredericksburg to Gloucester when it was time to switch families; then back down to Georgia.
Three car trips. We only had one dose of Ace. By the time I realized that, all the vets were closed for the holidays.
So we got to Fredericksburg okay, using that last dose. Then, when it was almost time to leave for Gloucester, we went to a pet store and dropped ten dollars on some herbal-remedy calming dog treats which we fully expected to not work...but we had to do something. Christmas day, we gave him the recommended dosage before it was time to get in the car. They worked as well as expected. Jack rode in the back seat, which became a giant puddle of drool. Twenty minutes from my parents' house, after enduring for two hours, he vomited on my dry-clean-only winter coat. Our arrival in Gloucester was pretty gross.
The day came when it was time to drive the eight or ten hours from Gloucester back to Georgia. We were going to give Benadryl to Jack to sedate him, since those stupid herbal treats didn't work and we had nothing else. I was digging around in my parents' medicine cabinet, looking for the Benadryl, when I came across a bottle I didn't recognize. I checked the active ingredient: Acetaminophen! WOW! My parents already had Ace in their medicine cabinet! I showed Joe, excited, telling him that it was the same word, I was sure of it. (I couldn't pronounce it, but that's beside the point.) Ecstatic and relieved that we wouldn't have to deal with the drool, I looked up a recommended dosage online before giving some of the Ace to Jack.
After I gave him the medicine wrapped up in some pieces of ham, I sat back down at my laptop to do further research, to kinda confirm that I had given him an acceptable amount. The more I read, the more concerned I became. Especially once I noticed the difference between the words "Acetaminophen" and "Acepromazine."
I phoned the vet my mom uses. The vet told me I'd given Jack twice the amount he should have had. (I think she thought I had given him our normal car-sedation drug Ace-P, and not Ace-T, aka Tylenol, which is apparently extremely harmful to dogs in any dosage.) She gave me instructions for how to induce vomiting: a tablespoonful of salt down the back of his throat. So we took him outside and Joe gave him the salt. Nothing happened. We gave him a little more. A few minutes later, he started throwing up thick whitish-yellow foam with ham in it. We just stood there in the snow petting him while he vomited. Once that was over, we brought him inside and gave him some water.
I felt horrible. I gave him some treats to make up for what I'd done. He wouldn't touch them. He just lay curled up as far away from us as he could get and would look at me reproachfully, his eyes all droopy and red, whenever I tried to get his attention. He knew a car ride was coming up, between our packing and the Ace-ey feeling the Acetaminophen had given him before we got most of it out of his system. (He had long ago learned to associate Ace(promazine)'s effects with impending doom by car-ride.)
Nine hours later, we got back to Georgia. I guess the car trip wasn't so bad. He didn't run around, vomit, or have any accidents...and we learned that he does eventually run out of drool.
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