I recently went on a vacation without dogs, for a whole week. My sister took care of my perfect, nine-year-old dog Otto, but my young adult son took care of my adolescent dog, Woody. It was a better fit because my son is an athlete and runs, and Woody would get enough exercise to keep him out of trouble.
About 36 hours after I returned and met with my son and brought Woody home, I awoke to the sound of a dog about to vomit – you all know that sound. I jumped out of bed and ran to open the door and encourage the vomiter, who of course turned out to be Woody, to go outside. He lurched over to some tall grass and threw up. Then he went back into the house, climbed onto the couch, and went back to sleep. I went back to bed.
I was way too tired to investigate the vomitus until after it was light out, later that morning. Here is what I found!
This makes the SECOND small-sized tennis ball that Woody has swallowed. I told the story about the first one back in November, and I’ve been assiduous about making sure he has had no access to these small balls ever since. My son was well aware of Woody’s preference for tennis balls, and especially the small ones, and thought he had put the few that were rolling around his house in a safe place. But after I texted him about this ball, he wracked his brain and remembered that as he was driving to where we met a day and a half before, he had twice caught Woody on the floor of the back seat of his car, rooting around underneath the front seat for something – and then he put it together that one of those small balls must have been under the seat. D’oh!
Well, thank goodness that Woody threw up the ball on his own – and that he didn’t suffer a blockage, since I didn’t know that he swallowed anything and wouldn’t have been on the lookout for signs of a blockage. But the fact that I’m paying for health insurance for him just makes more and more sense, every time he vomits up something he never should have swallowed. We’re up to at least five inappropriate swallowing/vomiting incidents at this point. And that doesn’t even include this Kong Safestix that he chewed up in a few unsupervised minutes as I was loading the car before my vacation. (I put all the pieces together next to an intact one, so I could make sure that most of it had not been swallowed.)
When will this adolescent teething phase be over?!
