I have traumatized my dog, and it makes me feel like Bad Mommy all over again.
Remember that feeling? The one you get when your four-year-old announces cheerfully at breakfast that she's sick and can't go to school, and you think she's malingering and send her anyway, and she spikes a fever and vomits in the lunch line and when you go to the school office to pick her up sobs accusingly, "I told you I was sick!"? Yeah, that one. Only maybe a little worse.
Yesterday I got home from appointments and errands to find a polite note from the water company on my door, saying that if I owned the green barn that fronted Booher Road I should do something, since I apparently had a water leak that had used 40,000 gallons of water in the past few weeks.
I hotfooted over to the green barn, which is indeed ours, only metered separately from the rest of our farm, and turned the water off, and could not find a leak, and consulted the water company, and with their help determined that the leak is probably somewhere in the 60-year-old pipe running beneath the 100-foot-long concrete center aisle.
Awesome.
I returned home to two joyous small dogs, the old one and the younger one, apparently celebrating the fact that they'd pulled a bottle of Under Dog's cardiac medicine down from a high windowsill, chewed the top off, and eaten all the pills.
Frantic, I called our vet, who immediately consulted an online toxicology source and told me that if I could get the dogs to vomit right away, all should be well. Per the vet's suggestion, I poured half a cup of household hydrogen peroxide down Under Dog's throat. He swallowed, looked vaguely apologetic, and urped up a big puddle that clearly contained some of the pills.
Polly, our gentle dog, morphed into 18 pounds of ferocious resistance. She clenched her teeth and thrashed her body until we were both drenched and the peroxide bottle was empty. I poured salt and water into a cup and tried to make her swallow that. She heaved and fought; it took half an hour before finally, wretched, she puked up her share of the pills. Then she cowered in her crate the rest of the night.
This morning I had to take her to the vet's for her regular grooming appointment. As soon as I walked into the mudroom, where her crate is, she started to shake. She trembled all the way to the vet's, and I felt so awful that I tried to hold her on my lap and pet her while I drove. She wasn't having it. At the vet's, however, I became the lesser of two evils, and she stuck her head in my armpit and leaned against me while her groomer cooed reassuringly and our vet came out to see how she was doing.
I feel like such a bad mommy. My one consolation is that when my daughter came down the stairs this morning and told me she was sick, I didn't make her go to school. I sent her back to bed.
Remember that feeling? The one you get when your four-year-old announces cheerfully at breakfast that she's sick and can't go to school, and you think she's malingering and send her anyway, and she spikes a fever and vomits in the lunch line and when you go to the school office to pick her up sobs accusingly, "I told you I was sick!"? Yeah, that one. Only maybe a little worse.
Yesterday I got home from appointments and errands to find a polite note from the water company on my door, saying that if I owned the green barn that fronted Booher Road I should do something, since I apparently had a water leak that had used 40,000 gallons of water in the past few weeks.
I hotfooted over to the green barn, which is indeed ours, only metered separately from the rest of our farm, and turned the water off, and could not find a leak, and consulted the water company, and with their help determined that the leak is probably somewhere in the 60-year-old pipe running beneath the 100-foot-long concrete center aisle.
Awesome.
I returned home to two joyous small dogs, the old one and the younger one, apparently celebrating the fact that they'd pulled a bottle of Under Dog's cardiac medicine down from a high windowsill, chewed the top off, and eaten all the pills.
Frantic, I called our vet, who immediately consulted an online toxicology source and told me that if I could get the dogs to vomit right away, all should be well. Per the vet's suggestion, I poured half a cup of household hydrogen peroxide down Under Dog's throat. He swallowed, looked vaguely apologetic, and urped up a big puddle that clearly contained some of the pills.
Polly, our gentle dog, morphed into 18 pounds of ferocious resistance. She clenched her teeth and thrashed her body until we were both drenched and the peroxide bottle was empty. I poured salt and water into a cup and tried to make her swallow that. She heaved and fought; it took half an hour before finally, wretched, she puked up her share of the pills. Then she cowered in her crate the rest of the night.
This morning I had to take her to the vet's for her regular grooming appointment. As soon as I walked into the mudroom, where her crate is, she started to shake. She trembled all the way to the vet's, and I felt so awful that I tried to hold her on my lap and pet her while I drove. She wasn't having it. At the vet's, however, I became the lesser of two evils, and she stuck her head in my armpit and leaned against me while her groomer cooed reassuringly and our vet came out to see how she was doing.
I feel like such a bad mommy. My one consolation is that when my daughter came down the stairs this morning and told me she was sick, I didn't make her go to school. I sent her back to bed.
I have the feeling that sometimes being a good mommy can feel an awful lot like being a bad mommy.
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