The Gift That Keeps On Giving

Yesterday was a big event in our house. Lilac turned fourteen years old and we wanted to show her how happy we were to have her with us. That meant that we had to celebrate in grand style. We cracked out a can of Merrick dog food, which we do for special occasions, and mixed it in with their kibble.

Of course, the birthday girl turned up her nose at it and went back to the dog bed in the living room to lay down and rest. The others attacked theirs with various degrees of gusto. The birthday party seemed to be underway, even if the star for the day was celebrating in a somewhat understated way.

The first sign of trouble came when Bunny came back to bed with me. Instead of immediately curling up against me, she moved to the foot of the bed and just stood there. I called her to lay down, and then I heard the dreaded sound. If you're a dog owner, you know what I'm talking about. It's a sound that will awaken you from a dead sleep and send you running at superhuman speeds from whatever you may be doing as you call "no" in seeming slow motion. It's a sort of gagging sound mixed in with deep sound that comes from the gut and means disaster is imminent. It was. Bunny threw up on the bed and then looked at me with an expression of such despair that I couldn't even get mad at her. After all, these things happen. So, we took the duvet and the cover for it down to the wash and I went back up to try to sleep some more.

After a while, I woke up and came to the living room, leaving the puppy sleeping contentedly on the bed. Or so I thought! A little while later, my husband went in to find that she'd been sick again. More stripping of the bed ensued and the puppy was ushered into the living room where we could watch her. She curled up in a little ball and drifted off to sleep. We thought that was the last of of it, but we were mistaken.

At lunch time, my husband was supposed to go over to help his brother in law get a new swingset for our newest nephew. Just as he was leaving, Hawk stood up and promptly lost his breakfast. After helping with the clean up on aisle five, husband then left and Hawk laid down to rest. Surely now the crisis was over.

Surely not! Blueberry, the dog with the cast iron stomach, was next an hour later. That poor girl had a very rough time of it. She was sick for about five or six hours. Finally, she had nothing left in her poor stomach and she retreated to the couch after making sure that we'd steam cleaned our entire carpet, twice. Apparently she doesn't like laying on the damp carpet after it's been steam cleaned. I have been sick and I was exhausted after cleaning up after her all afternoon, but then, finally she'd gotten it out of her system. I breathed a sigh of relief that all seemed well.

That's when Hawk started getting sick again. I will give him this, he is a gentleman about it! He first went into the crate to get sick, and then began obliging us by going to the kitchen every time instead of going on the carpet. Unfortunately, Hawk's moved on from being just stomach upheaval to a major case of the dreaded Big D. I feel so badly for him. He's old, he's in declining health and he's a nervous kind of guy who just wants to make everybody happy. He continued to be sick through the night and into today. We are praying that we have finally seen the last of it this afternoon.

Several things strike me in this whole fiasco. One, we will never be serving our dogs fish products ever again. Two, Hawk is going to get a major reward for being considerate enough to keep staggering to the kitchen to get sick. And three, Lilac proves again that age and wisdom count for quite a lot. She's been resting a lot more comfortably on her bed in the last day than anyone else here!