Sometimes, when you have a dog, you wake up at 5:45 a.m. to find soft dog poo all over the bedroom and bathroom floors, in the dog basket, and on the dog. You find a way to go back to sleep even though it smells really bad while your boyfriend locks the dog in the other bathroom then buys cleaning supplies from the 24-hour Walgreens down the street. He washes the dog when he gets back and cleans the other bathroom floor, which was already covered in more dog poo, now with increasingly suspicious red streaks in it. When he goes back out to buy newspapers to cover the floor, you hold the dog who looks very unhappy.
Sometimes, when you have a dog, you’re late for work and also leave early to meet them at the vet, and when you tell a coworker where you’re going she reminds you that when her dog had bloody diarrhea and she took him to the vet they said it was terminal cancer and he died shortly afterwards. Two coworkers see you start to cry and say they understand and it’s ok to be worried about a dog you’ve had 15 years. By the the time you can leave work and get there the exam is over and everybody is relieved. The vet asked if the dog has been under stress lately and he said that yes, they just moved into a new house and also she fell in the deep end of the pool last week and didn’t seem to have any instinct for swimming (and would have drowned if her heroic owner with jungle cat reflexes hadn’t saved her). The vet says that it seems like a stress-induced intestinal infection and prescribes medication and special dog food and tells you to come back if it isn’t cleared up in two days. Sometimes, when you have a dog, two days from now is the start of a long holiday weekend while your partner will be out of town for a high school reunion.
You come home several hours later after work to find her in a freshly newspapered bathroom that has been clean for several hours and she seems relieved to sleep in a clean basket and eagerly snatches the new food and licks up her medicine. You relax and stop worrying about the worst that could happen.
Sometimes, when you have a dog, you come back at the end of the night and you again find bloody poo on the blanket and on the newspaper and tracked about with little dog feet. You look forward to 7:00 a.m. when she gets her next dose of medicine and you remind yourself that the vet said it probably wasn’t serious and that it should be better after a day or two.
Sometimes, when you have a dog, you laugh about how this must be the worst day of your dog’s life, what with two baths, going to the vet, a thunderstorm, and being locked in a bathroom all day, while you try not to cry thinking that maybe the vet was wrong.
