Deliverance

About a week ago, the hell-hound started to act a little funny – well, she thought she was funny, anyway, but to be honest, a dog wearing a joy buzzer when I tell her to shake wears thin pretty quickly.  But she also stopped eating, and was moping around and just not being her old self.  She didn’t dig through the garbage when I accidentally left it within her reach, and nary a spatula was carried out back for three whole days.

At first I was pretty pleased, thinking of the money I would save on food and cooking utensils were she to continue this behavior, but then I thought of my future political aspirations and the damage that Mitt Romney’s campaign has undergone for his treatment of Seamus (the guy’s a big enough douche-canoe in the first place, but how he’s polling above 10% with the dog debacle hounding him baffles me), and decided to take her in to see the vet.

Well, I dropped her off and went to work, and they called back with all kinds of crazy stories about her liver being all out-of-whack, and how they needed to do an ultrasound to get more information, and unfortunately, she had apparently pulled her “act really good and cute and friendly for strangers” routine, because they seemed appalled when my first reaction was “Can’t you just put her down?” and prattled on and on about what a sweet girl she was.  Sweet pickled pretzels, people can be so gullible.

So they did their doctor stuff, and determined that her gall bladder was all backed up or some such thing, which wreaks havoc on the liver (or so they say).  Oddly, they didn’t ask about her drinking habits, which was my first thought when they mentioned that specific organ.  Let’s see … I seem to run out of beer faster than I should … she has a bad liver … yeah, I think I know the problem.  But it didn’t occur to them that she might be part North American Booze Hound, instead leaning toward some crackpot theory involving the non-digestability of chicken wings and flapjack-flippers.

They seem to think she’ll be okay, and all I have to do is administer an incredibly complex and wildly expensive regimen of 4 different prescription pills for a few months and make sure I feed her bland food, like boiled hamburger and white rice.

Yes, I have to boil hamburger for her.  I’m down a thousand dollars and counting already for her majesty, and now I’m cooking her gourmet meals and bleeding from the bites on my fingers that she inflicts when she grabs the pills from me (she’s not the most gracious of eaters, and is especially aggressive when there is peanut butter involved as the vehicle for the medication).

Well done, Indy, well done – I never would have guessed that you could expand your abuse of me to include a loss of dignity and economic ruin.  Well done, indeed.