The other day, when Angel and I were out for a walk, we ran into an old friend of mine from my "dog park days." We hadn't seen each other in years so we gave each other the "Readers Digest" version of what had transpired since we saw each other last, and expressed sympathy to one another for the dogs that are no longer with us. Then the gal said, "Over the years, I have told SO many people the Oleander Story. You have saved so many lives. No one I have told the story to knew how poisonous oleander bushes were." Then she proceeded to tell me about the time her horse grabbed a mouth full of oleander and how quickly she jumped into action to fish every bit of it back out of his mouth, and how grateful she was to know about me and Lucky's experience.
Inside I cringed, as I flashed back to "the story" . . . part of me still holds it as "the time I almost killed Lucky" . . . so it is difficult for me to see it in the positive, but I did my best to focus on the benefits. If Lucky and I hadn't gone through that terrible ordeal, and if people hadn't continued to share the story, many animals lives might have been lost.
It was many years ago, when Lucky was still struggling with her fear of sounds. I thought having a fountain in the backyard would help soothe her and possibly drown out some of the neighborhood sounds that we couldn't avoid. It definitely helped because Lucky was able to spend more time hanging out in the backyard with me, so I was pleased with myself. One day, I had this "bright" idea that I would dress up the fountain by floating flowers in it. I picked some pretty white flowers from the bushes in my complex and put them in the fountain.
A couple of days later, Lucky became sick . . . and I mean sick. She was throwing up hourly, she couldn't even keep water down. She was becoming so weak that I had to help her walk to the backyard, and there were more and more incidents of her not making it to the backyard before she threw up. We were both wiped out and sleep deprived.
I called my vet and he said it definitely sounded like she had been poisoned. He quizzed me about all the places Lucky and I had been in the previous few days to try and figure out what she could have possibly gotten into. I couldn't come up with any answers and I was scared.
That night one of my friends came over. I was blathering on about what was happening with Lucky, and how frightened I was, then continued to ramble about how I had made a fountain to help Lucky with her sound fears and how I had been floating flowers in the fountain but had removed them before she got there and hadn't replaced them. She asked me what flowers I had used and I mentioned the bushes out front. Her eyes nearly popped out of her head and she said, "Mo, those are OLEANDERS"
Once Lucky was out of danger, my vet wanted to know how Lucky came into contact with oleanders. I confessed that I had put them in the fountain to make it "prettier." He asked if Lucky was drinking the water in the fountain and I flashed on images of Lucky dropping her tennis ball in the fountain and then fishing it back out. He said I was basically making "Oleander Tea" and that we were lucky that Lucky hadn't died.
So I learned what an oleander bush looked like (Growing up, we had just referred to them as "the freeway flower" since they were planted in the median and on the sides of the freeway). I learned that every part of an oleanders is equally poisonous (flower, stem, leaves), and I also learned that the darker the color, the more poisonous they are (so I was grateful that I had at least picked the white ones instead of the hot pink ones).
It took me a long time to make peace with myself over the fact that while trying to do something to help Lucky, I actually hurt her. I thought I had forgiven myself for it but I could tell from my reaction, when my old dog park friend mentioned the story, that I still hold some guilt and shame over it. I had made it my mission to help Lucky recover from what other people had done to hurt her. Never in a million years did I think that *I* would end up hurting her as well, even though it wasn't intentional.
In the hopes that others can continue to learn from my mistakes, I am sharing this story . . . feel free to pass it on to others. The more people who know about the dangers of oleanders, the safer our pets will be.
