My Day WAS A Tall Tale!
Yeah, yesterday was exciting. Fuck. I can’t take too many “exciting” days like that.
Started out, I was driving to work, window rolled down, happy-happy singing with the radio, and all the sudden something huge flew in the window right by my head. Startled all to hell I whipped my head around to look, and out of the corner of my eye, in the rear view mirror, I saw something hit the back window and flutter. Omifuckingawd bird! I thought, jerking the car over to the side of the road and jumping out. I ran around to the back to look down into the hatch, heart slamming, expecting to find a dead sparrow in the hatch or something.
No. It was one of those goddamn big grasshoppers with the big black and yellow wings.
And then, to top it off, crawling into the hatch, I couldn’t even catch the damn thing. It crawled up into a crack in the hatch door, and poof! it was gone. So, I had to drive the rest of the way to work hoping the pissing thing wouldn’t come flying and fluttering up into my face and startle my dumb ass right into a ditch or anything. Which, it did not, which probably means it’s back in there, waiting to do that to me today on my way to work. Fucker.
Work was painfully slow and boring. I got home, let the dogs out, putzed around, let the dogs back in. Squatch was supposed to be coming over shortly to hang out and meet the dogs again, particularly Jazz, to make sure everything would be cool when he was there zoo-sitting this weekend.
Jazz came in the door, ran over to the couch, sat there a moment, and then jumped off –
– leaving a great big splotch of bright red blood on the couch behind her.
”Whatthefuck?!” I exclaimed, picking her up. Her back end was covered in blood, poor little butt all swollen and painful-looking. My response to this was basically: “Omigawddogshittingbloodemergencyvet!!!!”
Squatch arrived while I was waiting for Art to get home, and Jazz barked at him, causing her to squirt more bloody diarrhea on the floor. Art arrived a moment later, and we left Squatch to hang out with Grimmy and MrJames, speeding off to the Emergency Vet’s Office, which is not even local. We don’t have one; we have to go to the town next door.
So, Art and I spent a couple of hours there (Jazz having capped things off nicely by getting car sick, like she always does, all over me), getting poor Jazz poked and prodded and x-rayed by a team of useless idiots. Last time I go there, unless my animals are literally ripped right open, I can tell you that.
You see, after finding the blood, I had checked Jazz’s kennel, where I discovered that she’d barfed up several bits of rawhide chewie, several bits of a blue plastic toy I’d thrown away yesterday for being all chewed up (I figured Grim had done it), and a freakin’ button. I figured her guts were going to be chock full of things with lots of sharp edges, thus demanding surgeries, etc.
So, the Laurel and Hardy team at the vet’s clinic x-rayed her, and then spent twenty minutes kindly explaining to me that according to the x-rays, they couldn’t find their asses in the dark with both hands and a flashlight. “Well, there’s no bone, metal, or stone in there, because that would be bright white, but her intestines might be bunched up, which might mean she has some string in there, but it might not, and here’s her tummy, and this might be a huge square something in there, but it might not be, might just be like an optical illusion, we don’t know. How about a $1,500.00 bout of exploratory surgery, or possibly an even more expensive barium series, which might show us more, or might not?”
”How about I just take her home and keep an eye on her for a couple of days. You know, for free. Since there’s nothing huge and immediately serious showing up in the grossly over-priced x-rays you just made me pay for. And by the way, that square piece in her tummy? It’s too big for her to have even swallowed, if there’s anything actually in there.”
So we paid and left, coming home with some grossly over-priced antibiotics for her. Seriously. They gave me amoxicillion for Jazz, at 1/5 the strength of the human dose, for, like, sixty bucks for 14 pills. I just got ten pills of amoxicillin from my doctor for that sinus infection, five times as strong, for fifteen bucks. Who the hell are they trying to kid, here?
Also, since she was vomiting — which, I explained, several times, no, she’s not vomiting, she puked once in her kennel, and was car sick once on the way there, like she always is — they gave her a subcutaneous injection of a shitload of water, to prevent dehydration. She had an inch-high lump of water, bigger around than a coffee cup, on her back, which sloshed. Seriously. That was kind of amusing. It absorbed quickly, though. Mostly gone by the time we got home, and all gone today.
She had diarrhea really bad last night, but no more blood. She seems fine today — tuckered out, but fine. Diarrhea has cleared up. I made arrangements with my regular vet to hold the bill for us if Squatch needs to take her in while we’re gone. I finally got to bed about five in the morning, and was back up at 10:30, to finish doing things to get ready for vacation.
And now I have to go, because I have about a dozen more things to do. What an awful week — almost over. Almost over, though.
