Lilo's kidney's are failing. :sad: It's not a matter of if he'll die but when, and how comfortable I can keep him in the meantime. To that end, for the last six weeks my husband and I have been giving him subcutaneous fluids, which is really difficult because he yowls and fights us. We hate hate hate having to hurt him with the needle and feel like monsters. :sad: At least Lilo is a fairly mellow boy, and as soon as we let him go, he's totally fine.
The thing is, sometimes it goes really easy: Lilo is relatively calm, the water flows quickly. Other times he yells up a storm and fights back hard, and often on those occasions, the syringe is very difficult to depress and it takes a lot longer. But from my end (the syringe operator), I can't feel a difference between the good and bad needle sticks. It doesn't feel like I'm catching or dragging on anything under his skin on the bad days, but something is clearly going wrong. :sad:
Making matters worse, last week we had a few bad sticks in a row, and my husband declared that it must be my technique and that we needed to switch places, with him taking over the syringe while I held Lilo. This was not an improvement; he had just as much trouble with the syringe as I did, and I had a lot of trouble holding Lilo still, so after two nights of that, we switched back. :x But upsetting our routine seems to have upset Lilo, and now he's fighting even harder, and has run away and hid a couple of times afterward. Yesterday for the first time ever, he bit my husband.
Does anyone have any technique advice for giving subQ fluids? He's doing OK healthwise so far, and I want to be able to keep it going for as long as we can, but it's getting harder by the day. :sad2
The thing is, sometimes it goes really easy: Lilo is relatively calm, the water flows quickly. Other times he yells up a storm and fights back hard, and often on those occasions, the syringe is very difficult to depress and it takes a lot longer. But from my end (the syringe operator), I can't feel a difference between the good and bad needle sticks. It doesn't feel like I'm catching or dragging on anything under his skin on the bad days, but something is clearly going wrong. :sad:
Making matters worse, last week we had a few bad sticks in a row, and my husband declared that it must be my technique and that we needed to switch places, with him taking over the syringe while I held Lilo. This was not an improvement; he had just as much trouble with the syringe as I did, and I had a lot of trouble holding Lilo still, so after two nights of that, we switched back. :x But upsetting our routine seems to have upset Lilo, and now he's fighting even harder, and has run away and hid a couple of times afterward. Yesterday for the first time ever, he bit my husband.
Does anyone have any technique advice for giving subQ fluids? He's doing OK healthwise so far, and I want to be able to keep it going for as long as we can, but it's getting harder by the day. :sad2