(Warning: Some images in this post may appear too graphic for some audiences. If blood makes you queasy, read on at your own risk!)
Remember those cute, peaceful pictures of adorable doglings that I posted yesterday?
Well, clearly, I spoke too soon.
To begin this story, you have to get a little history. One of our neighbors has a dog, cute little thing that looks like a mix between a min schnauzer and a shih tzu. The biggest problem with this dog, and said neighbors, is that the dog loves our yard and makes frequent jailbreak attempts to get over to our side of the fence. (They do say the grass is always greener…)
If it were just her getting into our yard and trying to play with our dogs, we wouldn’t care. Size-wise, they are pretty evenly matched, and she’s generally a sweet, fun little thing, but the problem with the holes is that it makes our yard less secure. These neighbors don’t have the greatest fence on the other side of their yard, and our little Iggies could easily get out onto the street and get into some major trouble if they made their own jailbreak. We’ve actually run out of rocks, stones, and other miscellaneous objects to stop up all the holes that dog is digging. We’ve started pulling bags of dirt.
But last night, Neighbor Dog broke through again. And while she and Stevie were frantically running through the yard, something happened. I was inside at the time, but according to Jared, he saw Stevie take a bit of a tumble, but get back up and running again. From a distance, everything seemed fine.
All I know is that when I came back out, I took one look at Stevie and knew something was wrong when I saw this:
If you don’t know much about greyhounds, especially their smaller counterparts, they have very thin skin with relatively no body fat and very little fur, so it’s common (especially with racing greyhounds) to shred up the whole section, all layers of skin, in falls or tumbles.
Something this big needed to go to the vet. Even Jared agreed after taking a closer look that it would probably be a good idea. The only problem was that it was 8:00 PM, which meant we had to go to an emergency vet to get it taken care of.
Just in case you didn’t think about it, the emergency vet is a really sad place. I wouldn’t want to work there. Just in the hour or two we were in the front “waiting” room, we saw several crying people and sad, sad animals. It seemed like a night for some serious lacerations on dogs, too, from what we saw and heard.
We came at a pretty good time, so we didn’t spend too long before somebody came and took a look at Stevie. At first they thought it would be relatively easy to sedate him, clean out the wound, and patch him back up, but quickly after they started they realized that the injury was actually a lot worse than it looked like. In order to do the extent of cleaning and stitching up that they would need to do, they had to put him under anesthesia (also very dangerous for sight hound breeds). They told us to go home to try and rest, and they’d call us in a hour or two once he woke back up.
Try and rest. Ha. You’re telling that to a woman who has anxiety to begin with, whose special dog has to go under for what seemed like fairly easy to care for wound, and to top it off, is now in her 9th month of pregnancy and is riddled with those fun pregnancy hormones and symptoms.
Go home and rest. Good one, right?
Nearly 6 hours and $600 later, we were able to bring Stevie back home:
(We’ve been trying to think of some good nicknames for him while he’s got those awful stitches in. Our favorites have been Frankenpup, Dog of Frankenstein, and Stevie Stitcheroonie.)
So far, he’s been okay, but he’s seriously grounded. For the next several days, most doggy privileges have been revoked. Potty outside on a leash only so he doesn’t get excited by anything and run off; inside he can’t jump, climb stairs, run, or play; most of the time he should be in a small confined space (like his kennel) to make him recuperate better.
It’s looking like it will be a fun two weeks.
