I skipped writing on Tuesday, and that's OK, because all the excitement happened at around 9 p.m., and we were too busy taking a dog to the emergency clinic for me to maintain a blog.
What happened was, in brief, two of our dogs got into a fight, and one of them ended up with a rather bizarre injury.
The long story is that
Violet was pestering Dotti, a boy shih tzu (that's ANOTHER story), and for some reason, the Australian shepherd, Chrissie, took offense and attacked Dotti, who screeched to high heaven. I threw Chrissie out of the house, and checked on Dotti, who was pawing at his face.
To my horror, I saw Dotti's right eye blobbed out and looking in a direction that no dog should ever be able to look in. My first instinct was to push it back in -- how hard could that be? But an eye is still an eye, even if it is outside one's head, and Dotti was having none of that.
I ran to the cellar hole and yelled to the guy who lives down there (we call him "Gollum," but his real name is Rex), "Rex, we have a dog emergency."
He replied, somewhat laconically, I felt, "A dog emergency? What happened?" But I didn't hear his chair squeak the way it does when he gets up to climb the ladder, like he would if he really believed it was an emergency.
I said, "Rex. This is a real dog emergency." Only the way I said it was, "REX. THIS IS A REAL DOG EMERGENCY."
No one could look at poor Dotti, with his eye popped out, our own in-house Marty Feldman. Kayti kept saying, "Oh, gross. Oh, gross."
I drew the short straw and got to hold him all the way to Westbrook, where we paid -- I am not making this up -- $574 to get Dotti's eye popped back in. Of course, that covered the anesthesiolosologologist's fee, because Dotti had to be sedated, and the three -- count 'em -- three stitches to keep his eyelids closed and the pain meds and the otic ointment and the funky funnel around his head that keeps him from trying to remove his eye for good. (Biblical reference: If thy right eye offend thee, pluck it out ...)
The doctor said we won't know for awhile (presumably until the stitches are out) whether Dotti's vision will remain intact.
One funny thing: We were all sitting in the waiting room, and a vet tech came out of the operating room area swinging a plastic garbage bag with something in it. "Here's your ..." she started to say.
"My DOG?" I said.
She laughed and said, "No, it's the towel you had wrapped around him."
Whew! Wouldn't that just be the ultimate in vet callousness, tho? "Hey, we decided it was hopeless, so we put him out of his misery, and here you go."
I regret that we did not take a picture of Dotti with his eye askew. You will just have to imagine it, and weep.
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