Blood and horror stalk the household
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Fumes from paint and thinner can have a disastrous effect on a pet
It’s bedtime, but as I climb to the second floor of my townhouse, I find a scene worse than anything you have ever seen on TV.
In the hallway, there’s blood everywhere - puddles on the floor, splatters and streaks on the walls. In the bedroom, blood puddles are on my bed and streaks on the walls.
At first, I can’t believe what I see. I haven’t heard anything, just my one-eyed Siamese Angel sneezing. Since she’s always sneezing, I haven’t paid much attention to it.
Now the smell of the blood is making the animals nervous. My poodle Wan-Wan sniffs briefly at a puddle, then shudders and slips away. She doesn’t want to be near the mess.
The cats won’t come near it either. I pick up every animal, inspecting each body for injury, but I don’t see any cuts or bruises.
Downstairs, when I see traces of blood on Angel’s nose, I look down her nostrils with a flashlight, but I still don’t see any injury.
Since she seems to have stopped bleeding, I start cleaning up the bloody scene. With the animals becoming increasingly nervous, I can’t leave the mess until tomorrow.
It takes hours to clean it all up and put the bed sheets in cold water to soak. I consider using bleach, just the way the bad guys clean up crime scenes on TV, but then I remember how strong that stuff smells. We've already been bombarded by paint and thinner fumes from renovation work going on next door for the past few days; we don’t need any more air pollution here.
The next day, when I phone my vet to tell her what happened, she wants to see Angel right away. Unfortunately, Angel starts sneezing again when I put her in the carrier, and she doesn’t stop even when we reach the clinic.
There’s blood everywhere again - all over the carrier, on my clothes, on my vet’s clothes, throughout the examination room and on the table.
What can cause such tremendous nosebleeds? In cats and dogs, it can be trauma to the face, foreign bodies in the nose, dental disease, tumours in the nose, infections in the nose, blood disorders, even liver disease.
With Angel, now in her senior years, there’s certainly a lot to worry about.
My vet, however, begins with an even more basic cause. Since she can’t find any foreign body in Angel’s nostrils, she considers some sort of irritation in the air.
“Of course,” I think, “all those fumes from next door.” When I come home, my next-door neighbour on the other side is very upset. Those fumes have made her dog sick.
Angel herself spends a few nights at the vet’s, receiving antibiotics for possible infection and medication to reduce inflammation. She’s home now, and with no fumes entering my house from next door, she hasn’t had any terrible nosebleeds since.
