Did you know that grapes are toxic to dogs? I did because my brain holds on to useless pieces of information while discarding gems like Josh’s work phone number or my street address. I am not your go-to girl if you need to get directions to my house, but dog toxicity issues? I’ve got that covered.
So grapes (and raisins) can be deadly to dogs. They can cause kidney failure and no one knows if there is a “safe” amount to eat because some dogs are fine after ingesting grapes, others keel over. There is no known pattern to the dogs that are affected: size, breed, grape color, it’s a crapshoot.
By now you can guess that Micah got into some grapes, huh? I was upstairs putting Camille down for a nap and I came back to find a bunch of grapes on the living room floor that had been picked naked. Normal people would have cursed the loss of expensive grapes (it was $7.70 for a medium size bag, ouch!), but my brain immediately pulled up the “dogs+grapes = EMERGENCY” file and my peaceful afternoon was over.
Josh and I were supposed to have a few hours to ourselves since the boys were out and the girl was asleep, but instead we had to tag team googling poison control home remedies (since of course it was the weekend) and dog watch vomit duty.
I knew from my previous hydrogen peroxide experience that all I had to do was give the dog a few teaspoons of the stuff and those grapes should come right back up. Problem solved. Except that he didn’t throw up. Dr. Google said it could take between 5 and 15 minutes, so we sat outside waiting for our prize. Other suggestions were to feed him bread along with the peroxide so it would bulk up in his stomach and give him something to regurgitate. Another site suggested jiggling his stomach so it would be mixed with his stomach acid and make him feel really nauseous. Oh, and still another said to take a syringe and give him extra water. Did it all. No joy.
The procedure calls for administering a second dose, but by now the dog was on to me so I first had to catch him. Giving a dog peroxide the first time is easy, the second time? Impossible. I was pretty sure I had gotten enough down the hatch when I read on another website (by googling “dog peroxide no vomit?”) that said the peroxide had to be fresh or it wouldn’t be foamy/bubbly enough to make him sick.
I tested our peroxide by swishing some in my mouth — hmm, not that powerful. Still nasty tasting though. Then we had to decide whether to give up or go get new peroxide. To make this horrible, painfully long story short, I’ll cut to the end: Brand new peroxide, double strength (oops!), much waiting, jiggling, bread feeding, water boarding, no throw-up, gave up, dog fine, wasted afternoon.
The end.