Rat Poison and vitamin K1

If you know about rat poison you may have suspected that a blog may come up written about this when you read that Harley ate rat poison a few weeks ago.  At the time, I really had no idea about how dangerous the little bit of rat poison he ate would be.  When he did eat it I read a lot of posts (apparently not enough) on what I should do and how I should proceed.  I also read a lot of posts telling me what physical signs that I should watch for that would indicate I needed to bring him to the vet...coughing, lethargy, bleeding from the nose, etc...

A week went by and there were no physical signs whatsoever that the poison had affected him.  So, since I had made him throw up the day I suspected he ate rat poison I thought we were out of the woods.  On Sunday of last week I noticed that Harley had a strange cough.  He was still running and playing like normal though so I really didn't think anything of it yet....until Monday morning.  Jordan went out to feed his dog as usual and came back in crying telling me that Harley was dying.  He wouldn't move, eat, or even look at him.  When I dropped Jordan off for seminary and proceeded to the office to work, we were all certain we would come home to find our dog dead. We didn't though and that night we moved him into the garage.  Brad and I debated on what we should do.  I wanted to bring him to the vet but as Brad spoke to the vet over the phone about what they would do he felt it wouldn't be the right thing.  As I read online about how cruel it was to let a dog suffer and die this way we wondered if we should put him down ourselves.  At that point Brad said to me, he has a slight chance of surviving.  Let's bring him into the garage, monitor his vitals, feed him and see what happens.  He told me how terrible he would feel if he was the one to put the dog down only to find out he would have survived.  So that is what we did.  We knew that we needed to get some vitamin k1(which reverses the effects of the anticoagulant that the rat poison contained) into his system as soon as possible and the only place I could order it was amazon...which I did.  I even expedited the shipping and waited hoping the medicine would be there in a day or two.  I read up on how I could provide vitamin K1 to him naturally and bought things like kale, spinach and brocolli (anything green) to put in his food.  By Tuesday the dog wouldn't eat anything so Jordan created a slurry and together with Kenzie spoon feed our puppy.  Wednesday was a repeat, only worse because now Harley would not only refuse to eat but wasn't drinking either.  Again, Jordan created his concoction and he and Kenzie spoon fed our puppy.  On Thursday he was taking more than 120 breaths each minute and we thought the end was near.  However, he did show an increase in hunger that evening.  Friday he began to move around a little and by Friday afternoon we had the vitamin k1.  By Saturday Harley was again acting like a normal dog would and we knew he would survive.  He is on the road to recovery and we expect to see him back to his old energetic self within the week. 

So what two lessons did I learn from this?

#1 Never keep rat poison like DCon.  Yes, it's bad for your domestic animals but it also wreaks havoc in young infants and toddlers.

#2 If you suspect that your dog ate rat poison induce vomiting immediately AND start treating him with vitamin k1.  If you own a dog YOU SHOULD ALWAYS HAVE A BOTTLE ON HAND.  Had I begun treating Harley immediately with vitamin K1 he would have never come so close to death in the first place.

We are glad to have our Harley back and so glad we were able to save him.

So much of our energy and efforts went into the dog this week that we thought of little else.