Ever by My Side (34 page)

The trash container was made of heavy plastic, fitted with one of those flip-top lids. I stuck my hand inside like a curious snout, and rattled it around. It sounded about right. Clearly the flip-top
was way too easy for Meg to negotiate—note to Labrador owners: they may play dumb, but when it comes to the acquisition of food, they are cunning and sharp. How long had Meg been grazing around, topping off her stomach when she got hunger pangs, emptying the excess in the backyard the following morning?

The next day I purchased a sturdy metallic trash container with a foot pedal. Only by depressing the pedal could you flip up the lid and access the trash.

“Okay, Meg, let’s see you get past this.”

A few days later, to my delight, there was already a noticeable decline in the number of backyard landmines. I had solved the mystery and found a solution. My little yellow piglet’s nights of sampling in the trough were over. I felt vindicated and masterful. Not even Pavlov himself could teach a dog how to open our new trash can.

And then, after a week or so, I began to notice that Poopy Patrol was suddenly revealing ridiculous quantities of stool once again. I would find myself lying awake at night, listening for the squeak of a foot pedal being depressed somehow, the lid flipping back, a preamble to dumpster diving. Then I would berate myself. Then I would think about setting up a doggy cam to catch her on tape. Then I would berate myself. Only when I worked on the logistics of a camouflaged observational blind from which I would scream “Ah-ha!” when I caught her in the act could I fall asleep.

Thankfully, Meg was eventually, undone by a turkey carcass.

The juices, the aroma of irresistible, bony, grisly, greasy leftovers wrapped in aluminum foil—I should have known better than to leave them overnight in my new Fort Knox trash can in the kitchen. I should have taken them out to the garage and deposited the remains in the regular trash, where they would have lain beyond temptation. Still, the bait had the food addict in a frenzy, and I had only
just hit the pillow when I heard the sound of something hollow and metallic rattling around. I raced downstairs to witness the impossible, a foot on the pedal creating just enough lift in the lid for a nose to pry it the rest of the way open, the carcass and accompanying aluminum foil gone, nothing left but smiling greasy chops and a pink tongue busy licking them clean.

“Bad girl, Meg,” I scolded, spinning the trash can around so that the pedal was toward the wall and inaccessible. “Come here and let me feel your tummy.”

Remorseful, she stood perfectly still as I palpated her abdomen, stomach distended but soft and nonpainful.

“No more,” I said, tapping her nose, her eyes still glistening with guilty pleasure. “Let’s hope you did a good job of chewing your food.”

She trotted off back to bed and so did I, anxious about what the morning would bring.

I am always the first up in the morning at our house, and even before I reached the bottom of the stairs I knew I was in trouble. Typically, when all is well, Meg greets me with a yawn and a downward-facing-dog yoga move, a prelude to the excitement that is breakfast. That morning I received no greeting, something I had time to register only milliseconds before I was accosted by the smell. Meg sat by the back door looking forlorn, but between the bottom of the stairs and where she sat were pools of foul-smelling watery diarrhea.

“Oh, Meg,” I sighed.

I was in boxer shorts and nothing else and I wished I had a gas mask and a HazMat suit, but I let her out the back door and began the odious task of trying to clean up the kitchen floor before the rest of the family emerged.

There can be few things more unpleasant than waking up to the
pungent aroma of puppy diarrhea and trying to scoop a brown and sloppy liquid into plastic shopping bags while working your way through mounds of paper towels and Lysol. And it was everywhere, as though Meg had thought it might be less noticeable if she had spread it around the kitchen island, under the kitchen table, and in front of the back door. When I was finished I had two bags precariously full of biohazard and I didn’t want to touch anything with my hands for fear of contamination.

My plan had been to double-bag my collection, toss it in the trash in the garage, go check out Meg, and keep her away from food for the morning, giving her GI tract a break. Later, she could have something bland for dinner, maybe scrambled egg and rice or boiled chicken and rice. But to my horror, Meg had decided to find an alternative breakfast. She had correctly assumed that her usual dry food was off the menu and had therefore gone for the only alternative readily available, one of her own backyard turds!

There I stood in my boxers at the back door, diarrhea-laden bags in hand, screaming her name to absolutely no avail. I couldn’t put the bags down. What if they leaked? What if they toppled over? Only one thing to do: run outside, carrying the bags, and shoo Meg away from the breakfast of champions.

I’m pretty sure that if what followed had been recorded on video and downloaded onto YouTube, it would have gone viral overnight. You see, it wasn’t that I slipped or tripped, it was the fact that I was charging toward Meg, trying to make her stop by swinging one of the bags in her direction, only to find her focused if not mesmerized by her prize, holding her ground, remaining perfectly still as the bag bumped into her back end and, like a brown paint bomb, exploded, covering me with an enormous splash of the diarrhea I had just finished cleaning up.

It had the desired effect. Meg did desist from eating a stale poop.
In fact she skittered away from the paralyzed, half-naked man who looked as if he had just emerged from a mud-wrestling contest.

“God damn it, Meg!”

“What’s going on?”

The question came from Kathy, who stood at the back door in a bathrobe, coffee cup in hand, and in that speechless moment, I could see her trying to fathom the scene, her husband wandering the backyard in his underwear, his face a pinched mask of revulsion, and what on earth was he doing with those plastic bags?

Meg trotted over to greet her, apparently seeking the sanctuary of a sane member of the family, and like the Swamp Thing or the Creature from the
Brown
Lagoon, I inched my stiff body toward them, wincing with every slick, squishy crease in my joints, trying to hold my breath.

“I can explain,” I said, hearing the whine for vindication in my voice.

But Kathy was petting a remarkably unsullied Meg, and to my horror, for an instant, I thought I saw the two of them staring back at me, unified by their disgust, appalled by my unhygienic indecency, as though they were in collusion, as though, as I advanced, this crafty Labrador had whispered, “How do you live with this guy?”

I have heard it said, “Never trust a veterinarian who doesn’t own a pet.” I’m not sure I agree with this observation, but I will say, having a pet of your own does offer the veterinarian a different perspective, a view from the other side of the examination table, if you will. Sometimes, spending your working days with other people’s cats and dogs can feel a bit like being a tourist in a far-off capital city. Sure, you tick off the major sites, you get a taste for what it is like,
but ultimately the experience can only ever be superficial, a taste, a smattering of the highlights. Having your own pets is like living in this foreign city for an extended period of time. It is your chance to integrate, to immerse yourself and discover all the fine details, all the magic you might otherwise miss or overlook. There is no shortcut. Buying the T-shirt and mailing off the postcard just isn’t the same.

One of my biggest failings as a veterinarian who shares his life with cats and dogs at home is a desensitization to their everyday health-care issues. And please, I choose my words carefully. Desensitization is not the same as negligence or avoidance when it comes to looking after the family pets. You can get so caught up in the big stuff at work, you become inattentive to the little stuff at home.

“Dad, Sophie’s been scooting on the rug for days. When are you going to empty her anal sacs?”

“Don’t forget to bring the nail clippers home!”

“What do you mean you never noticed the skin rash on Meg’s belly?”

I know for a fact, many of my colleagues are a little slow on the uptake when it comes to their own pet’s health. And it’s not just veterinarians. Take my sister, Fiona, and her husband, Pete, a nurse and pediatrician, respectively, who live in Western Australia with their four kids. Recently their eldest, Jack, injured his knee playing Australian rules football. Pete reckoned his son would be fine with a bag of ice and a couple of Advil. It was not until the afternoon of the following day that they finally went to the emergency room, where an orthopedic surgeon remarked, “Your son has one of the most severe knee injuries I’ve seen in twenty years.” If I’d have done the same thing with Meg, the women in my household would have eaten me alive, and using the line Pete employed—“Ah, Nick, we breed ’em tough down under!”—would certainly not have got
me off the hook. Thankfully, when it comes to our pets, each and every member of my family provides real-time, in-your-face Post-it notes that will not wane, be silenced, or tuned out until the crisis, however trivial, has been averted or resolved.

Over the years, relative to so many of my clients, I realize we have been remarkably lucky with respect to our pets’ health. I find myself constantly checking out Meg’s hips, elbows, and knees, ensuring there are no early markers of orthopedic weakness. In fact Meg’s most troubling medical disorder to date resulted from that meddlesome, unstoppable impulse, so rampant among her breed—oral curiosity.

It occurred shortly after the war-paint-diarrhea incident. With the trash can emptied every night and turned around, making it truly inaccessible, Meg turned elsewhere for relief from her craving for midnight munchies. I imagine she tried the refrigerator in vain. However, one night, among the various kitchen cabinets, Meg discovered a lazy Susan. Unbeknownst to us, the opening to this revolving shelf, unlike the cabinet doors with small porcelain handles, was amenable to a strong, persistent muzzle. To Meg it must have seemed like she had come upon one of those carousel snack-vending machines, only she required no cash and there were no plastic windows holding her back as the samples spun around before her awestruck eyes.

Unfortunately for Meg, the lazy Susan predominantly stored baking ingredients—flour, baking soda, brown sugar, confectioner’s sugar—most of which were safely sealed inside large plastic containers topped by sturdy lids. Ultimately Meg’s choice of snack may have been dictated by a lack of amenable alternatives or the only unfamiliar olfactory stimulant to her curiosity. Whatever the reason, Meg singled out two items, chewed open their plastic wrappers, and devoured their contents—a two-pound bag of ground coffee and a one-pound bag of semisweet chocolate chips!

Yes, of course, I realize both items should have been locked away in a dogproof container, but we had seriously underestimated Meg’s oral fixation. Both chocolate (containing the stimulant theobromine) and coffee (naturally packing caffeine) are common household poisons for dogs, with the potential for seizure, coma, and death. If you know or suspect your dog has ingested either item, you should call your veterinarian. And there’s the rub when it came to curious Meg. Those who could help her, those who loved her, including a veterinarian only a matter of vertical feet from where she stood, all slept peacefully, totally unaware of the poisons trying to take hold of her body.

When I went downstairs the following morning, the absence of Meg’s greeting had me bracing for another trash-can disaster. But what I discovered was very different. Meg stood trembling by the back door and all across the hardwood kitchen floor were lakes of brown vomit.

Even in his sleepy haze it didn’t take Sherlock long to discover the remnants of the chocolate-chip and ground-coffee wrappers and realize what had happened.

“Come here, girl, let’s have a look at you.”

You know that feeling when you’ve seriously overdone your caffeine habit, that jerky, jumpy, unpleasant shakiness and heightened sensitivity of all your senses. Well, multiply this level of agitation by a factor of ten and you have a rough approximation of where poor Meg was at—the worst trip ever with no chance of relief.

A few weeks earlier I had seen a ten-week-old pit bull puppy come through Angell’s emergency service with an equally dangerous caffeine-related poisoning albeit from a more palatable source. His owners had passed out drunk in their apartment. They had been working their way through an assortment of beverages during the evening and, clinging to a measure of civility, had opted for a
nightcap of Bailey’s Irish Cream. Unfortunately the liquor had a powerful sedative effect, husband and wife falling asleep on the couch, the bottle of Bailey’s toppling over on its side, and the sticky, milky brown liquid pouring from its neck, irresistibly sweet to a curious puppy. For those who have tried the drink, the manufacturers have overpowered the stimulant punch of the coffee flavor with a traditional depressant—alcohol, and plenty of it. The result was a couple of drunks turning up with a drunken puppy who required twenty-four hours of intravenous fluids and supportive care for alcohol toxicity.