Chocolate Bar

I promised an explanation about yesterday's chocolate mishap.  So here it is.

I'm sure you've heard it a hundred times that chocolate is bad for dogs.  Truth is, milk chocolate and white chocolate are no big deal.. but anything containing 70% cocoa or higher can be lethal.  Straight baking chocolate WILL truly kill a dog.  It's no joke.  Perhaps if Fudge our Newfoundland had gotten to it, the situation would have been less concerning.. but our 8 lb. dog discovered it first.

In short, yesterday I found Crumb behind the couch polishing off a chocolate bar still in its wrapper.  At first I was in total shock because the chocolate had been up on our coffee table.. It's still a mystery as to how Crumb got the chocolate,  but that really isn't important.  The focus is that he ate twice the amount of dark chocolate that a dog his size should ingest.  So I knew it was bad as soon as I snapped out of my disbelief.

I emphatically ripped the chocolate bar away and ran to the computer.  Funny how my first thought was "Google", and not.. "vet".  But regardless, I found plenty of hits on how to get your dog to vomit and expel any toxins that are sitting in his stomach.  Hydrogen Peroxide?!  Not wanting to burn a hole in Crumb's esophagus, I frantically phoned the vet for a second opinion.  It seems I wasn't being a psychotic individual, the vet was just as concerned as I was.  Apparently dark chocolate contains "theobromine" which for dogs acts as a slow, caffeinated toxin in their veins.  In toxic doses, a dog's heartbeat can become elevated to the point of heart attack and death.  I was NOT going to lose Crumb to a chocolate bar.  Two months ago we had a bad pancreatis scare that left him in the animal hospital for days.  $400 later we had a dog who now has chronic sensitivity to food and needs to be on a bland food diet.  So needless to say, this chocolate was neither bland nor healthy for Crumb's little system.

Anyway.  I was instructed to pour hydrogen peroxide down Crumb's throat until he puked profusely.  What a terrible thing to do to your baby.  Within minutes he was barfing uncontrollably.  He vomited upwards of twenty times.. and if there was any doubt that Crumb had eaten the chocolate all by himself, there was no longer a lingering doubt.  Chocolate vomit all over our floor and rugs proved that his stomach was being emptied out quickly.  After the puke fest ended, I called the vet for further instructions.  In the meantime she had done research to see how concerning the situation truly was.  Crumb ate at least 2 oz. of pure dark chocolate, which is slightly larger than a Hershey's bar; this was twice the amount that his system could handle.  Even though his stomach was emptied, the concern was how much had already been absorbed into his bloodstream.  Cardiac arrhythmia was still a possibility.  In tears, I rushed a miserable, exhausted Crumb to the animal hospital where they pumped his stomach full of charcoal.   What scared me the most was when he showed signs of being over-caffeinated and he couldn't stay still.  It appeared that his mind was racing, but his exhausted little body couldn't keep up.  I wasn't ashamed to cry in the waiting room.

There's more to the story than that.  Basically I rushed him twice to the vet because of recurring symptoms.. It was horrible to watch him vomit up charcoal sludge.  The cherry on top of the evening was the black sludge that slimed out of his bottom after dinner.  By bedtime, he was so doped up on pain meds that he couldn't walk in a straight line.  Now it's the next morning and he's sleeping peacefully next to me on the couch.  The vet gave him a Halloween bandanna, and he's back to being my little boy.

The vet said that if I hadn't been home or hadn't gotten him to the vet, the chocolate ingestion could have been lethal.  Enough freak accidents happen in this world.. I'm not going to lose my little boy to a chocolate bar.  So seriously, don't shake a stick at a dog eating chocolate.  Milk chocolate?  No biggie.. White chocolate?.. What the heck is that anyway?  Certainly not real chocolate.  It's the dark stuff you need to worry about.

I now feel like I need to put my dark chocolate and baking chocolate under the sink with the cleaning supplies.. because to little guys like Crumb, they're just as poisonous.