Mi Perro es Gordo

 

I put Scout on a diet  over a week ago. I had noticed that she seemed to be extremely overweight. So bad that I had a dream where I was using her back as a table because it was very flat and wide. I waited too long to do this, to put her on a diet. Scout is fat and it wasn't until Bucky came to stay with us that I realized just how fat she is. Bucky is lean, almost anorexic compared to Scout.

In the living room there are five huge windows that look over the street. It is Scout's realm, where she keeps a lookout for trespassers and strangers. She has a chair that she uses to get up on the radiator/window sill so that she can 'Gladys Kravitz' the street. It's the same chair that Bucky, our new roommate, likes to sleep on. Saturday I had noticed Scout limping a little bit. Later in the evening she was up on the radiator/window sill, but could not get down. That's because Bucky was sleeping on her exit chair, so she jumped. The thing about Scout, is that she thinks that she can fly. She jumped the two and a half feet off of the radiator and hit the floor like a sack of potatoes. She let out a yelp and I thought she had broken a bone. For half an hour Scout moaned and cried, so I took her to the Doggy Emergency Room.

First time I had been to the doggy emergency room and I was impressed. The building looks like a human hospital. After being triaged and given a tag to put around Scout's neck, we took a seat. It was a seat that I would get to know very well over the next five hours. Over two hours waiting to see a doctor, and three hours waiting for Scout to get her xrays. During those two hours Scout and I were first waiting, I got to see a large Doberman have diarrhea on the floor of the waiting room, and a small dog that looked like a cross between a Chihuahua and a Beagle, barf up a chocolate Easter bunny. We'll call that, the floor show. Meanwhile, Scout decided that she owned the waiting room and barked at every new dog that entered her new territory.

It turned out that Scout had not broken a bone in her foot but had only sprained it. She came out of the xray department all happy and walking on all fours as if nothing was wrong. She was on a methadone pain killer. The nice lady handed me her on the leash along with two bottles of pain killers and instructions for her to lose ten pounds. Oh, and a bill for nearly eight hundred dollars.

Scout and Bucky