October 12, morning, Medicine update

Elvis is showing some pretty serious behavioral changes that I think is due to his new heart medicine, Vetmedin.

We'd noticed he was spookier in the last several days than he had been earlier, but we just put it down to regression, which he's done before. It seemed, though, to be a strange spookiness. Last night, though, we knew for sure it was something else.

When I was letting everyone in from their 8:30 potty break, he came tearing down the path like normal, hopped up on the step, took one look at me in the door and panicked. There was no way he was coming in past this person who was obviously up to no good. I got Randall to call him, and he did the same thing. Randall finally put the blind down over the door window, opened it up, stood behind it and Elvis came in. Not normal. Not even when we'd first brought him home from the shelter had he ever done that.

He's also been showing fear when we'd go to pick him up. He'd run like hell from you, but once he was picked up, he was fine. It would take me five minutes to coax him to me so I could pick him up to put him on the ottoman or in my lap when I would go to do needlework. If I put him down to run to the bathroom or refill my water glass, it would be the exact same procedure. Five minutes to get him to come to me so I could pick him up. It's like as soon as his feet hit the floor his brain left his body.

So I looked up the drug's side effects, and sure enough, behavioral changes is listed.

I put in a call to his vet just now. I've got a lot of his medicine here, and he's at the upper limit of the dosage, so it's possible we can cut him back and see a change. It works very well otherwise, so I'm certainly willing to work on tweaking the dosage, but I'll wait to hear back from Dr. Walthall. Meanwhile, I pulled him off of it this morning. I gave him a cough pill as a preventative (usually I only do that at night) and his Lasix is the same. Hopefully we'll be able to work through this.