Back to the vet

I came home from an overnight trip Saturday to find that my dog Lucky looked as if she’d kidnapped by Michael Vick and forced to go three rounds with a Rottweiller.

There was a big sore on the side of her face and it was pretty ugly. There was blood caked in her fur, she seemed kind of droopy and, most telling of all, she hadn’t eaten her food in a couple of days. My mother used to say the way she knew my father was really sick was if he didn’t eat.

I had no idea what had happened. There’s nothing she could have gotten in a fight with in the back yard. She’s too slow to catch the squirrels, and the frogs don’t generally appear too violent. But whatever caused it, she looked terrible.

So I had to take her to see the vet Monday afternoon. As I’ve mentioned before, we didn’t do this when I was a child. You slapped some motor oil on the dog and wished him or her luck. But I’m a modern, sensitive man, and I decide to go flush another $200 down the toilet, i.e., take her to the vet.

She had actually been there a couple of weeks before, to get her annual shots, and apparently she remembered, because when I got her out of the car she dug her claws into the asphalt and bowed up. I told her to stop being such a baby, but she didn’t move, so I half-carried, half-pushed her into the office past a startled woman holding a trembling poodle.

We don’t really fit in at that vet’s office. For one, Lucky is a yard dog, and she’s a mutt, and quite frankly, she smells a little bit. In addition, the sore on her face had become a huge, bloody, oozing mess.

Sitting around us were a few people, holding their little polite pedigreed dogs in their laps. They took one look at Lucky and recoiled in horror, clutching their dogs to their chests in abject fear.

Meanwhile, Lucky plopped down on the floor, bloody-side down, so every time she moved there was a little red smear on the linoleum. She must have felt bad about that, because a couple of times she helpfully began to lick it up, until I stopped her. A woman holding a terrier nearly had a heart attack when she saw that.

Somebody walked through with a white dog and one of my kids said, “Hey, that’s the color Lucky used to be.” Ok, so she’s a little bit dirty. She’s the canine equivalent of Pig Pen from the Charlie Brown cartoons.

They finally called her back, and the doctor said that she had contracted a bad staph infection. Nothing to worry about, but she was going to need to stay overnight, because apparently the initial attempts to shave the hair around the affected area had not gone well, and they were going to need to sedate her in order to do it. Do you see now why I don’t attempt to groom her?

I asked the vet what could have caused the staph infection, and she said to me, with a straight face, “Well, their immune systems can get compromised when they’re experiencing stress.” Stress? This dog does three things – eat, crap, sleep. All in voluminous fashion. What could cause it stress?

I’m the one who’s stressed. I’ve spent more on that dog in the past two weeks than I paid for my first car. It’s a good thing she’s so lovable and sweet and licks my toes, or she might be walking around right now with a face covered in motor oil.