"To Pollock"

Last week I’m pretty sure Dorothy and I came close to being voted off our block.  It was nothing we planned.  It’s just that on our 9 pm walk on Tuesday, there was something on the sidewalk that Dorothy found irresistible, and before I knew it, she was crunch-crunch-crunching her way down the street.  I stopped and tried to see if it was a bone of some sort, prepared to pry it out of her jaws if so, but whatever treasure she had found was quickly crunched and just as quickly swallowed.  We went on our merry way.

And all was well until 24 hours later, when on our 9 pm walk, Dorothy’s whole innards seemed to explode outward.  To all of you Harry Potter fans, she was a little blast-ended skrewt, propelling her way down the streets of Philly with the momentum caused by what was shooting out of her hind end.  And oh, it was not pretty.  I’ve never seen anything like it, and hope to never see anything like it again.  It made me wish very much for a yard, because although I consider myself a conscientious dog owner who steadfastly cleans up after her dog, there was really nothing I could do to try to fix the mess that Dorothy created at 9, at midnight, at 6, at 11, at 1, and then once again at 5:00.

It. Was. Horrible.  In fact, Sean came up with a new verb to describe it – to Pollock v.: to make a mess that looks like this:

Only not artistic.  And created out of an organic matter that is better left unsaid.

Anyway, on Thursday morning I walked Dorothy to the vet, and tried my best to bring a sample of the problem with me.  As usual, Dorothy LOVED being at the vet, and happily climbed up on the examination room table all by herself (causing her sister Tulip to roll around in her grave).  All sorts of bacterial things were ruled out, and it seemed clear that Dorothy’s malady was probably caused from the tidbit of god-knows-what she had picked up and savored the night before.  I left an hour later and a few hundred dollars poorer, and the four blocks from the vet’s office to my apartment were disastrous.  I was carrying my purse, a bag of meds, and an 18-pound bag of special kibble, and leading Dorothy by her leash; Dorothy was doing one of two things:  she was either lying down in protest at the walk back, or lurching alongside of me with ghastly matter shooting out her back end, pollocking the sidewalk as we went.

Once home I played a brief and frustrating game of Ptui!, in which I put the metronidazole capsule Dorothy was supposed to take inside of some foodstuff, and Dorothy dexterously ate the foodstuff while spitting out the tablet.  Sigh.  It was definitely one of those days when I muttered whole paragraphs containing the oft-repeated phrase, “my last pet.”

But!  I am happy to report (knock on wood) that Dorothy seems to have recovered from her adventure.  I wish I could say the same for certain areas of the sidewalk on my street.

Oh it was so very dreadful!