I had a very bad morning. More accurately, I had a very bad 24 hours or so. Per usual, posts of this sort relate either to work or my dog, and in this instance both were involved.
It started Tuesday afternoon when I brought Q home from playing outside and discovered he had a big cut on top of his paw. At first, it looked like nothing, because he occasionally gets cuts and it's no big deal. This one, though, was different. It was long (according to my Google searches, long enough to need stitches) and DEEP. Like, frighteningly deep. Almost-see-his-bones deep (yet oddly, not really bleeding). Also, it was one of those cuts that's just a big flap of skin. Sorry, I know; I was grossed out, too. If talk of skin staples freaks you out, you probably just want to close this page now.
Although Q didn't seem terribly bothered, we called the vet, who told us to bring him in Wednesday morning. I did, they put him under anesthesia, shaved his little (big) paw, cleaned the cut, and closed it with two staples. Four hours later, I picked up a wobbly, weak, narcoleptic, way-watered down version of Quincy, and my heart broke into a million pieces. He slept most of the day and felt better, but then...
Then he ripped out one of the staples when I was out grocery shopping. I called the vet again, and they said he would be fine. Only, the cut opened up, and then this morning, an hour before I was supposed to leave for Florida with the crew team, the other staple came out and the cut was completely open.
Now, under other circumstances, I would have just taken him back to the vet and had everything fixed again, but since that wasn't possible, I charged headlong into worst case scenario mode. I was leaving for Florida for a week. Jeremy will be in the city 12 hours a day all week. I assumed, naturally, that this meant that Quincy, left to his own devices and with no supervision, would either lick his paw until it fell off or would contract some horrible, incurable infection. So I cried. Oh my goodness, did I cry. I cried and sniffled and apologized profusely to my dog, who in turn very sweetly licked my hand. Jeremy called just to say goodbye, and instead he got a series of barely indecipherable sniffles which no doubt just added to the stress that has been piling up in his life this week.
It was all guilt, of course. I could not get past the fact that my poor little puppy, the one creature in the world who actually depends on me on a daily basis, and for whom I am responsible (and yes, I willingly leave Matilda out of that category, because she's so independent I think she may even get her driver's license soon), was going to be alone, hurt, and scared while I shirked my duties and flew to an entirely different pole of the country. So chances that someday I'll be able to leave a sick child alone? Slim, my friends.
In the end, I had to leave to catch my bus, but first I wrapped Q's paw in socks and ace bandages until it was less a paw and more of a pillow. And then I went to the bus and cried in front of a bunch of parents. I would like to say I am one of those people who can artfully manage a crisis and save emotional outbursts for solitude, but there I was, loading kids onto a bus and trying to reassure their parents, some of whom were sending their kids off alone for the first time ever, and I was sniffling, red-eyed, and puffy, frantically wiping tears off my cheeks in between handing out my cell phone number and collecting allergy and asthma instructions. I tell you, they picked a winner when they hired me.
The save of the day goes to two people, both of whom I think may be the greatest people on earth. The first is my husband, who, despite having a dead phone and in the city trying to work through some serious school stress, several times called the vet and a friend of ours and somehow arranged for Q to get back and fixed up again. I guess I should also thank the person whose phone he borrowed to get all of this accomplished.
The second is Kevin, a good friend of ours at school, who had already spent the day driving other friends to the airport, and who has already walked Q for us on many an occasion. He picked the dog up, drove him to the vet, and sat with him when they cut off actual pieces of Q's skin and then stapled his paw together again, this time without anesthesia. I can't even imagine holding Q, the most energetic and willful 85-lb. dog in the world, while his paw was being stapled. Kevin deserves a medal, but instead Jeremy took him out for dinner.
The moral here, of course, is twofold. The first part is that, even as hard as I try to remember, I always forget that things usually are nowhere as bad as they seem, and they somehow work out in the end. The bigger moral is that there are some wonderful, kind, good people out there, and I'm happy that I know so many of them.
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