Hotel Green Park, Part II

Remember this place?

In the Himalayas above Pokhara, the first rays of dawn illumine Macchapucchre

Yes, Nepal.  I live here.  Remember, that’s a lot of why the puppy has been so sick.  Kathmandu sanitation not so good.

(Again, today, Alaska’s marginally better, still happy and playing and stomach slightly improved.  Hooray medicine!)

Back before our little Alaskan Himal got so sick, we spent a few days away from her gazing at the massive Himalayas all around Pokhara.  And I put up a post about the exterior of the Hotel Green Park, where we stayed.  Here’s the companion post, for its interior.

We actually stayed in two different rooms while we were in Pokhara.  Apparently, since we arrived later than they expected on our first day there, they’d assigned the room reserved for us to someone else.  The next day, they offered to move us into their nicest room.

Really, the two rooms weren’t that different.  And they were neither awesome nor terrible.  The “nicer” room had a better view of Macchapucchre Himal, though the view from the first room had been impressive enough.  It also had an actual tub in the bathroom, as opposed to the simple spout and drain for showering in the first room.  Still, both cost only about $20 a night, and at that rate, absolutely nothing in the US could beat them.

The queen-sized bed in our room at the Hotel Green Park. There was also a double bed against the opposite wall.

The bed was a little too hard, but not so uncomfortable as to keep us from sleeping.  The sheets and blankets and pillows were clean, and warm enough even in the chilly nights.  (There was neither heat nor air conditioning, but there was a ceiling fan that cooled things off nicely in the heat of the day.)

A coat hanger, chairs, and working color TV with cable.

The TV worked fine — except, it was initially missing a remote.  When we let them know about the problem, instead of bringing us a remote, they brought us a different TV… with a remote!  Both TVs functioned just fine, with good quality images, and I watched a Bollywood movie and parts of various soap operas in Hindi.  We also watched CNN and the BBC.  Quite a luxury for us, since we can’t even get television signals in our house here in Kathmandu!  (We live far enough outside the city center that the cable lines don’t yet run this far.  Apparently, we live in the urban sprawl part of Kathmandu, where productive farmland lay not too many years ago.  I do feel a twinge of guilt over it, though we didn’t build the house here or even pick it out, and we’re certainly crowded in with plenty of Nepali neighbors on every side.)

The most… interesting… part of the hotel room was the bathroom.  Ants had somehow tunneled their way up to it, though we were on the third floor.  And the room wasn’t quite clean enough for my standards, and the toilet splashed alarmingly with every flush–good to make sure the lid was down before touching the lever!  But, again, for $20 a night, it wasn’t bad.

Um, the mirror's cock-eyed, and so's the toilet lid... but everything works!

Yes, there's a bathtub too.

So, overall, for $20 a night, in Pokhara, Hotel Green Park’s definitely a decent place to stay!

Nepali of the day:

himal:  snow-covered mountain

bahira:  outside

bhitra:  inside

kotha:  room

sutnu:  to sleep

sutna kotha:  bedroom

charpi:  bathroom/toilet

Puppy Update, Times 3

What? You mean I'm STILL sick?

A brief addition to the puppy saga–we took her to the vet again today.  We also took a little baggie with evidence of why we thought she was still stick.

Sure enough, after looking at her stool sample under a microscope, it was pretty clear that she STILL has giardia.  And I learned that I was wrong about the disease–it’s not bacterial, but actually caused by a protozoa.  I learned that because I was surprised when we were presented with a bottle labeled “wormex” even though the report from the vet tech clearly said there was no more evidence of worms.  Turns out the medicine was also formulated to kill off the protozoa that cause the trouble in giardia.

Read more about the disease and the protozoa that cause it.

So.  She does have another medicine, too–I think it is an antibiotic–and I may even get organized enough to type up the names of both medicines tomorrow.  For now, I’ll just note that she’ll be on one for 2 days, and the other for 3 days, and the vet thinks those really ought to finally wipe out the infection.

On the bad news side, I hear getting rid of giardia can be sort of difficult.  On the good news side, the vet is convinced that she’ll survive now–she’s just uncomfortable with the giardia infestation, so we’ll treat it until it goes away, and then she should finally be strong enough to get the vaccines she was scheduled for a month ago.

Puppy Update, Revisited

I apologize for disappearing for so long–you must have thought something terrible happened to the puppy.

The truth is the opposite.  She has steadily continued to get better, and she has been back to acting like a regular puppy for over a week, playing with her toys, annoying the cats, wagging her tail like crazy and dancing around and trying to jump up to greet anyone she sees for the first time that day–or after an absence of, say, two minutes.

The remaining trouble is that she still has persistent diarrhea.  No solid stools since before she got sick, though she’s been wormed, has gone through a round of antibiotics to fight off the giardia, and surely has defeated her parvovirus–because, as I said, she’s not only still alive, but obviously feeling better and pretty darn happy.

But we’ve both been exhausted from looking after her.  Last night we finally implemented a *brilliant* idea, and got to sleep through the night for the first time since before Thanksgiving.  (Now THAT’s something to be thankful for!)  Before last night, I really had no clue how long it had been since I’d slept more than four hours at a time… and I’d gotten the four hours straight only the night before that.  Mostly, none of us in the entire house were managing more than three hours of sleep at a time.  That may not bother the cats much, but it’s surely not good for humans or puppies.

The poor puppy did have one more seizure, too–last Tuesday or Wednesday; I’m a tad fuzzy on exactly when, except that it was again in the middle of the night, circa midnight.  And half asleep myself, I was frantic, and, even though the seizure was definitely the mildest of the bunch, and she quickly relaxed afterward, I hardly slept myself.  Instead, I pulled her into bed with us and put my hand on her tiny ribcage so I could feel her breathing.  After having read that following a seizure a puppy’s lungs could sometimes fill with fluid, so that they’d choke to death–one sign of which was pale gums, which she had–I worried about her, and I worried even more when I caught her cough twice.  But she slept that night better than I did, and she hasn’t suffered seizures since.  Pale gums are also a sign of anemia, and with her eating better, and taking a vitamin supplement twice daily, her gums are being restored to a more normal red-pink, and she seems stronger.  No more hypoglycemia.

But as for the sleeping–she has the runs so bad that even when she wakes in the night and immediately cries to go out, she often can’t wait.  So she messed her crate several times, and needed middle-of-the-night baths to clean her fur, before we got the brilliance to adopt yet another idea I found online:  puppies with diarrhea should immediately be released from their crate training, until they’re better, at least.  Now she’s sleeping on the floor of our tiled bathroom, with the bottom half of her crate covered with newspapers to make a warm, semi-soft bed that can easily be cleaned.  And when she needs to make a mess, yes, she makes it on the floor.  That’s easier to clean than her and her crate.  And the bathroom is right next to our bedroom, where we can hear her if she cries, and she even has her own space heater to help keep the room warm.

She’s quite a pampered Nepali street puppy.  If she weren’t in a house and being regularly seen by a vet, delighting in a specially cooked diet of chicken, rice, puppy food and yogurt, I know she wouldn’t have survived this long.   The adult dogs who live on the streets here must have remarkable immune systems–they eat garbage, live exposed to the elements, and somehow face all the numerous ailments that spread so easily here (rabies, distemper, mange, along with endless stomach ailments).  But, even though our little Alaskan Himal hasn’t had a mother since she was three weeks old, and she’s faced three problems many Western dogs never have to face in their entire lives, she’s now made it to three months old.

And she’s growing–she’s now about the same height and length as the cats.  Considering, at five weeks old, she started out a third their size, that’s quite an improvement!

Sigh.  It’s nearly 11 again.  And one full night of sleep isn’t enough to make up for two or three weeks without it–off to bed!  But maybe, just maybe, I’ll manage to upload a picture of her soon?

Maybe not feeling 100%, but playing!

Puppy Update

Our parvo positive puppy seems, overall, to feel better today.  She’s had no more seizures since the one yesterday morning.  Her appetite stayed up all yesterday evening, she remained fairly active while we were up, and then she slept through the night pretty well, only awakening at midnight and 6 am to ask to go out–which isn’t far out of her normal range for sleeping through the night.

She continues to willingly take her antibiotic.  But she worried us some this morning when, after taking her antibiotic, she didn’t remain in the kitchen to look for breakfast–instead she headed for the living room and asked to be allowed on the couch.  She’s still so little, and sick, that we both often let her curl up in our laps to nap while we’re watching TV.  And I realized she was indeed aiming for a nap–when instead of sitting down on the couch, I squatted on the floor and tried to interest her in playing with her tennis ball (her usual morning game) she glanced at me like, “You’ve got to be kidding.” and promptly curled up on the corner of a blanket trailing off the couch.

Well, I didn’t exactly want to be up at 6 am anyway.  It’s still dark here then–dawn begins at about that time, but it’s not bright enough to see inside the house without a light.  Our alarm wouldn’t go off for half an hour, and then I usually stay in bed and read until about 7:15.  And, indeed, when I headed for the stairs, the puppy was ahead of me, stopping only beside the bed to beg to be allowed on it.

She’s supposed to sleep in her crate/kennel/cage/bed–call it what you will, her pet carrier that we’re using for a safe and comfortable place for her to sleep while we’re house-training her.  But on Saturday night, when she was so sick and scared and suffering a seizure every few hours, we wrapped her in a towel and let her sleep with us.  On Sunday, she went to sleep in bed with us–but when I let her out at midnight, she’d trotted back upstairs by herself, and when I indicated her crate to her, she willingly entered and lay down.  She’d slept there until 6 am… but now in the early morning she asked very politely to be put in bed again, and there she indeed curled up and slept while I read.

She stayed there through both our showers, too, sleeping in the bed by herself–normally she doesn’t do that.  Usually she wakes up the moment we leave her, and cries to be helped down so she can follow us around and again curl up somewhere near us.  But by 7:50, she still slept deeply… and I really needed to convince her to eat before we left.

And she didn’t want to eat.  Even in the kitchen, with the food under her nose, she’d just pull back, then retreat somewhere where she could curl into a ball and try to sleep again.

We finally left with her curled on the couch, our didi having nodded soberly to careful instructions about what to do if the puppy continued to refuse food, or if she went into another seizure.

[Didi review:  "Didi" is the word here for a maid, and it's linguistically interesting because while the English word "maid" literally means a young girl, the Nepali word "didi" actually means older sister.  So it's extra-odd that I know I'm a year older than our didi.  She's a wonderful young woman, and actually used to work as a nanny.  Though she hasn't quite bonded with the pets like we have, she seems to be adjusting to the idea of treating them like children, and she'll help out with them in any way we ask, staying very patient even while learning how to mix special food for the puppy.]

And by noon our didi called to say the puppy still hadn’t eaten–she just kept sleeping.  She would go outside, and do her business, but once she was inside she’d immediately curl up and sleep again.

I returned at 3.  And when I opened the door, the puppy dashed into my arms, tail wagging furiously.  And our didi followed her with a smile.  “Ma’am, puppy ate food.  5 minute.”

“Just now?  Five minutes ago?”

“Yes.”

“What did she eat, all of her food, or just…”

“Just liver.”

Still, it was a start.  And when I immediately offered our puppy some more minced chicken/minced chicken liver, made soupy with the water we’d used to boil the chicken in, she eagerly gobbled it all up.

So for the rest of this afternoon and evening, she has kept eating.  Not a lot at a time–and she refuses puppy food, or rice–but she’s indeed staving off dehydration and keeping some nourishing food in her belly.  She continues sleeping a lot–she’s been on my lap throughout my entire time writing this post, and for much of it she had her head slightly tilted up so she could rest her chin in the crook of my elbow, despite how my arm bounced with the typing.  She’s currently in her third patch of REM sleep of the post–and I think, poor baby, all her dreams have been nightmares, because she tenses and seems uncomfortable.  But when I pet her and talk to her softly, she settles, even in her sleep, evidently to more pleasant dreams.

In between the deep sleeping, she remains active.  She doesn’t quite play with her toys again.  But she “dances” up to greet us, tail wagging and prancing, her front legs sometimes held out straight like a Lippizaner stallion performing, as she bounces from foot to foot.  She’s done that when she’s happy ever since we adopted her; she seems to think it’s fun.  Outside she doesn’t quite run, but she trots quickly around the yard and house, investigating anything that catches her interest, hunting bugs, sniffing at the grass.

We may take her by the vet again tomorrow–lack of appetite is a common symptom of parvovirus, after all.  But not one she’d displayed earlier, and as long as she keeps eating occasional small amounts, and playing some, and remaining clearly interested in her surroundings… I assume her exhaustion is only to be expected, from fighting off two diseases and a worm infestation, and then suffering a spate of seizures to boot.  I really think/hope/pray she is continuing to get better.

And the update for the update:  She woke up just as I was finishing this, and wanted to go out.  And eat again.  And play!  I offered her a treat for going outside, and though she didn’t try eating it, she proudly carried it around, then dropped it on the floor on purpose and hunted it for a while, occasionally playing with some of her other toys again.  It’s good to see her so happy!

I know, again with the no pictures.  But I’m too exhausted myself to try uploading them.  Maybe, if she keeps getting better, tomorrow?