This is to test if the email to the blog will automatically update without me having to go in and publish it manually from the website (kinda defeats the purpose of email these things in).
Edit: And it worked... YAY! To think, the IT guy missed the checkbox necessary to allow this. I'm so ashamed. I shall turn in my pocket protector now.
Guess what I did today? Yeah, I was late to work this morning. I mean, what did you do this morning? Wake up... kiss the wife/husband good morning... get the kids up, blah, blah, blah, feed the dog, maybe a rub on the tummy and then off to work... yeah, me too. Only I decided to add a little something extra. I hit my dog with the car pulling out.
Okay, let me back up a bit. We have a five foot fence around our house, encompassing about an acre of our fifteen. It's a wire fence with metal posts holding it up, but no top support between posts. Thus, with enough weight and pressure, you could cause the wire to buckle. Boka was good enough to never do this. But after we got Copper, all bets were off. If he wasn't climbing the cattle gate we use at the end of our driveway, he was leaping over the fence, and given a few weeks, he weakened it enough that Boka could go in and out after him. So essentially, our dogs leap the fence every day and chase our car down the street a bit. Good exercise, a fun little race (Boka never wins on her stubby little legs), and they're always back in the yard when we get home... well, almost always.
Still, all in good fun, right? Except that Boka has this nasty habit of getting right. In. Your. Way. She does it when you're walking, jogging and apparently driving. Just as I was accelerating, she ran right in front of the car and thump, bump, whine, slam, squeal, it was done. I backed up, she pulled herself off the pavement and darted on three legs into the woods by the side of the road. Holy crap, is it broken, what's the problem, she's screaming, limping...
But I can't get out of the car to check on her. No, because my emergency break is virtually useless, the car's a standard and our entire road is a hill, so if I get out, the car and my family roll down into the valley by the river about a half mile back. So my wife gets out and goes to check on her. All through this Boka is just crying and crying and if you've ever heard a dog cry it has to be one of the most heartbreaking things you can hear. And if it's your fault she's crying, well you just want to curl up and disappear. I know I did.
Lin (that's my wife, Lindsay but we call her Lin or Skinny Linny) says we can't leave her like this and I'm asking if it's broken and she doesn't know and... I backed the car down the street and back into the driveway. Linny is walking that way and Boka is walking gingerly and on three legs (one hind leg curled up tight under her) as well. She's stopped whining, but I have to look at it myself to know. I tell Alex again that she's fine and she'll be okay and he believes me. Hell, I don't know for sure but I want him to believe it. Maybe if he does, I can, too.
The car parked, I get out and go up to Boka. She's now lying on her side licking at her leg gingerly. When I get close enough to it, my stomach roils and boils. She's licking a bit more than midway up her leg from the paw and it's just torn open. Red, sinewy and I swear to god I can see the whiteness of her bone. How she's stopped screaming I don't know because I find that I want to. Linny can't even look at it, she's a few paces off looking back toward the road. Alex wants out of the car, but he doesn't need to see this.
"We can't leave her like this," I say to her. And then "Shit!" because I've used up so many days at work already. Lin gives me the look that says I don't care what's going on but there's no reason for that kind of language in front of the child. But looking at me is too close to looking at Boka, so she turns back without saying anything. I had thought maybe we could leave it if it wasn't broken until we got home. See we were leaving early this afternoon anyway to take Copper in to get de-manned, so we could just take her up with him to the vet! Copper spent a solid week up at the neighbor's house while her pure-bred Golden Retriever was in heat and talk about frustrating. He's a pure-bred, too but I don't know if the world is ready for the Golden Foxhound, yet.
Linny remembers that the Vet's Office/Animal Hospital has an emergency number posted on the front and they open at 8:30. It's 6:00am now. I look again at the wound. She's pulling it up under her body, and with the burrs and seeds in her fur from running through the woods, I can just imagine the wound filling up with debris and good god that would hurt! We decide that I'll take Alex in to Daycare (they're heading to the zoo that day on a field trip) and Lin will stay with Boka, call the emergency hotline (she asks me to stop at the office on the way and call her with the number).
When I call from in front of the vet's office, she's got the number already, so we go on. Alex asks if Boka will be alright, and I tell him that she should be fine and that we were gonna take her to the hospital that morning. I ask if he's worried about anything and he is. He's worried that I didn't sign his permission slip and he wouldn't get to go to the zoo.
When I get back, the doctor's decided Boka can wait until 8:30, so we wait. She's very quiet through all of this, just lying there, nursing the leg. The other back leg is ripped up a bit, too, but not nearly as bad. We get to the doctor and he checks her out and decides she needs surgery to suture the leg back together. With exposed bone there's a greater risk of infection if we try and treat it as an open wound, which is a cheaper alternative. I don't know what to do, but we have to take care of her and it's my fault and so six hundred dollars later, Boka is due for surgery tomorrow sometime; because she'd just eaten before the accident it is more risky to do it today.
So she's in the hospital, Alex is at the zoo and we're at work and I'm hours behind schedule to get things prepared for tomorrow's project. And half the freaking streets are closed around here because of Fair preparation, so I'm in just a swell mood all around! And I feel absolutely horrible for poor Boka. I just hope everything goes alright tomorrow...
