Sometimes life can get a little trying, we've recently lost a much loved, very close member of our family after a long battle against the Big C. Don’t know why but it always seems to be the good ones this evil illness takes.
Anyhow, they say things such as this come in threes. The second one I’ll not bore you with but the third, well, there are times when you have to look on the bright side or you would just give up. This third event involves our universal shredder (Alfie the Springer Spaniel) who for a couple of days had not been on top form. He was a wee bit subdued and not quite the hurricane we've come to appreciate. Well, subdued moved on to looking pretty sick. Then he was sick, vomiting, not eating and not drinking, and it’s time to go to the veterinarians. There was a bit of poking and prodding and they decided to keep him in. Knowing that he is a lively chap and pretty keen to chew and eat almost anything that comes his way, a scan of his stomach and intestine is the only way to go. To be honest, what with one thing and another, we could have done without a canine situation but you know what it’s like - you just get attached to the damn things, and considering other events of recent times Alfie was just about keeping us all sane. Scan showed an obstruction from stomach to bowel and so out comes the knife and vet says he will give us a call when the op’s over. Later that day we are informed they have removed: A piece of plastic bottle A piece of blue blanket A very. very long piece of nylon string Several other nondescript items of plastic material The vet in question was a very nice, that’s very nice, young Polish lady and her English is far better than my Polish. So she’s listing the removed obstructions and telling me that Alfie will have to have a muzzle until he gets out of the “I’ll eat everything” stage, and this is costing a fortune etc etc! Now you know I have issues, so when I repeated the list of removed objects I politely asked if she had also found a small child and a bicycle too, as we hadn’t seen the neighbour’s child recently. You know when you say things, when the mouth just overrides the brain? The question just came straight out and I know, yes God I know, I should have known better. Well five minutes later when she had explained that Alfie is not a very big dog, he’s only a puppy, and a child and a bicycle would not fit, I’m beginning to think that the child / bicycle joke had not been a good idea. “Clearly you are mentally deranged, and if you can quite manage (should you really own a dog at all?) Alfie can be collected Wednesday morning,” is how she finished the conversation, well more or less! About six weeks previous to this particular event, Alfie had had to wear one of those ridiculous see through collars; I call them lampshades, to stop him licking a row of stitches from another small situation. He had to have one on for a week, well these things are £3.00 a time and he destroyed at least one a day, 2 most days was the normal. Subsequently we built up quite a rapport with the receptionist when collecting replacement lampshades, and so when I asked if they did them in any different flavours, as in, would there be one he might not like eating so much, she got a handle on my mentality. Sadly the same cannot be said of our young Polish vet. So I just knew that it was going to be an interesting conversation when I picked the little devil up on the Wednesday morning. Oh, I’d better end by saying that Alfie is on the mend, getting back to his normal self. The word the vet uses a lot in the daily updates is active, yes, when he’s on song “active” is a word you could possibly use, we tend to use the word “psychopathic”.
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