Gourmet Cooking vs. Doggie Dentist

After watching a few shows the other day on Food Network about comfort foods, I started making plans to make some of them, like macaroni and cheese, tuna casserole, spaghetti.  I'm a huge fan of comfort food; I just also happen to really enjoy cooking fancier foods, and ethnic foods.  My cravings normally dictate my meal plans. I will see something on FN that will catch my eye; then I will comb through cookbooks, and before I know it, I'm off on a new food path. So, lately, it's been the comfort foods of the 50's.  Which is a good thing, because they are cheap to make, they are fast to make, and they make a lot of leftovers. All of these things were good reasons on their own, but for now, I have to buckle down financially, and so comfort foods is going to be the ONLY way to go. : )

I finally got Sydney Sue into the vet. I'd been waiting to get a check from my company that they had been unable to pay until now; the minute I got the check in the mail, I called the vet and made the appointment. Sydney Sue, like many retired greyhounds, has really bad teeth. When I adopted her at age four, she already had a few teeth extracted. I brush her teeth regularily, and she saw a non-anesthetic dentist two years ago to get the tarter scraped off.  Apparently, the non-anesthetic dentistry is not as effective as traditional dentistry, because they cannot clean underneath the gumline. Sydney Sue's teeth were basically rotting underneath her gums, and her gums were pulling further and further up as a result. The brushing, after a while, was useless against that kind of damage. So, the vet and I talked, and he said that he would try to save as many teeth as possible, but that he would pull the ones that needed to be pulled while he had her under.  Sydney Sue is 9 years old, and is not going to be able to have agressive surgeries as she gets older, so now was the chance to get the hard stuff done.  I certainly do not want to continue to exposure her to either bad teeth (the infections and inflammation that are a result of the bad teeth can kill a dog) or to being put under again, if I can avoid it.  In the end, they extracted 12 teeth.  I picked up Sydney Sue, and got another nasty suprise - her blood work shows elevated kidney values - which may mean she is at the beginning of kidney failure, or that is a reaction to the infection in her mouth.  I will bring her back in 6-8 weeks for a recheck, and cross my fingers that everything returns to normal. They did a urinalysis while she was there to insure it wasn't a bladder or urinary tract infection, which it wasn't.

The total bill for this?  $933.28.  Oy, vey.  I see a lot of tuna casserole and Top Ramen in my future.  *gulp*