The One Where I Apologize to Charlie

I'm afraid I owe Charlie an apology.  

Will he accept it?  Probably not, but only because he can't read and doesn't have any idea that I recently mocked him on the internet.  Nor does he understand the word sorry, as his vocabulary is limited to more practical words like sit, down, stay, leave it, ok, treat, dinnertime, no, and bone.

It turns out Charlie might have an enlarged heart, which, if you are looking at his little face and thinking metaphorically, sounds both obvious and delightful.  Of course something that adorable and loyal must have an extra large heart to fit all the love he feels for his humans and even his cat siblings. 

In medical terms, an enlarged heart means a roughly 6-24 month prognosis.  Or he could just have bronchitis.  Or, he could be the canine equivalent of a car that only rattles when you drive it, and purrs like a kitten for the mechanic.  Bottom line, he's had a gross hacking emphysema cough for about a week.  We chalked it up to a hairball because he's been licking incessantly from a combination of nerves and seasonal allergies.  He'd surely wear a pocket protector but for the fact that he doesn't wear clothes to begin with.

The licking eventually escalated to frantic scratching and chewing, which has been keeping all of us up the past few nights.  Also, the sound of a dog licking himself is aural embodiment of the word moist, which I cannot abide.

It all came to a head yesterday when he apparently stepped on a piece of glass on our morning walk and cut one his paw pads.  He took it like a champ and I had no idea he was injured until I spotted bloody paw prints in the kitchen.  It looked like a fairly superficial wound so we cleaned it with peroxide and hoped for the best.

After another sleepless night of scratching, biting, and licking of the absolutely non-sexual variety, I thought I should check on his little paw situation.  The cut had split wide open and looked raw and terrifying.  Then he hacked and coughed and barfed up his breakfast.

We went straight to the vet and got a walk-in appointment the minute they opened.  I felt like a deadbeat dog mom listing the Infinite Jest-length tally of all his ailments.  

It turns out his itching is probably because we abruptly stopped giving him meth and the withdrawal is making him feel like there are bugs crawling under his skin.  That, or itching has been a common complaint in the area this summer due to a mild winter and a proliferation of environmental allergens.  

The vet seemed the most concerned about the coughing, which of course Charlie didn't do once while we were in the exam room.  Since he hasn't spent time around other dogs recently, we informally ruled out kennel cough.  He's on steroids for the itching and an antibiotic to prevent wound infection.  I mean, thank god, because if he stepped on glass from a broken beer bottle, the broseph who smashed his Bud Light Lime on the sidewalk was probably packing at least 3 strains of HPV and an alphabet soup of the hepatitis.  

The vet also gave us some kind of cough medicine to use as needed.  Unfortunately the cough medicine is in pill form, because Charlie getting weird on cough syrup would make a lot of my dreams come true.  The hope is that at least one of these drugs helps reduce the coughing, which would suggest that the problem was something minor like bronchitis rather than the death sentence of an enlarged heart.  Add all these pharmaceuticals to Charlie's daily dosage of doggy Prozac, and I feel like I could easily be accused of Munchausen syndrome by proxy.  I swear, I'm not spending hundreds of dollars on this dog for attention or my own sick pleasure.  Truthfully, I do it because I don't want him to suffer, but also because I can't take another night of hearing him lick himself for 6 hours straight.

Finally, the vet whisked him away to clean up his paw.  I could hear him screaming down the hall, which was heartbreaking because he doesn't normally do that unless something is very scary or excruciatingly painful.  He came back a few minutes later all bandaged up.  The picture is a little too small to see, but he has some badass red alligators chomping all over the place on the bandage wrap.

Of course, we must add insult to literal injury.  The number of times Charlie has accidentally head-butted me with the edge of the cone and nearly lacerated my bare legs is in the low double digits.

Charlie's favorite part of this whole ordeal is this very technical, no-expense-spared bandage protecting bootie.  It is, in fact the top half cut off of an empty IV bag, with gauze strips woven into the edge to tie the contraption around his leg.  I feel so comforted knowing his care is in the capable hands of a graduate of the esteemed yet unaccredited MacGyver University of Veterinary Medicine. 

Bag it up

So now I feel like a monster for relentlessly making fun of a poor dog that could be in the process of dying.  I mean, we're all dying, but not usually with an explicit time frame.  He's a difficult dog, but he loves us.  Also, I just noticed his weiner is fully visible in the above photo and not a single damn one of us asked for that.  He really is a difficult dog.