Hey Boy Does It Again

Herb’s Blog, Herbdate 22607 – 921

Here’s the haps:

First, let me thank all of you for reading my story this last week. You guys are a class act. I feel blessed and privileged to have such a high-class audience. The link to all seven of the stories is https://thehapswithherb.com/category/writing/my-stories/joseph/

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So, daughter TNT has a dog. I have mentioned him before, his name is Hey Boy, after Paladin’s valet in Have Gun Will Travel. She got him with the intention that he should be a service dog when she had Lyme disease. He is what poodle people call a Royal Standard or the AKC recognizes as a Standard Poodle.

He’s big and he’s smart. Too smart. And he has a stubborn streak.  But he is loyal to my daughter, though. And for all of his flaws and quirks, he’s part of the family. He is a great dog with kids and babies, one of the best I’ve ever seen. Eager to please and very (maybe over, sometimes) protective.

I think if you’re going to have a pet then you should treat it as a pet. I don’t go for so-called “outdoor pets” or letting your animal run all over the place. Not only is it rude and disgusting on your part, but it can also be dangerous.  A while back ago I found the half-eaten corpse of a cat on the property.

Some animals are working animals, like my uncle’s barn cat, who lived in the straw in the hay-mow. Barn cats are not really pets although you can approach some, once in a while.

Anyway, just like with kids, you are responsible for your pets and other animals. This includes if they do something stupid or if they have an accident.  Like if a seven-year-old visitor is throwing a ball for the dog to have the unmeasurable pleasure of getting and bringing back.

Hey Boy gets so much fun out of it that he will run like the wind after a ball anyone has thrown, but a kid? Oh, yeah!

So, if you are a dog running at full tilt and your foot happens to come down on the metal landscape edging, something is going to give and it won’t be the metal.

About two in the afternoon our young visitor came to the door, “Auntie Tadda! Hey Boy’s paw is bleeding!” Sure enough, he cut one of the pads on his left rear foot which was bleeding a lot. And so I am starting to write this to you on my phone from a veterinary emergency room. Our regular vet didn’t want to see him because he was bleeding pretty badly so they sent us to the doggy E.R. It’s just like a human emergency room. You get triaged and then wait for several hours. We finally wound up getting sent to a different animal E.R. One of the reasons we were not a higher priority case was that my daughter took care of the problem right away. Not only because of her first aid training or her college classes for early childhood education or that she also worked at a vet’s office for quite a while, she knew she needed to stop, or at least slow, the bleeding, so she wrapped a towel around the paw and applied direct pressure which stopped the flow of blood. By the time we got to the first E.R. the triage tech removed the towel and wrapped the foot with a bandage until the vet could look at it.

“Ma’am, you sure did the right thing by applying direct pressure like that. Usually, a car in a case like this looks like a bloodbath.”

“Thank you. How long until we’re seen.?”

“Well, since the blood is not seeping through the wrapping, probably because you did a good job at stopping the bleeding, he’s considered stable. We have several critical cases to get to before we can start on the stable ones.”

Several, several (yes, two severals) hours later, around eight in the evening (Yup, six hours there) someone came back and told us that one of the vets was in a complex surgery and the other one was taking care of all of the other critical cases and maybe we should go another fifteen minutes up the highway to a different E.R. because it could be another six hours. They had called ahead for us already. So, up the road we went with our stable dog. I am finishing this post on my “big” computer at the house but the end of the story is good. The next vet was able to stitch up Hey Boy and old conehead came out and we wound up getting home a little after twelve-thirty. Ten hours and a large chunk of change later. But we know he’s been taken care of properly, his wound cleaned and sewn up and he will get to have peanut butter twice a day for the next two weeks, which is how we trick him into taking his pills. Antibiotics, an anti-inflammatory, and a pill for nerve pain. He can’t resist the peanut butter no matter how hard he thinks he wants to try.

A righteous man regardeth the life of his beast: but the tender mercies of the wicked are cruel. (Proverbs 12:10 KJV)