Visiting A Vet

For some reason, none of my posts have been uploading when scheduled. I wrote the below last week, the day before driving to Rome to pick up my Mom for her two week visit - and thus, never actually checked the blog again to make sure it uploaded. It didn't. So, this is from last week:

Well Crazy Dog has finally broken a bone. It had to happen sooner or later. He started limping a couple of days before I returned from Greece, and I thought he’d just pulled a muscle playing or gotten a sore spot on his toe pad. After a few days, with no improvement in the limp, I headed off to the local vet, with a little bit of trepidation. We’ve visited a vet here before only once, while in a small town down south, and it turned out to be a sore spot that just needed a little cream put on it every day. This seemed more serious, and while waiting in the lobby, I talked with another client who mentioned that his dog had previously torn her ACL, which required surgery. Dogs have ACLs?!! Surgery!

There are a couple of vets here in town who speak English, and while I know I should be taking every opportunity possible to practice my Italian, I’m thinking that ship has sailed – I can barely remember how to order a pizza. And anyway, I’ve never spoken science Italian. I did, however, pretend I spoke Italian with a lady in the waiting room. Her dog was interested in Scully, and she kept pulling him away. I finally said (in Italian) that Scully is friendly, and she spent a long time telling me something about her dog – I think it was that he’s attacked three dogs in the past. Shortly after this, she let her dog come up and sniff all around Scully. So I have not a clue what our conversation actually was about. I also tried to listen in on a conversation between the vet assistant and a man there with his cat. When I reached the point where I thought the vet assistant was telling him his cat should wear clothes, I was quickly sidetracked into an imaginary conversation that was probably much more interesting than their actual conversation. Thankfully, my turn arrived soon to distract me from my distraction.

The vet found a swollen area which X-rays showed to be a bone fracture. It’s in an area the orthopedic surgeon’s office said would do better healing on its own rather than surgically, so our little Crazy is on bed rest. A dog, on bed rest. And more importantly, our dog – the one who dances to music on his hind legs every day, who must have daily ball chases and/or toy throwing breaks, who considers it the highest form of excitement to defend our lands against the invading Other Kitty, who routinely runs laps around our house throughout the day, even when no one or nothing is chasing him. Stuck in a crate all day, every day, for several days as a pre-cursor to being housebound for weeks, going outside only on a leash to prevent running or jumping: If dogs could imagine a Hell, bed rest would be Scully’s.