I Just Can't...

Here's a gem! Last night, Miney took Moe's half size Barbie to the bathroom to color her hair (the Barbie's hair and it gets so much better). After coloring Barbie's hair (with a purple marker, no less) she was left on a shelf over the toilet because, why not?

Sometime later, Eenie decided to use the bathroom for it's intended purpose and placed her cell on the shelf over the toilet right next to half-Barbie. After completing her task, she flushed the toilet and reached for her phone, accidentally knocking half-Barbie off the shelf. She tumbled into the swirly yellow depths and disappeared before Eenie truly understood the events she had set in motion, not that she would have tried to rescue half-Barbie from her fate had she been able.

Now half-Barbie is resting in a kink in our toilet, just waiting to return in a poo covered vengeance. My better sense says to get ahead of it and call a plumber, but my Luna vision says wait and see. When Eenie told me about the incident last night, I couldn't even laugh, which is seriously awful because things like this are hilarious. Luna has killed my sense of humor. Or maybe just tempered it a little as I found the humor this morning. Dang Luna and her dang need to eat all the dang hair all the dang time.

Does anyone have a snake I can borrow?

Have you seen me?

Oh My Dog...

This is Luna. She is six. She is a Chihuahua mix of some sort that we adopted from the shelter when she was just a wee babe.

Luna

She is one half of a pair I like to call the Idiot Twins. The other half of the moronic duo is her brother Apollo. 

Idiot Twins

They take turns wearing the Crown of Annoyance with my guy, Gus.

Cutest face EVER.

Gus is only annoying because he slobbers A LOT and tends to fling it around when he shakes his head, and cries to go outside, then wants to come immediately back inside, and then wants to immediately go back outside again.

Anyway, Luna has had this habit, since she was very little, to over drink to the point where she vomits so we have to give her ice cubes. She also licks the floor, the couch, Mr. D's legs (which I BEG HIM not to let her do because GROSS!!!) - she licks all the things. If you have a keen eye, you can see what looks like a bald patch on her under carriage above her hind leg. Would you like to know why?

Two weeks ago she threw up per her usual habit, except it wasn't congealed water. It was green. Now it's been raining pretty consistently for three weeks. Around here metric tons of rain = copious crops of mushrooms, and not the safe kind. No matter how we try to keep up with the removal of these fungi, we are never diligent enough, and as sure as the sun rises (eventually) one of the idiot twins will find and consume them and Pootastrophe commences. What follows is about two days of sleepless nights and runny days. It never fails. How did dogs survive in the wild? That's what I want to know.

So Luna voms green gunk and I'm puzzled because usually the green comes from the other end, but things change, so we keep an eye on her. Let me back up. The week before she looked pregnant. Knowing what we know now, we understand what was afoot and would have acted more quickly, but we didn't then what we know now so we did exactly what one would do with the information we had. (Heh!) It was baffling to us that she could be pregnant because she has been fixed as have the other two. I know what you're thinking, "if she's been fixed, she can't get pregnant, idiot." To you who have those thoughts I say, shut your mouth. We have friends who were told their dog was "fixed" and had every reason to believe so until the night she started birthing puppies on the couch.

We got the twins from the shelter and we were told they had been spayed and neutered, but I didn't ask to see evidence, so I kinda have to take their word for it, don't I? At any rate, we were worried we might have been duped or Luna was some kind of miracle, when pregnant belly went away. Then the vomiting began. The, she stopped eating and drinking so I took her to the vet.

At the vet they gave her an antibiotic, an anti-nausea and an injection to help with the dehydration she was experiencing. She had a large lump of liquid on her neck and looked just miserable, but they seemed to think she'd just had a reaction to mushrooms, which I said she "may have eaten, but usually manifest out the back door," so I think they stopped looking for a reason and just went with what I said, except I'm not a vet so maybe we shouldn't just listen to what I said unless we listen to the whole comment which included the part where she has diarrhea not vomiting. Just saying and possibly passing judgement.

At any rate, they sent her home with the caveat that if she vomited again we were to take her to the ER. No less than two hours later, she went ahead and did just that.

To the ER we went and once there, they referred us to a twenty four hour hospital. We had already spent $500 towards treatment by that point. At the second ER they told me they wanted to do some blood work, which had already been done earlier in the day at the other vet, but now it was past six and the other place was closed so we couldn't get those records. $150...They decided to keep her over night for observation because she was severely dehydrated..$1500...

The vet called me later that night and told me she thought Luna had a bowel obstruction. She felt Luna needed surgery to remove the obstruction, but nothing showed up on the x-ray, meaning she hadn't eaten anything metal. The surgery would be "exploratory" meaning they would open her up to dig around and "they might find something, they might not."

Now the price tag on that was $2500, which hurt, but the bigger issue was the fact that they wanted to "open her up and poke around just to see if they find something". That seemed kind of invasive to me, so I asked her to wait.

The next morning she called and said that whatever it was that was clogging Luna's pipes had moved to her lower intestine, but she was concerned it might not move from there. We decided to move forward with the surgery.

The vet called two hours later and said she had removed a mass of hair and bits of sharp plastic from her lower intestine. The hair wouldn't have made it through the colon and the plastic would have torn everything to shreds. When we went to pick her up two days later they showed us the wad of hair they pulled from her gut.

It was just...ungodly. Words can't express....if I had taken a picture...I just can't describe...it was like...I mean....it was just...it had to have been collecting for years. You guys, I have never seen anything like it. It was literally the stuff of my nightmares. I get the heebie jeebies just thinking about it. Bloody, freaking, what the fresh, tenth circle of Hell. Ew. Gah. I'm sorry. I'm done.

One more.

Deep shudder.

So we brought her home, stapled up like Frankenstein's monster, and $4,000 poorer. People, that is above and beyond ridiculous! I haven't spent that much in healthcare for my children in all of their years put together, but what were we supposed to do? Also, I'm over being the one who takes the pets to the vet when they are in crisis! The last two times I took a dog to the vet he/she had to be put down. Who is the common denominator in these cases? I is! 

At any rate, when the children ask why there is no money for college we're going to have to tell them Luna ate it. 

Also, once these three head to the Big Farm, we are never getting another dog. EVER.