The Raisins and the Chocolate (Summer of 2013)
Once again my mom was babysitting Alvin while Josh and I were away for the weekend. She indulged in her favorite junk foods she stocked up on from Big Lots.... such as 2 large packages of chocolate devil's food mini cakes and oatmeal raisin cookies. Unfortuntaely she didn't finish many of them before heading home, and accidentally left the treats on the counter.. and when anything is left on the counter it's basically like leaving a prepared meal right at Alvin's place setting. Of course he helped himself to the meal and once we got home there was little remnants of evidence as he had eaten the plastic carton and the wrapper too. The little bit of wrapper from the chocolate cakes I managed to find I wasn't concerned about, as he had also gotten into the garbage again and I figured it was just trash that was in there.
The concern didn't start until heaping piles of brown thick vomit covered the carpets when I got home the next day in alarming amounts. I called my mom to find out what the cause could have been this time and she panicked as she remembered she never brought the devil's food cakes and cookies home with her. With no ingredient label to be found I couldn't even find out what kind of chocolate was in the cakes and what exactly was in the cookies he had eaten but my mom knew there were raisins as that was her favorite. Two forms of poison on even the strongest animal wasn't a good combination. Chocolate isn't as big a killer, especially for Alvin as he has enjoyed his share on every occasion he managed to get his mouth on some, always coming out unharmed, but raisins are extremely toxic and there isn't really any way around eating them. I called the closest emergency vet which was 40 minutes away and rushed him in, fearing mostly for my credit card charge more than the life of Alvin. We had been through this episode in some form of another many instances before.
Once we got there on a busy evening, we had to wait for hours before he could even be seen. Once he was, I had to pay $60 just to call the poison control hotline to find out what treatment was necessary for the items in which he had eaten. I had to estimate what exactly it was that he ate and how much of it.. since there was no evidence left except for a bit of wrapper from the devil's cakes. There was no evidence that any oatmeal cookies had even ever existed. After contacting my mom numerous times to try to be clear on the number of cookies there were in the package and how many packs she had bought, she faced a memory block and really couldn't remember for some reason why she didn't know how many cookies she had left on the counter. After enough recollection she specifically remembered deciding not to buy the oatmeal raisin cookies from Big Lots, perhaps because they weren't the good soft kind, and had put them back on the shelf. He had never eaten the oatmeal cookies after all! I knew chocolate was bad and that he had eaten a LOT of it.. enough to cause him to throw up, but the poison control even indicated that the chocolate in those cakes wasn't the kind to be too worried about, it was the raisins that were a killer. I also now noted that I didn't find any raisins in his puke. After many tests had already been ran, I halted the process of continuing with any treatments as I REALLY needed to stop this bill from adding up any further. He was not going to die and I knew it, so I didn't need their help any more. I apologized for their time and the inconvenience.. and they were just thankful he was alright. I was able to leave with only about 7 hours of my time wasted, and only a few hundred dollar bill instead of a thousand, which fortunately my mom was willing to cover since they had been her devil's cakes. For Big Lots being such a bargain store, those were by far the most expensive cookies she had ever bought, and didn't even get the satisfaction of eating them.
No comments:
Post a Comment