Did you ever congratulate yourself for having all the bases covered only to watch everything go down the toilet in an instant? That’s what happened to me the last day of April. I got up that morning and made a note on my calendar to set up an appointment to get BeeBee spayed in May sometime after her first birthday. My thinking was that she’d be old enough that her growth plates should be well on their way toward closing if not already closed and her stitches would be out before I took her to my son’s to babysit my granddaughter over the Memorial Day weekend.
Alas, Bee’s grooming that day resulted in one of those bad news/good news deals. The bad news is that I noticed a, um, uh sort of, sounds like pussy/pusy/pussie/pusy discharge from her feminine nether regions, a.k.a. a purulent discharge from her vulva in vetspeak. Let me digress here a moment to note that I am referring to pus, not a very small cat oozing out of my dog. For all the years that I have thought of exactly what I saw coming out of Bee as a pus-sy discharge, it never occurred to me that I had no idea how to spell it and even if it was an actual word. As is so typical of Spellcheck’s idiosyncratic nature, it pleaded ignorance to all definitions of the word but had no qualms about commenting on its proper spelling. This struck me as somewhat mystical. Is the proper spelling of a word for which one recognizes no meaning comparable to the sound of one hand clapping?
To continue: the bad news was that Bee obviously had an infection that was producing a gross discharge.
The good news was that Bee had an infection that was producing a gross discharge from her vulva.
At this point you might be asking yourself how this could possibly be good news. Or perhaps you’re thinking I’ve finally gone round the bend as you suspected I would one day. BUT it was good news in that the most likely place that discharge was coming from was an infection in my very long dog’s most likely proportionately very long Y-shaped uterus. Far better that that gross stuff was flowing out rather than trapped within her uterus because that spelled the difference between a relatively normal dog and one who could become direly ill in an instant
Not being one to look a gift discharge in the mouth–how’s that for a disgusting play on words!?–I was very pleased when I was able to schedule Bee for surgery a mere two days later.
That morning, I had to face the first challenge related to this event. You might be thinking this meant the surgery. Nope. I’m referring to withholding food from a dog with a greatly enhanced sense of smell that compensates for her deafness and visual limitations. I have not tested this, but there are days I think this dog easily could smell a single molecule of dogfood from a least a mile away if the wind was right. Moreover, she believes that every such molecule is created specifically for her and it is her mission in life to locate and eat it.
As you might have guessed, feeding two other dogs while not feeding Bee was like telling the Pentagon they can’t have more money. Oh, the noise, the drama! I put her in her crate while I fed Frica and Ollie because I had no doubt she would bulldoze them out of the way and snarf down their food. Although she couldn’t see them daintily eating their breakfast, she knew what was going on and she was not pleased. Had I possessed a magic decoder ring, I suspect I would have heard some deaf-dog profanity that morning because the sounds she was making were unlike any I’d ever heard her make before. My favorite was a half-howl, half-croak emitted from an upside down position with all four fat feet extended heavenward. This I decided was meant to convey the needless tragedy of a certain dog’s immanent death if some heartless, cruel, and abusive poor excuse for a canine bitch didn’t feed her immediately.
When said heartless cruel and abusive saintly (in my version of the story) individual did not and after Bee had sucked up every invisible molecule of food said villain missed prior to freeing her, she was back to her usual self. After stomping Ollie a few times, she acted like nothing had happened.
Until we got to the clinic…