The day that I called to make an appointment to spay Jolie, I came home to three voice mails and a ringing phone. Apparently the vet was going on vacation, so they could do the operation first thing the next morning, or else we would have to wait (although I appear to have misunderstood that just a bit). So two nights ago we took away her food and water at 10pm, and I slept the sleep of the guilty with the considerable aid of allergy medication.
If she was miffed not to receive her breakfast (or, still, any water) she didn’t show it, and our day started in much the normal way until I hopped into the shower, which was where everything began to unravel. It is a mystery of our bathroom that, under just the right circumstances, the running shower will create a small flood under the sink. It has to be something about the alignment of both the shower head and the curtain, but I really can never predict when I will step out into an inch of water and when I will not. Naturally, yesterday was a flood day.
Not that that’s a big deal in and of itself; what made it a problem was that I was in there with my inch of water and my puppy who had been deprived since the night before, and so of course she immediately started licking everything in sight. Actually, “started” is probably the wrong word–I have no reason to suspect that she waited for me to look before she drank.
I pulled her away and tossed her out of the room, and idly looked for the twentieth time for the source of the pond on my floor, but I couldn’t see anything different. Except…well. Not that this has anything to do with anything, but I did happen to notice just then that the rodenticide that our gardienne put down while I was in the U.S. was directly in the path of the flood. So the box must be getting soaked by all of the water that spills over it each time, and my previous assessment of its potential danger (that it’s too far back in a tiny narrow space to be worth removing) might be off.
Reminding myself to throw out the poison when I got back, I strapped a chipper Jolie onto her leash, and we headed off to the vet’s.
And about halfway there, she started vomiting.
She’s done it before–once she licked the rodenticide (which is how Nick found out that the gardienne had put it down), and another time she found a condom at the bus stop (eww) and played with it (ewwwwwwww) before I saw it clearly and dragged her off in horror. And there were plenty of other times when she got at something we never identified, and each time she ends up heaving and spitting up this sad little white foam, and goes on with her day. So it wasn’t like I was even so worried, per se, except that…well, she wasn’t supposed to eat or drink anything for twelve hours before the surgery, and yet somehow I managed to give her rat poison with less than 45 minutes to go.
Do you think that’s a bad thing?
I decided that I had to tell the vet, and immediately began rehearsing to avoid too much linguistic trouble. Luckily, Nick had called me when he first discovered the box, and had to repeat the word on the side of it about twenty times before I understood, so I at least knew that the water had been mixed with “souricide.” During the rehearsals, though, it became clear that I didn’t have the command of nuance required to convey that I am not, in fact, an habitual poisoner of my dog. The fact that Jolie recognized the waiting room and was doing her very best impression of an abused animal when the assistant came out didn’t help matters much…so I lied a bit, and said that this had all happened in the street, with a box of rodenticide that someone had thrown away carelessly (I do see them on occasion–I think it’s all of the facade work going on near us).
She had a lot of questions, and I discovered a whole new language barrier: it was impossible to tell whether I was over- or underselling the problem. Even when the vet called me a bit later to confirm the details in his adorable English, I couldn’t tell if I was giving off more of a “there probably wasn’t even any poison in the water, so please drug my dog and cut her open” vibe, or a “she drank poison; forget the surgery and treat her for that.” Certainly neither of them seemed to know whether I needed reassurance that there was no problem or that they would do all they could, and they ended up kind of alternating.
In the end, though, the vet decided that they should keep her for the day but not do the surgery–the worst of both worlds. I spent the day picturing her–undrugged–in a place that frightened her so much, and when I went back in the afternoon and heard the dog screaming and the vet shouting, it was worse than I had imagined. He immediately ushered me in and showed me someone else’s dog being guarded on the table by the two assistants. “We just put him on the table,” he pattered, sounding light but watching me carefully. “We put him up there and he got crazy–look: he peed everywhere! He peed on me! Silly dog; all we had done was put him on the table!”
Maybe the racket put her over the edge, or maybe she had been that way for the last five hours, but when I got to her, Jolie seemed to be in some kind of canine shock. She didn’t respond at all when I called her; she just stood there in her open cage, shaking. She kept it up until we got outside, at which point she appeared to suddenly notice that I was there, and reverted promptly to her former obsessively-licking self.
We’re rescheduled for next week. Wish us luck.