Tuesday, August 5, 2014

The Elderly Incontinent Dog Still Lives

In the battle between me and the elderly incontinent dog, the elderly incontinent dog is winning.

Yesterday, flush with happiness about a particularly nice three-hour stretch of writing, I stepped out of my office straight into a cold puddle of pee. I then tried to hop one-footed the length of the hallway to the bathroom, to rinse my foot, thence to the laundry for cleaning supplies, by which point the dog had vanished.

He'd peed just outside my office door because I'd banished him from my office. I'd banished him from my office because he keeps peeing on my rug. He pees now whenever he gets the least bit excited, and he gets the least bit excited any time any vehicle comes up the driveway, and he likes to sit on my office window seat, just above the good rug, to watch for vehicles coming up the driveway. You can see how this might be a problem.

A year ago I was praying, actually on-my-knees praying, that the elderly incontinent dog would not die immediately after my son left for college. My son and that dog love each other, and I dreaded having to call my son when he was still homesick in a foreign place (Indiana) and tell him his dog was dead. It seemed at the time a very real possibility. The dog has a frightfully enlarged heart and congestive heart failure; one afternoon late last summer he leaped off the couch, had a sort of seizure, then wholly lost consciousness on the floor. We all thought he was dead. We carried him sobbing to the vet's office, where, no joke, they gave him a shot and five minutes later he was merrily peeing half a gallon onto the vet's floor.

I've always wanted that to happen when I brought an elderly or critically ill pet to the vet--not the peeing part, but the a miracle injection followed by instant restoration of life. Bummer that it only ever happened to the elderly incontinent dog.

He's deaf as a stone. He understands my sign language, but pretends not to. I took him outside today for a nice walk and he gobbled up some dried piece of grass clots or manure or roadkill, which he will likely barf at the time and place most inconvenient to me.

I estimate I've done 100 loads of laundry in the last year solely because of him.

A few weeks ago, I had to take him back to the vet. For a rabies booster.  The vet and I laughed for half an hour. A rabies booster, because that son of a bitch still lives.

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