Hives!

Last night we had some friends over for dinner. I made creamy butternut squash soup. When I was cleaning and cutting up the squash, I had to core the middle of seeds. Some of the seeds dropped on the floor during the process. Rick speedily swept them up and threw them away. We hung out for a few hours with our friends and they ended up leaving around 11:30. We decided to watch a little TV before bed. Atticus had been hanging out sleeping in our room during our TV watching. So around 12:30 or 1:00, Rick went and got Atticus to put him to bed. Atticus had hives all over him! This has happened to him once before about a year ago when he had a reaction to an immunization. But, this time we didn't know what he had eaten to make him do this. As a rule, we don't typically feed him people food and certainly hadn't that night. Rick ended up finding one of those squash seeds close to Atticus. I don't know if he ate one or just licked it, but he was definitely allergic to it!

When he had the last reaction, the vet told us that we could give him Benadryl and that should help the hives. But just to be safe, I called the on-call vet. He said to give him Benadryl. If the reaction hadn't gotten better in a few hours, give him another dose. Rick hopped in the car and ran down to the 24 hour CVS close to our house and bought some Benadryl. We gave him a dose right away and hoped he would sleep. Rick got up at 6:00 this morning to check on him. Atticus's hives hadn't gotten much better, so he gave Atticus another dose. We got up this morning and Atticus still had hives. Rick called the vet and they said they would be closing at 1:00 today and were not open tomorrow, so we decided to just take him in for a steroid shot. Atticus is back to normal and the hives are gone! He scared us! We felt so bad that he had hives all night, but the good thing was he didn't seem to be upset or wasn't acting sick. Poor dog!