Our boy has a drug problem.

A still-life, with Christ and pills. Specifically, Gomez's post-neuter antibiotic. Client and doctor names have been removed from the label, to protect the innocent, the guilty, and the potentially negligent.

The instructions clearly say: give TWO pills TWICE a day for 14 days. That's a total of FOUR daily, two thousand milligrams of Cephalexin sunshine. No problem. Gomez has a junkie’s weakness for peanut butter, which makes jamming pills down his throat much simpler for everyone:

“Dude! Time for your meds...” and he comes running, literally drooling for a fix.

It wasn't until we got closer to the end of the supply that we discovered we'd been given enough for half the dosage specified on the label.

So what's wrong here: the number of pills, or the instructions? Is this a wicked new reality show, where a hidden camera feeds our confused looks back to a lounge filled with drunken veterinarians, pissing themselves with laughter when we realize we’ve been overdosing our dog?

I suspect the instructions are at fault here, not the amount of pills we were given. Four pills a day seems like a lot, but then, it was surgery... We’ll find out soon. Either way, it's a nice little heart attack for us humans, trying to do the right thing and finding out, uh, no. We were not.

UPDATE: It was neither. The error was in the “14 days” -- Should have been 7 days. So it wasn't as bad as all that. But still. We'll be starting fresh with a new vet this Saturday, and these guys come with almost universal praise from the neighborhood.

...never did like "reality" TV shows, particularly ones that exist only in my paranoid fantasies. Damn those giggling vets and their faulty medication instructions and their hidden cameras.