Pug on the Run!

Ah Sunday. A difficult and frustrating week has finally ended. Saturday was filled with grocery shopping, cleaning, and finishing up on some freelance work. Everyone in the family is out of town. I am going to sleep in, get up and linger over coffee, read the Sunday paper, and pick up around the abode. Also, I plan to do something that I almost never do—cook. I am going to make a homemade beef vegetable soup and cornbread on a cold October day. It will be lovely (a word I have never spoken except in derision, but sometimes secretly wish was a possibility).

The sleeping-in part was the first sign of a flaw in my plan. In fact, the pug, Moses, who is sleeping with me in my son’s absence (he usually sleeps in my son's room) has walked, snorted, sniffed, chewed, and stomped about the bed all night. (Oh, I know, non-dog owners will say, “Throw him out!” Well pugs do not live outside my friend!) I try to hide a Benadryl in a piece of cheese, a piece of meat, a filet mignon damn it. Just please, let me sleep! No dice.

I let the dogs out (yes it was me). And as I was doing so, I looked at Moses’ retreating hydrant-like torso. Oh, my God. I am much kinder than most people think; that’s why I won’t describe what I saw, but it wasn’t good. Let’s just say that much ooze was involved. I called the emergency clinic and (WARNING!) these four words of the diagnosis will describe it all: infected, ruptured anal sac. An apparently, and obviously, very painful condition, but don’t judge me. Our beloved pet had been for his annual only two weeks ago and it already takes three people to hold down the ornery little monster just to put in his required thrice-daily eye drops. This new condition can come on very quickly, which it did, and on a Sunday. My Sunday.

I called my son who was at his girlfriend’s college visiting, both of them studying vigilantly at the library I am sure, and told him that he needed to come home a few hours early to help me transport Moses to the emergency clinic. The subsequent trip wasn’t pretty but we arrived intact, though completely grossed out. I warned the nurse that this little smush-faced, curly-tailed animal is a wonderful pet, but a horrible patient. She smiled condescendingly as she, Dr. Doolittle, took his leash and guided him into the unknown of the back office. Several minutes later we heard a frantic cry, “Pug on the run! Pug on the run!” accompanied by the scuffling, puffy, piggy sounds that we match to a fat little bully named Moses. He was quite disruptive.

Once captured, after escaping to the front-desk receptionist’s area, he eyed us with malicious intent as he was carried away. Meanwhile, my son’s girlfriend called to ask about Moses’ condition. He told her the four words and her phone went dead. “I think she hung up on me,” he says. “Can you blame her?” I ask. The nurse charged us an exorbitant amount that we can’t afford. I was then given the impossible task of administering multiple horse pills, hot packs to the rear, ointments, and a syringe ingredient to an animal that has a panel of ten approve his treats.

It is already 3 a. m. and I have spent much time under the dining room table attempting to force a pain pill down Moses’ throat. You simple can’t hold a pug’s nose to make it open its mouth. Did you know that? While I am trying to recover the pill that Moses has managed to spit out from its many delicious coverings, my yellow lab jumps onto the counter and consumes the entire container of shaved turkey I had purchased for the pill-hiding occasion. Even though Moses has spit the pill out several times, he has absorbed some of it into his system and finally passes out snuggled next to me–his personal torturer–on the sofa. This allows me a few moments to contemplate the helluva week ahead of me. Work, bills due without funds, the house is a mess, and oh yes, five different medications and several daily hot pack applications for a dog that makes Hounds of the Baskervilles look like Winnie the Pooh. Oh well, I won’t move for now. Sometimes you just have to sit still and comfort your nasty little pug.