Category: Tiny Dog

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Update: The Tiny Dog Fails Prozac Trial

Dear world,

Today I am writing this (or started writing this) while on hold/talking to one of the leading medicaid providers in my state about how they will not provide mental health services for one of my patients. It is not going well.

(See also: extreme irony, crushing disillusionment, American healthcare crisis, etc, etc).

In the meantime, did anyone know that the following are possible side effects of fluoxetine use in dogs??

  • Anxiety. (Read: unrelenting panic.)
  • Irritability.
  • Insomnia.
  • Loss of appetite.
  • Gastrointestinal distress.
  • Excessive panting.

No?? Me neither. Guess what??

Tiny dog experienced all of these. Here is the picture on the internet of a dog on Prozac:

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Here is a picture of the Tiny Dog on Prozac:

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It was a good try. And everyone was very optimistic that it would work. Unfortunately, Tiny Dog is one of the very few dogs for whom Prozac had a paradoxical effect and he had exactly the OPPOSITE response as what the drug was actually supposed to do.

Right around day 4 or 5 of giving the pill, Tiny Dog started to seriously distrust us. He was very suspicious of his nightly cheese snack. He probably bugged our phones. He also took to crying ALL. NIGHT. LONG. One night, when he was in our bed, there was a gust of wind outside. That was it for Bed. Bed can never be forgiven. Tiny Dog will no longer enter the bedroom. Instead, he paced and cried and barked all night long for 4 days.

Initially, Wife was like, “I told you so.” and I was like, “This is normal. It will get better.”

By day 10 of the pill, no one had slept in days, Tiny Dog had entirely stopped eating, and I was home with him by myself trying to do work. It was impossible. Not only did Tiny Dog want to spend his entire day and night in the dirty clothes hamper in the bathroom closet, he also wanted everyone else to do so as well.

The vet cautiously suggested that, maybe, just maybe, Tiny Dog was having an adverse reaction to THE VERY THING THAT WAS SUPPOSED TO HELP HIM.

10:45 AM: It will get better, they said. Give it a few days, they said.

12 PM: Cue Tiny Dog, strapped to my body in a tiny sling, shivering, gags and vomits.

12:45 PM: (at vet’s office.) Maybe we should take him off the prozac.

Moral of the story: perhaps we should all just love each other for who we are. HA- just kidding. You better believe we’re (read: I’M) trying a new anxiety medication as soon as he gets detoxed from this one.

…or maybe we’re just happy to have Tiny Dog back, for now…

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Love,

Emily

P.S. Managed Care Organizations can SUCK IT.

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The Tiny Dog Gets Prozac

First, some notes about the Tiny Dog. The Tiny Dog is a shelter dog, meaning that he comes with his fair-share of baggage. I’ve never owned a dog before. Wife tricked me into this venture because a) I was out of town b) it was her birthday and c) his face looks like this:

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She assured me (and the shelter assured her) that Tiny Dog was the most mellow, sweetest, laid back of all dogs. He’s great with kids! He’s super friendly! He’s great with small animals and other dogs! And totally house broken! You can probably tell by the sarcastic exclamation points and the title of this post that Tiny Dog is none of these things.

The first thing Tiny Dog did when we brought him home was attempt to reclaim my childhood stuffed animal as his sex toy. He is, however, very, very, very cute. And, let’s be real, we’re not the most disciplined owners (despite the fact that I have an advanced degree in behaviorism…), so his behavior is almost definitely 80% our fault.

Tiny Dog kind of looks like a fancy small wolf or coyote, so we were convinced that he was chihuahua (which we knew) mixed with other fancy breeds. So we bought one of those extremely expensive dog DNA kits for insane dog owners who want to attempt to stick multiple swabs in their dogs’ mouths. Tiny Dog is not exotic. It turns out that Tiny Dog is exactly 2 breeds: Chihuahua and Pomeranian. In fact, his DNA results would suggest that he’s somewhat of a fancy designer dog. Which further led us to question our assumptions about Tiny Dog being a meek little stray street puppy who had to fend for himself before being saved by the humane society. Now armed with more information about Tiny Dog’s intelligence and survival instincts (or lack there of), we are forced confront the probable reality that he was the intellectual runt of his designer dog litter who probably just wandered off until the shelter found him 20 minutes later.

But we really, really love Tiny Dog. Nonetheless it became quickly apparent that his neuroses and personality (100% Chihuahua) were no match for us. The first summer we had him he was constantly hysterical about storms and would hide behind the toilet if he heard so much as a truck driving by:

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After 3 days of incessant shivering, whining, hiding, and lack of sleep for everyone, I took him to the vet who informed us that he had a urinary tract infection, which was probably making the anxiety worse. She treated the UTI, gave us a bottle of the world’s tiniest valium for storms, and gently suggested that we might wish to consider prozac.

Wife was really opposed to this. In spite of the fact that we both benefit from modern medicine to maintain our own sanity, she was worried about the health ramifications and the overall weirdness of putting a chihuahua on prozac. So we did work on training mostly diligently for a while. We took Tiny Dog to an obedience class where he excelled, unless it was storming. He seemed to like us more and have less separation anxiety. His wonderful trait of spontaneously growling/snapping at people whenever he was so much as breathed on while sleeping seemed to be diminishing.

But then Christmas came and Tiny Dog was extremely distressed by all the noise, action, and changes in routine. He kept threatening to bite people and terrified my mom’s 70 pound flat coat retriever. We tried to fly home with him on a plane which was a fiasco resulting in the entire plane hating us, me refusing to sit next to Wife and Tiny Dog, and the flight attendant noting, “wow, he’s really hyperventilating, huh?” Not to mention, he growled at a baby. A baby. (As a side note, Wife also bought me a Furbo for Christmas, which is a fancy schmantzy dog-cam that allows your to watch your dog when you’re not home. You can also talk to them and feed them treats from the machine. This terrified the Tiny Dog, and he wouldn’t come in the living room for 3 days.)

At this point Wife started to become paranoid and frantic that we would have to give him away if he bit someone (he never has), so we pulled out the big guns. We made an appointment (later this month) to work one-on-one with a professional dog behaviorist (embarrassing: see previous notes about my profession) and I bundled Tiny Dog off to the vet again. Within 30 seconds of walking in the door Tiny Dog pooped on the floor and growled at a dog 12 times his size. They put the world’s tiniest muzzle on him, but he made a valiant attempt to bite the vet anyway. The vet tech seemed to find this endearing, as she had previously made friends with Tiny Dog while he was under sedation for a dental exam, and also she has 5 chihuahuas of her own. I was vaguely mortified. Following the exam, Tiny Dog jumped down, hid under my chair shivering with his tail between his legs, and promptly peed on the floor.

They gave us the prescription.

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Stay tuned…

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2018: Choose Your Own Adventure.

Happy 2018. I realize blogs aren’t a thing anymore.

Don’t even get me started about how everyone and their brother is doing a podcast or a video blog these days, and the only remaining “real” blogs are bankrolled by cooperate sponsors. Even if I had audio equipment, it would most likely be water damaged within a week. I have a brand new laptop I bought 8 months ago which I still have not even set up because I cannot figure out the quick start guide. Not to mention the power plug has 3 prongs, and all of the outlets in our house only have space for 2. I’ve always been a writer (mediocre at best), so this is the medium you get.

(Remember when the word “blog” didn’t even exist because we still used “web log”? Or when everyone had one to deposit their solipsistic ramblings alongside their MySpace Top 8? Or then they became completely obsolete like 3D doritos or fruit-shaped trix? Yeah, me neither. Asking for a friend.)

It’s not clear to me yet whether this will be a blog about a) two lesbians trying to make a baby, b) autoimmune disorder food allergy hell , c) the ironic attempts of behaviorist trying to train and raise a tiny, terrible Chihuahua, or d) the misadventures of a hapless-but-still-sometimes-useful child psychologist.

But, YOU, my four readers, will get a chance to find out. Let’s run down the options:

A) My wife and I want to have a baby. But we are both women. Apparently this makes us “functionally infertile”. Who knew? After a year of trying without success, we decided we should seek medical intervention. Note: we are not responsible adults. Coming into this marriage, we both had best friends who doubled as life coaches, whose entire job it was to prevent us from doing things such as, for example, purchasing a pig as a pet and digging a mud wallow in the backyard. Or to answer questions such as “Are cuddle duds a real thing?” (answer: They are.) or “We are stranded on a mountain in a blizzard in a Pruis with no preparations even though this is a totally predictable situation for a normal person; what do we do now?” (These are all real, non-ironic examples.)

B) After about 12 months of experiencing idiopathic nausea and vomiting, followed by severe upper abdominal pain, and then about upteen million medical procedures which were only slightly less unpleasant than the actual symptoms, I got diagnosed with Eosinophilic Esophagitis. Which, in case you didn’t know, is a highly unpleasant but mostly harmless autoimmune disease of the esophagus, usually triggered by food allergies. Generally, it’s no big deal, but it turns out I’m having a teeny tiny midlife crisis about this, because I’m tired of being sick all the time and it’s starting to make me feel like a failure. Also, I have to stop eating all of my favorite foods and basically any foods that would be considered “favorite foods” by anyone ever.

C) The adventures of Tiny Dog. He’s adorable, and awful, and as a behavioral psychologist it is a constant ego-check that I’m pretty terrible at training him.

D) In my spare time when I’m not at the aforementioned medical appointments (and it really is starting to feel like the minority of my time at this point…), I work at a children’s hospital as a psychologist with children with various disabilities and behavior challenges. This is an always fascinating, sometimes terrifying, hilarious, exhilarating, exhausting job. There are many moments each week when I think, “well, you just can’t make this shit up.” Obviously I can’t really write about it that much, because of confidentiality and respect for patients (Like I think, “if it were my kid doing something hilarious, would I want someone talking/writing about? Answer: ABSOLUTELY. But I’m clearly not the best judge of character.) But it’s not every day you discover a bat living in the sleep center of your office building (which I find highly ironic), or you are helpfully reminded of the wide array of things it is possible for children to swallow with no adverse effects whatsoever.

Anyway, choose your own adventure. Sally forth, 2018. You shall not defeat me.