Sunday, October 3, 2010

My dog is a drama queen....

Even when she is not trying!! She feels like a princess in her sparkly collar, obviously....

As promised, here is the saga of the Tuesday night vet visit! (We have already established that when I say "tomorrow", I don't necessarily mean the very next day, so hush.) That night when I got home, Maggie was not her usual hysterical self when I got home, but I thought that it could be attributed to her being asleep when I arrived. Sometimes if you catch her truly asleep you are spared the full-on, wiggle-butted, yodeling assault of a greeting that is her usual.... But she normally goes bananas when Matt gets home, and instead she just moped over and stood next to him. When he reached down to touch her, she yelped in pain. We couldn't get her to come to a treat. And then, in the move that worried me the most, she climbed in my lap and shook all over like she was afraid.

Since she is like our child that can't talk to tell us what is wrong, we decided that it must be serious if she was acting so wrong, and we called the emergency vet number. The vet, who was very young and perky, agreed to meet us at the office. This was all around 8PM. We get there and there were two cars in the parking lot, one with the vet and her husband and one with a man and a dog. Turns out he was the husband of one of the cleaning ladies who were working inside. The very nice vet had counted on there being a key in a secret hiding place so she could let herself in, but it wasn't there.... So there we stand in the parking lot. She tried calling the cleaning lady on the number provided by her husband, but no answer. The husband said, "Just beat on the door and they will come see who is there." Instead the cleaning ladies CALLED 911. Seriously. A few minutes later, there we are with FOUR deputy sheriff cruisers, big guys in bullet-proof vests and their hands on their guns! The cleaning lady CRIED when she opened the door and found out she was safe from Maggie, the miscellaneous terrier and my mom, the only person they could see from where they were hiding. Obviously, my mom would bring her twenty pound terrier when she tried to trick the cleaning crew of a vets office into opening the door so she could kill them and steal animal tranquilizers, right??

Anyway, vet visually identified we were allowed to enter! There were exams, rectal thermometer temperatures, and x-rays.... Then the vet brings the images in to show us. Show us that our dog was absolutely full of crap. No kidding. It looked like she hadn't pooped in two weeks. We took our dog to the emergency vet and braved terrified cleaning ladies and deputy sheriffs to find out that our dog was constipated. Not embarrassing at all....

I have to say, though, that she was absolutely miserable and even if we had known what was wrong, we would have taken her to the vet anyway.... We couldn't let her just suffer. A doggie enema later, she danced back into the exam room like her old wiggle-butted self! I have never seen such immediate relief! Happy dog... However, when the vet tried to give her a treat, she wouldn't go NEAR her. Every time she got close, the woman stuck something up her butt, and she wasn't having any more of THAT! She tried to get the treat by stretching her neck as faaaarrrr as it would go, all turtle-esque..... Even butt-protecting isn't worth treat-forgoing!!

We have spent a couple of days here pretty obsessed with dog poop, but things seem to be back to normal... Silly mutt-mutt!

1 comment:

Laurie said...

Awww...glad Maggie is feeling better, but what a funny story! I had a cat who had problems with constipation - we gave him a tablespoon of canned pumpkin (NOT pie filling) a couple times a day to keep things moving along.