First day on the drip at home

Got out the doggy bag of drug vials, syringes, fluid bag and giving set, mircropore tape, wadding a vetwrap to put Jazz on his drip, and rigged up a frame over his crate (actually a folding coffee table stand, on end) to hang the bag from.

Had a bit of trouble getting the drip started, but got help over the phone from one of the nurses, and got it going by using one of the syringes to withdraw some fluid from the bag (via one port) and adding it (via the drugs port) at the other end. I had tagamet and metoclopramide to give him via the drip too.

He had a couple of times during the day when he got a bit agitated - as a response to one of these I took him out in the garden and sat with him for a bit, with his drip bag hanging from a tree branch. And obviously, he needs reasonably frequent attention to make sure he hasn't squashed or kinked the tube and stopped or drastically slowed the flow (which was to set at 1 drip per second).

Having been rather slow at times all day, so that I'd been wondering whether we'd get through it all before bed time, at the end of the day the bag suddenly ran out before he'd had his last dose of drugs, so I ended up taking him to the vet so they could administer them using their ad hoc fluids bag to flush them through. I also learned how to do a subcutaneous injection in case I need to administer other drugs in future.

It's clear that this probably isn't something that we can do for him when he's just got Andy with him (especially as Andy will be working), but we'll sort something out about that later.