So, it was just a normal Wednesday night. Zac and I went out to eat some Mongolian BBQ, went to the library, and were looking forward to a nice, quiet, TV-less night.
Let me add in a little preface - our dog, Shisa, will eat/chew ANYthing. I regularly find odds and ends come out of her (well, see, I'm not digging around). If there's a piece of paper, sock, appetizing piece of wicker - anything - around, you can be sure Shisa will find it and proceed to chew on it/entertain herself with it for a while. I've also been sewing lately (an important aspect of this story.)
So, about 8 o'clock on our nice, mid-week evening, I notice Shisa is chewing on something. For some reason I think it's a straight pin (although I couldn't see it, so I'm not sure why I thought that..."mothers'" intuition?) I call on Zac to figure out what she's chewing on, as I usually defer to him to extract foreign objects from our little furry friend's mouth. He pries her mouth open, and indeed sees straight pin (a straggler from my recent sewing escapades) in there. Before he can get it out, Shisa proceeds, being the smart dog she is, to swallow it.
Zac starts freaking out a little, and I, who was raised in a laissez-faire household, was saying to him "Ehhh, no problem, it'll pass. I had a cousin who passed an open safety pin as a baby, the dog'll be fine." He was still a little worried, so we looked up the number for the vet technician on call on base. And I, as usual, Googled Shisa's ailment to gather the infinite wisdom of the cyber world. The technician said to feed the dog some bread to cushion it, and she was going to call the vet to see if Shisa needed to go in. A couple minutes she called back and said we DID need to take Shisa in, but the on-base clinic was closed so we'd have to find an off-base (i.e. Japanese) pet emergency room to take her to.
We called one place that we knew of (Noah's Animal Hospital), but couldn't get an answer. The second place, Animal House 22 (or something like that) answered. Zac tried to explain the situation, but "straight pin" was getting lost in translation, so we amended the story to a needle. We finally found the place, about 30-45 min away, in the pouring rain (did I mention? Of course there's pouring rain in this story.)
They immediately took her back to x-ray. Shisa's a very
They brought us back to look at the x-ray, and indeed there was a small line in her stomach. I think I was holding out that they would x-ray her and not find anything, that Shisa had just dropped the pin and not swallowed it. But there it was, a little white line in the cloudy gray picture of her insides. The vet was explaining everything (in Japanese) as her assistant translated for us. Apparently, Shisa needed immediate surgery before the "needle" poked through her stomach and intestines. We could stay and wait or go home and come back later that night or in the morning. We decided to stay, since we lived pretty far and it seemed like the responsible thing to do.
During the surgery, other people were bringing in their pets. A couple of people needed to speak to the vet, but the technician kindly explained to them that the vet was in the middle of emergency surgery....Uhh, that'd be our dog. The one who swallowed the straight pin.
An hour-hour and a half later, the vet emerged. Surgery successful. Although, through some fairly rough translation (and many references to "heart," "too fast," "seizure," and "conscious," we gathered that Shisa had
woken up through the anesthesia, so they were only able remove the needle and not the abundance of hair they also found in her stomach (HAIR?? WHat?)
They took us back to see her in her little kennel. I think this is the part that just broke my heart. Little Shisa was just coming out of anesthesia, so with her plastic cone and in her little kennel/cage, she was stumbling around, falling down like the town drunk. It was just the most sad, pathetic thing you've ever seen. They explained she had to stay for a couple days so she could be on an IV/she couldn't eat to let her stomach heal. Then, when she could eat and keep it down, they'd let her go home.
Well after 10 o'clock, we headed home, a little shocked with the whole situation (and the cost of the whole situation). In a way, we'd gone through one of our first married "crisis" (if it can be classified as such), so it was kinda emotional (not boo hoo emotional, but you know what I mean) in a whole other aspect. So a few thousand Yen and a couple hours later, we were back home and went to bed after our "quiet evening at home." Funny that even in the smallest things (like a nice quiet evening), God just smiles (perhaps laughs?) at our "plans," and watches us go.
I guess fortunately we're getting all the kinks out of our "parenting skills" now with the dog before we have kids. We'll know better for our human kids to keep watch of the straight pins, or at very least know what to do if they swallow one.
So what do you think? Are we the worst dog parents ever?
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