When the Cure is Worse than the Disease

Well, I have done it.

Mindful of my reputation for over-treating the sundry ills and mis-fortunes of the krewe, I have tried to exercise restraint with Emmett’s tail situation. When we brought Emmett home, he was so sick from a urinary tract infection, he had blood in his urine. His midriff was hot, inflamed and tender to the touch, yet he didn’t even raise an eyebrow when poked or prodded. He underwent two simultaneous series of antibiotics and by about the fifth day here his tail, which had been tucked under his belly since I first laid eyes on him, had relocated to what we thought was a better location, up and wagging.

We were thrilled. Obviously, so was he, as he began the process of wagging his tail so enthusiastically, he was beating it into hamburger. I would leave for work in the morning having fastidiously cleaned, treated and bandaged his tail, only to come home to find the bandage laying on the floor somewhere and to be greeted by wags that, if they were not actively bleeding when I arrived home, soon became that way.

And now, a break for a corporate endorsement: Zout is a laundresses’ best friend. I myself do not do laundry, or rather I do laundry inartfully. Thankfully, K attacks laundry with the same dogged commitment and zeal that I bring to trimming toenails, medicating, weed-whipping, hoeing in the garden, painting, canning, walking . . .

Witness the blood splatter on this pair of khaki pants. Note the state of dried-ness, indicating two fundamental reasons I am not in charge of the laundry: 1) I tend not to observe things on the back of pant legs in need of immediate attention; and, 2) I tend not to care so much if there are markings such as these on my clothing – I have taken the line from a PoiDog Pondering song that goes, “you should wear with pride the scars on your skin/they’re a map of the adventures and the places you’ve been” to its full, illogical conclusion: scars, stains, whatever.

Our Dane-diva and non-resident knower of all things Dane, Aunty Kathleen, had commended to me a plan, easily referenced at my second favorite place on the planet, the Internet, for restraining an enthusiastic tail to allow it time to heal.

http://www.dogstuff.info/tail_healing_method_arndt.html


K thought it was a joke. Aunty Kathleen assured me that it was not. Ordinarily, I would have moved quickly and decisively. But in this case, the cure involved both breaking out the aforementioned running tights for another bandaging situation, and then securing Emmett’s tail back underneath his body, the place we were so elated to see it leave a few short months ago.

After much commiserating, I downloaded the plan for tail securement this morning, obtained the necessary accessories, and put my own notion of Emmett’s happiness aside for the sake of his well-being.

And so Emmett’s tail-joy goes on sabbatical: