My husband and I don't have much of a social life anymore. We expected that; we'd been well-informed that having a baby would do this. And while we don't love it, most of the time we don't mind. We've always been home-bodies for the most part anyway. But we do have our limits, and they were severely tested this weekend.
We had just sat down to our usual special Saturday dinner treat: pizza that costs its weight in gold. With a baby in bed by 7pm we don't have the opportunity to dine out very often and thus not much of a way to distinguish Saturday nights from every other night other than pizza delivery. But this Saturday night was to prove extra special in oh so many ways.
It started right after I'd taken my first bite of gold pizza. The dog had been making a nuisance of herself all day by licking her private crotchal area. This is something she has always done with some frequency, so other than getting incredibly irritated - really, the sound of that can catipult me into a bad mood faster than you can say "that pint was supposed to serve four" - I mostly ignored her. But Tom, who apparently pays a little more attention to detail when it comes to the dog's private crotchal area ministrations, noticed something different this time: namely that she really, really would not stop.
Now, if it were still just me and the dog, like in the old days, I probably would have spent another 24 hours or so yelling at her every time she went crotch-diving before it occurred to me something might actually be wrong. Tom on the other hand leapt to attention and grabbed a flashlight in a resourceful and Boy Scout-like manner. I sighed heavily. I generally don't like my meals interrupted, especially to shine a flashlight up my dog's ass, but I couldn't let him do this alone so I joined him on the floor and held the dog still while Tom did the honors.
Oh. My. God. What was going on with my dog Down There made giving birth look pretty. There was oozing. There were several non-solid substances providing varying levels of olfactory insult. It was the Battle of Normandy, if the soldiers had been covered in fecal matter the consistency of tar.
The sight knocked me completely senseless. I held the dog and felt dread sweep through my body. "What do we do?" I whispered in utter horror as Tom clicked the flashlight off with a grim expression.
We gathered Theo up in an old towel and Tom carried her through the rain to the car and to the emergency veterinary clinic where they diagnosed what every couple longs to hear on a Saturday night: "impacted anal gland." "Yeah," they elaborated completely unnecessarily, "those get pretty nasty pretty quick." In fact, they wouldn't even let Tom stay in the room while they treated Theo, for his own protection. While I was upset at the thought of Theo going through this without us there, I recognized that had Tom remained, he may never have had a good night's sleep again.
Theo arrived back home around 11pm, thoroughly drugged and accompanied by a dozen different medications and instructions. And, for the first time in her 14 years... yes. The dreaded Cone Collar of Shame.
I couldn't do it. I looked at my poor dear friend, drugged out of her mind, miserable, scared and shaking and simply could not force this further indignity upon her. She was so drugged, I reasoned with my skeptical husband, that she wouldn't be inclined to lick anything anyway. Let's just leave her be and let her sleep.
Of course I was awakened a couple hours later by that insanely irritating sound of ferocious crotchal area ministrations. With a sigh, I wrapped the Cone Collar of Shame around my miserable little dog and went back to sleep as soon as I was assured she had drifted off.
I was awakened again an hour later. She had managed to crane her neck far enough around the cone to continue her mission. With a cry of frustration and fatigue I pulled Tom out of bed who thought for a long while (he really likes problem-solving, and is fairly good at it, so long as you're patient). "Maybe we should diaper her," he said.
And here I couldn't bear to put a cone collar on her! But it's amazing what you'll agree to do to your best friend when your best friend's ass is leaking something indescribably heinous on your bedroom rug.
So we diapered the dog. How handy we happen to have an 11 month old baby who is, apparently, roughly the same size around.
Diapered and coned, we all fell back to sleep for a few minutes before the baby awoke at her usual Oh My God It's Early hour. I got the baby, and Tom carried the drugged dog upstairs to get her settled on the couch for the day. As soon as I brought the baby upstairs and she saw the dog - I swear this is true - she started laughing. Even our 11 month old daughter knew the dog looked utterly ridiculous.
The indignities were not over. For any of us. The day found us juggling a very curious and mobile baby with the diapering and cleansing of our dog's extra ass hole. I won't go into any more detail on that. Just suffice it to say that I feel like I need a shower along the lines of the one they gave Karen Silkwood. And I may never eat pizza again.
But one thing's for sure: I will never again complain about a boring Saturday night.
