The latest trip to the ER, and dog vocabulary

Posted by Sappho on October 2nd, 2009 filed in Daily Life

I meant to have a light-hearted Friday dog blogging post up this morning, related to the news, a couple of months ago, that dogs are about as smart as toddlers. But life got in the way. I’ll get to dogs in a minute. First, an account of the emergency room visit.

Joel has more chronic conditions than the average man our age. He has asthma, diabetes, a congenital narrowing of the coronary artery, gout, occasional acid reflux, and bipolar disorder. He takes about a dozen medications a day, to manage one or another of these conditions. Also, his father died at the age of 55, of a heart attack.

All of this makes for a couple of conflicting pressures when he experiences chest pain. On the one hand, he’s had chest pain repeatedly, sometimes for benign reasons (that acid reflux). On the other hand, there’s that extra risk of heart attack: the narrowed coronary artery, the diabetes, the dead father.

This time, Joel had noticed chest pain for the past couple of days, but inferred from the location and feeling of it that it was likely to be asthma, and so first went for self-treatment. Yesterday, he escalated that self-treatment to getting his Advair inhaler prescription renewed, and taking a dose in the evening. He woke me a couple of hours later, when he noticed that the pain hadn’t gone away, and asked me to drive him to the emergency room. This was at 1 am.

Reporting to the emergency room with chest pain got us quickly admitted to one of the ER rooms, but apparently once he was hooked up to the blood pressure and heart rate monitors, his lungs listened to, and his medical history taken, he apparently started to look lower risk, and our several hours stay involved the usual alternation between things being done and waits while other patients were looked at. In the end, after an EKG (matched with an earlier EKG and found to be OK) and some bloodwork (including a test that we were told gave results showing him overwhelmingly unlikely to have a blood clot anywhere in his body, and therefore overwhelmingly unlikely to have a blood clot in his lung, the most serious likely cause for chest pain that seemed centered in his lung), he was pronounced unlikely to be suffering any serious heart or lung problem, and released. By this time, Joel was apologizing for coming in, and saying that he should have waited a couple of hours more for the Advair to work, as the pain had vanished not long after we got to the hospital. (The doctor assured him that it was OK to come in for chest pain.)

I got home and to bed at 5:30am. I did go into work (the dog woke me at 8:30am for his morning walk), but only worked a half day because I was so tired, and took the rest as sick leave.

Other ER stuff: We have put Joel on MedAlert, for obvious reasons, but he’d forgotten to update the medication list the last time he got a change, so, though instead of asking them to call MedAlert, he tried naming all of his medications from memory. This turns out to be hard; he got all of them except the glimeperide (the second of two that he takes for diabetes), so we had to ask the nurse to add that one later. Also, though he remembered the names and times that he takes the meds, he didn’t really remember the dosage. I need to nag him to update MedAlert, and also print the updated list for me when he’s done.

Now, for the lighter, dog-related part. The average dog, it’s said, can learn 165 words and gestures. So I’ve been trying to make a count of what words and gestures I think Drake (our seven-year-old Boston terrier) knows.

• Come: There are many words and gestures that are synonyms for this one. Come on, here, Drake, Drakey, here doggie, etc. I wonder whether, perhaps, that 165 word and gesture total is partly met by counting many, many variants of “come here,” and “I’ve got food for you.”
• Speaking of food, Drake knows: Who wants a biscuit? Does someone want a biscuit? Tasty dog food. Cat food. Cat treats. Yoghurt (in our house, this is a cat, rather than dog, treat, though he gets second lick after the cats are done cleaning a yoghurt container). Greenie. G-word. Kong. Bring us your kong. And the honking of a stuffed pheasant, as a signal that he can come out of his sit/stay and get his dog food. We are unsure whether he knows the word “poison,” which we use to designate foods like chocolate, that we won’t give him because they’re bad for him. If he does recognize the word, I’m sure he thinks it means, “food Mommy and Daddy insist on keeping for themselves,” rather than “food I shouldn’t eat.” He does know the word “beggar,” but thinks it means, “someone is about to give me a treat.”
• The dog obedience commands: Sit, Sit pretty, Stay, Heel, Nicely, Focus, Leave it, Drop it, Down, and also a trick where he circles between my legs to get a treat. Also settle. And, as a variant to sit, “buns down.”
• Who wants to go outside? (Variant: Who wants to go for a walk?)
• Some other movement related commands: Let’s go, hurry, giddy up, up the stairs, down the stairs, this way, go back inside, go to your bed. Mommy’s going to leave the boy (if he doesn’t hurry up).
• Cease and desist words: quiet, enough, what are you doing, the game show noise (sort of an “eh” or “uh” sound). Also, stop, to stop and wait for us. And bad dog.
• Other commands: not on the lips, what are you supposed to do?
• Praise and affection: good dog, who’s a good boy, handsome, and there are a couple of songs that we sing him that he recognizes as for him (“Hello, doggie” to the tune of “Hello, Dolly,” and John Denver’s “Follow Me”).
• Miscellaneous other phrases: It’s just a doggie (to quiet him when he barks at big dogs), good bye (no, Mommy and Daddy aren’t going to the door because they’re taking you for a walk). OK (you can quit sitting or staying or whatever).

Those are all I can think of. There are dozens of them, but I don’t think I’ve gotten too close to 165. I suppose it’s possible, though, that he knows others I haven’t thought of. It’s harder to tell what the cats know, because they’re less motivated. I know they know the phrases that announce they’re getting fed, and they also know “sit pretty” (as long as you’re holding a treat to motivate them), “back inside,” “up the stairs,” “down the stairs,” and “what are you doing?” Still, food motivated though the dog is, he’s way more willing than the cats to respond to commands that aren’t immediately reinforced by food.