Highs and Lows

NOTE: After declaring in March (!) that I was reviving the blog I wrote a couple posts, then forgot to post them.  That means that now they are MONTHS old.

As Supreme Ruler of this blog, I've decided to publish them anyway.

This one in particular is out-of-date because the mammoth dog has gone to live with a family who has a hobby farm and other animals and all sorts of outdoor activity that he can participate in. Seeing as he was utterly uninterested in playing with children, he was bored at our house and now he has other animals to pretend he's in charge of.  So the dog is happier and I get to breeze past the enormous-bags-of-dog-food aisle at Costco with nary a glance into it. Win-win.

Without further ado, one of the out-dated posts...

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It's been too long since I posted Highs and Lows.


A Bloody Big LOW:

I haven't started swearing like a Brit, this low is actually bloody.

Side note: I'm not British.  My knowledge of British culture is from tv and movies.  As far as I know, Britain is made of up Downton Abbey, MI6, and the Duchess of Cambridge.  That being said, I have no idea of the severity of the word 'bloody'.  Am I Brit-swearing like a sailor? Or is it the equivalent of 'crap'? I expect an answer in the comment section from my two British readers - Tanya and Kristin.

Side note #2: This Low section deals with a lot of blood.  If you don't like blood (Mom), it might be best for you to just skip ahead to the Highs...

SO, the Low: My dog had a nose bleed.

Yes, a nosebleed.

What caused it?  No one knows.

The vet guessed 'kicked in the face by a horse.'

Ok.

Maybe.  He showed no other signs of trauma and let me jab him in the muzzle without doing anything.  (This is pretty normal, the not doing anything.  Because he's like Eeyore.)  So I'm skeptical, but there are horses next door.

Regardless of what caused it, I went out after lunch one fine day to check the mail and there was blood everywhere.  This is not an exaggeration.  All over the driveway, on the front steps and on the garage floor.

And one look at the dog revealed two big, black, bleeding nostrils.

It was like the set from a horror movie.

You know those scenes where some homicide detectives are discussing blood splatter patterns? I just kept wondering what they would make of this.  Would they get 'Newfoundland with a nosebleed and a tendency to shake his head'?

I hooked the bleeder up in the grass so I could scrub blood off my driveway and front steps.  

After all the scrubbing, I had to go inside and tend to little people and I figured that when I came back out the problem would have solved itself.  Because I don't know how to stop dog nosebleeds.  (The ever helpful internet recommends putting an ice pack on his nose.  Go ahead.  Try to put an ice pack on your dogs nose.)

But later - still bleeding!  This is when I chatted with the vet.  She asked questions and said, "That's strange...kicked by a horse?...both nostrils? Odd...wait 'til tomorrow and see."  So I did.

Then it got to be late evening, and STILL BLEEDING.

At this point we realized it could be a sign of heat stroke and, since he's basically a yeti, the 60 degree weather might be killing him.  So we got out the doggie trimmers and tried to trim off his thick, thick winter wool.  But he has as much surface area as the state of Connecticut.  Connecticut with a fur coat so thick it would make a polar bear jealous. And he was droopy and sad - even for him.  So we just trimmed his back (poorly, because we were losing the daylight) and put him in the grass for the night, since I didn't want a repeat of the blood-on-the-driveway incident.

There he was, a droopy, half-trimmed, nose-bleeding, black yeti.

The next morning - Oh, the humanity.  (The canine-ity?)

The dog had gotten himself free from his constraints and was lying on the back porch against the door.

And the blood was just everywhere. Because he was STILL BLEEDING.

We have a big porch.  It's multileveled.  And I swear he had dripped on every single inch of it.

This prompted a discussion with my husband about just how much blood a yeti can lose before it becomes a problem.  My feeling is that you have to be getting close at TWENTY HOURS of nosebleed.

With that Medman ducked out the door to work.  It's possible he's never been so happy to go to work.

What came next was an hour-long, grizzly version of a Cinderella scene. Not the go to the ball and dance with the prince part.  The scrubbing on hands and knees with a scrub brush and a bucket of bleach water part.

Except I swear Cinderella's animals helped her.  They sewed her a dress and freed her from a tower.

My animal was impersonating Jackson Pollock. With blood.  From his nose. On my porch.

The details--I can't even talk about.  Suffice it to say that this was among the most gruesome hours of my life.

I finished cleaning the porch, took a shower with the hot water set to "sterilize", got the kids dressed and went out to decide whether to try to get the 130lbs of bleeding, dead-weight up into my van and to the vet or just leave him to sail across the river Styx in peace.

When I went outside--NO blood.  None.  Just a happy dog shoving his drooly head at me and wanting to be scratched. And wanting to chase deer.

So...a day-long nosebleed then.

Ok.

The official theory is that he ate a mouse that had been poisoned by rat poison, which has blood thinner in it.

My personal theory is that he stopped bleeding because he ran out of blood, but his brain works so slowly he hasn't realized yet that this is a problem.


Highs?

After recounting this little tale I just can't bear move on to Highs and add pictures of my kids to this...so let's postpone those for another time.  (Sorry, Mom, if you skipped the bloody part just to land here...)