Category: 500 Words

Fun With Dog Vomit – Part II

/ John Weathers / Leave a comment

We took Perrin home Monday evening from the emergency vet with instructions to watch him for signs of abdominal pain or vomiting over night and then possibly follow up with our normal vet in the morning. He was sluggish and snoozy on the ride back home as the drug that they injected him with to induce vomiting apparently packs quite a wallop.

Our plan was for me to get up with Perrin at 7am and keep an eye on him for any signs of trouble while working from home until a disturbance or until I needed to go into the office for an 11am meeting. Melinda had to our for an errand that morning, so it was up to me to make sure Perrin was fine.

Things didn’t go as planned.

I woke up around 6am in absolutely darkness to the sound of Perrin gagging and the sinking feeling that I was about to have to clean up dog vomit. Before I could position him to anywhere more strategic (such a wooden portion of the floor), Perrin proceeded to vomit up more purple Kong toy pieces. Not pausing to access the damage, I tried to escort him downstairs quickly only to have him vomit again at the foot of the stairs. This time it was only a small bit, but I noticed in the light of the hall way that there was a little bit of bloody phlegm in the mess. I took concerned note of this and then shuffled him quickly downstairs where he once again threw up even more pieces of purple Kong toy. Every time, I kept thing how this surely had to be everything.

But no… the Kong toy was the gift that kept on giving.

After the third time, Perrin’s stomach seemed to settle. After cleaning up the mess, I cracked open my laptop, made myself breakfast and coffee and settled in for what was to be a long and tiring morning. I contacted the emergency vet by phone to make sure that the trace amounts of blood were nothing to be concerned over. She felt that it wasn’t serious in the amounts that I described. I decided I would continue to monitor the situation and call my vet when they opened to see if she felt that Perrin needed to be examined further.

Over the course of waiting for the vet to open, he vomited five more times each time bringing up yet more rubber pieces and the last time was somewhat unnerving as it was mostly bloody phlegm. With this turn of events, I called my vet and as I expected, she wanted us to bring Perrin in for X-rays.

With barely time for a quick shower and change of clothes, I rushed off to take Perrin to the vet where they proceeded to take X-rays. While I was worried about him, I thought at this point that he was probably over the worst of it and that I would soon be headed back home with maybe some medicine to settle his gi tract. While Perrin was being X-rayed, I was using my cell phone as a hotspot so that I could check my work email on my laptop and make sure that my meeting got delayed so that I didn’t have to worry about missing it while at the vet’s office.

I was absentmindedly typing away when the vet returned and her demeanor caught me off guard. It seemed that things weren’t going to be so simple after all. The X-rays showed some troubling things, and I would need to make a decision.

To be continued…

Fun With Dog Vomit – Part I

/ John Weathers / Leave a comment

So we had some friends over for dinner yesterday evening for dinner and games. As has been the case for several months now, we had a few dog toys laying around that my dog Perrin enjoys chewing and playing with from time to time.

One such toy is a Kong’s Genius Leo Treat Dispenser.

Perrin has had this toy for several months, and it showed now signs of wear or tear. At the first such sign that one of the chew toys is going the way of the dodo, we pick it up and throw it in the trash and then make a mental note to stop by the pet store at our earliest convenience and pick him up a new toy.

This toy is large. It’s roughly a foot in length, and at it’s widest point it is a little wider than my fist.

That why we and our guests were quite surprised to find that at some point in the evening between nine and eleven, Perrin had somehow managed to devour three quarters of the Kong toy while laying innocently under our dining room table (which also serves as our gaming table). We were rather alarmed.

We had had an earlier scare on Saturday as when we came home from our dinner outing, we found that Perrin had stolen a small picture frame from a book shelf and shredded it – cork back, wood frame, glass, and all – across our living room floor. We hastily tried to reassemble the glass shards and convinced ourselves that we had managed to account for 98% of the glass. Also, as we were handling the glass pieces we found that they were not that sharp and upon examining Perrin’s mouth we saw no signs of cuts. In addition, some online research suggested that we could afford to wait and see how he was. As it turned out, he was completely fine.

But we seem to have underestimated just how much Perrin wanted to go visit our vet Dr. Miller and even get reacquainted with the fine folks at the Cobb Veterinary Emergency Clinic.

So there we were as the clock hands approached eleven and our guests were calling it a night. Melinda had read some disturbing information online about the possibilities of consumed rubber getting blocked inside Perrin’s innards, and we determined that this time we couldn’t afford to wait until our vet opened in the morning, but instead we needed to rush off to the emergency vet. We packed up the tiny remains of the partially consumed Kong toy (now a pitiful thing the size of my fist instead of the grand source of hours of amusement that Perrin had known for months), and we each brought an eReader with us in anticipation of a long, unpleasant wait at the emergency clinic.

We arrived and mercifully there was only one other dog in the waiting room, and he wasn’t gravely injured – there were no severed limbs, no badly misplaced eyeballs dangling from their sockets, or similar horrors from the Kafkaesque treasures that sometimes await poor souls at odd hours of the night in either emergency clinics for pets or ones for  humans. Perrin was quickly ushered in and then we proceeded to wait by ourselves with Jimmy Kimmel on the tube and our smartphones in our hands. I immediately decided that my mind was too frazzled with worry to focus on anything like Anna Karenina. Instead, I browsed through my Google Reader and found an article on the economy of Vietnam to keep my mind occupied while we waited. I would occasionally glance at the TV in glazed amusement mixed with hopeful and fearful anticipation of the nurse coming at some point to invite us back to meet the vet.

When the time came, they led us to what seems to be the clinic’s only patient room. It’s the same room where over half a decade ago, we were given the grim news that our dog Bodie would need to be euthanized. It’s not a place with pleasant memories for us.

Presently, the doctor came in to tell us about Perrin’s condition. She was very friendly and not a note of gloom or doom dotted her eyes or streaked her kind face. She told us that they had given Perrin an injection and induced vomiting. In no time, he had vomited up a shocking amount of purple rubber toy chunks. Struck by a morbid curiosity, we agreed to allow the staff to show us the tray where they had collected the vomit and toy pieces. Like stunned characters in a murder mystery, we calmly identified the missing Kong carcass. I told myself silently that surely that was all of the toy…

To be continued…

One Book a Month

/ John Weathers / Leave a comment

A friend of mine recently congratulated himself on achieving his 2012 goal of reading at least one book a month. He in fact managed to read 1.5 books a month. It brought to mind an incident from the past month where a friend asked for a recommendation of the bests fiction books that people had read in 2012 and I found myself unable to come up with much because I had only managed to finish nine books in 2012 with seven of those being fiction and most of those fiction books were fairly lightweight incidental stuff that I wouldn’t likely recommend.

I’ve got a growing list on Goodreads and never feel like I’m making much progress. I have a bad habit of getting distracted from even the best of books and putting it down for too long and then having to start from the beginning months or even years later. I’m thinking of setting myself a goal for 2013 of reading at least one book a month and of not putting down any fiction book in favor of another.

This last point is vital because although I am really enjoying Anna Karenina at the moment, tomorrow my copy of the A Memory of Light will arrive and it will be very tempting to put down Tolstoy in favor of Jordan as I’ve been waiting for the end of The Wheel of Time for nearly two decades at this point, and I’m certain it will be amazing. But I’m committed to seeing Anna Karenina through this time and although I’m sure that I could rapidly devour A Memory of Light, it would still be very dangerous for my goal of not setting aside novels that I then have to start over.

I think the other goal of one book a month should be very doable provided that I have it as an explicit goal. Indeed, it may even prove easier than my other goal of writing these daily blog entries – which I must confess have already become somewhat of a burden. That said the only time I actually sat in front of the computer and truly threw my hands up in a loss for something to write was last Friday night when the evening was drawing to a close and the pressure of writing something before midnight was upon me.

Since I’m only half-way through with Anna Karenina, I’m going to cheat a little bit and let it count for this month’s book. That said, I think I’ll manage to finish both it and A Memory of Light this month. I can’t imagine myself dragging out that book! Indeed, I imagine that I will find myself challenged to put the it down and focus on other things. Let’s hope so!

Another thing that I will need to master if I’m going to achieve my reading goals is the problem of getting sleepy while reading. I used to be able to read late into the night. I still remember pleasant memories of finishing Robert Jordan’s The Dragon Reborn in a frantic read through the night into the early hours of the morning and how it’s fantastic rousing conclusion energized me and led me to simply crack open the next book in the series instead of going to sleep. I think my chief problem is that when I get into bed, I put myself into a position where my body is laying flat and my head is propped up at an angle for reading. I seem to recall that my more successful late night reading endeavors happened when I could comfortably and easily sit in a position with my back in a vertical position.

This bedrest pillow might be just what I need!