by Esther C. Baird, first published in the Ipswich Local News, May 11, 2023
They say that owning dogs makes you calmer and happier and provides better immunity against germs.
And surely, as I sank onto my couch covered in dog … everything … that’s what I was feeling: happy and healthy (perhaps with a tiny side helping of exhaustion).
A smidge of deep and abiding anxiety whenever the dog moved.
The merest touch of darkness at the hole in my bank account.
It began with stuffed toy duck.
Moose and Nitro, our two Bernese mountain dogs, love new toys.
Regular readers will recall that Nitro is our re-homed two-year-old Berner who has brought all the aforementioned happiness — along with the desire to give hugs — to our family after the loss of our older dog, Blue.
But Nitro also comes with a seek-and-destroy setting. And in under 60 seconds, the duck was decapitated and our living room was decorated in cotton balls.
I threw the remains away, and Nitro jumped up and hugged me to celebrate the fun we were having.
Two mornings later, I came down to find what, if I had to guess, was the latex lining of the duck head on the floor, where it had been regurgitated.
Fine. He’d eaten the inside of the duck in his lightning-fast destruction, but it’d come back out. No harm, no fowl (sigh). Dogs eat things.
But as I cleaned, Nitro began making that familiar sound that dog owners know means, “Get the dog off the carpet!” Sure enough, up came a … black sock.
Huh.
He began to make more weird noises that were less normal, and I knew we were entering into the dangerous world of possible bloat.
Bloat is a nasty progression in a dog’s stomach involving too much air, twisting, and sudden death if not treated. Thankfully, there is an emergency vet only 20 minutes from our house.
One mad dash across town and some X-rays later, Nitro was making friends with all the techs in the clinic, giving out hugs, and generally seeming fine.
But the X-rays showed “a foreign object of a cloth nature,” the vet explained. “It’s well past the stomach, but it could create an obstruction.”
“But not bloat,” I said in relief. “I bet it’s the other sock.”
She nodded, “Yes, but the only way we can be sure is to do emergency surgery to remove it, which costs the same as the U.S. national debt.”
She stared at me. I stared at her. Nitro wagged his tail. Was this a good time for hugs?
“Or we could wait till tomorrow,” I suggested, “since it’s not bloat, and see if the cloth object, um, moves along and doesn’t create an obstruction?”
She agreed. So Nitro and I, in solidarity with the foreign cloth object, moved along back home.
Obviously, he wasn’t out of the woods. I set up camp on our couch and watched him not sleep, while I also did not sleep. At first, he preferred to pace instead of lying down, but finally, around 3 a.m., he fell into a deep sleep. I assumed that was good news.
The next morning, at the follow-up, the vet confirmed it with the new X-rays, “It’s almost out! I may even reach in and see if I can get it!”
Fun at the vet!
But the end (sigh) was in sight. Later that day, in a plot twist, the foreign cloth object turned out to be what I’d call a … patriotic spangle? A toy meant to look like a firework with strips of red, white, and blue fabric shooting out of a dense cloth center.
Who could explain this? Who could fathom the depths of Nitro’s dietary choices?
He was giving up no answers. He was, however, giving up the entire contents of two days’ worth of E.R. I.V. fluids.
And so, after mopping the floor with bleach and spending time at the magical Wag-N-Wash in North Beverly, Nitro was a clean and bouncing dog.
I was an utterly sleep-deprived, bedraggled, bleached-out, significantly poorer shell of a person. In other words, in dog ownership land, I was happy and healthy.
Hugs, anyone?