It’s been a very strange and difficult day. On  Wednesday, we noticed that Rosie had an upset tummy. It happens sometimes and we didn’t worry too much. But this morning, we noticed that she also had a sore mouth. We rang the vet immediately and took her along.

It turned out that she had an abscess on her tooth and luckily the vet was able to operate on her this afternoon. He telephoned after the operation and told me that the situation was worse than we’d thought. Rosie also had abscesses under her tongue and is very poorly. The vet took a blood sample and the readings are all wrong. She’s dehydrated, anaemic and her kidneys are full of toxins and swollen. The vet is keeping her in the surgery overnight on a drip, to try and flush the toxins out. His words were that the figures on the readout presented a ‘dark picture’.

This is the siutation: worst case, she may not be able to recover; medium case, it’s possible she will regain enough kidney function to live a normal life (25% is enough, apparently); best case, if she does brilliantly she could have the drip taken out tomorrow.

The vet will take more blood at 10am and we are hoping to see improvement in some of her readings. If that happens she may have to go to another vet with her drip to be looked after for the long weekend, in which case we will transport her in our car.

We feel awfully guilty for not realising sooner that she was poorly. The vet did explain that it can happen very quickly, but all the same, we feel we really should have noticed.

We have an appointment at 12 noon tomorrow, by which time the vet will know a lot more. Poor Isobel has been poorly since we told her and the rest of us have churning tummies. It’s a very difficult and tense time.