My son has a mild fever and a tummy ache.
"What does it feel like?" I ask.
"Yucky," is the answer.
Well that doesn’t narrow it down for me much. It could be he simply needs to poop, and the fever is leftover from his ear infection last week. Or, he’s got a piercing pain in his stomach and he has the H1N1 flu and he will be admitted to the hospital within hours with life threatening symptoms, and I'll hold a vigil at his bedside banging myself on the head with his food tray and weeping that I should have been a better mom. My mind goes wild with possibilities, real and imagined, crazy and insane, none of them substantiated with any facts. But who cares. I need my stress fix for the week, and I ‘m sweating bullets. Turns out he just needed to poop.
Last week it was my dog. Her poop was mush, not just loose, I’m talking mushy mush. It’s mush quite often. She eats everything. What else can I expect but mushy poop. Still, I needed my stress fix for the week, something to make me sweat. This one actually sent my spiraling for a few weeks because it is an ongoing problem. I wanted to get her spayed, but what if she has explosion of poop while she is at the vet and they take her away from me and hand her over to doggie protective services because I should have gotten treatment for her mushy poop, and then my son never forgives me for losing the dog. (Whew, see how my head works.)
Actually, I did try to get her treatment. I've spent about $800 dollars on her for numerous visits to the vet and tests and medicines to get to the bottom of, no pun intended, the poop problem. Multiple doses of diarrhea medicine later, she still eats rocks and still doesn’t know how to poop like a proper dog.
‘Does it really matter?’ You ask. Well, she wakes me up a few times a night to be let out of the house to poop her mushy poop all over the backyard. So yes, it does matter since I haven’t slept through the night in 3 months. Sound like a newborn? It is, in a way, although I can leave her in her crate and go to the grocery store, And yes, leaving my son in his crib while I went out was something I thought about but, of course, never actually did, when my son was an infant. The thing is, infants will poop and sit in it and play with it, they don’t care. Dogs care. My dog won’t poop in her crate.
Lately, my little boy gets in to the dog’s crate with her, and as most mother’s would probably contemplate, but might not admit, I think to myself, ‘can I lock the crate and go for a pedicure? I’ll be quick, I promise’.
No comments:
Post a Comment