The last couple of weeks have been quite the stretch for the Chateau Steelypips family. As I wrote about last week, my grandmother died two weeks ago today, and the funeral was last week (which partly accounts for the relative quiet on this Substack of late). We also found out that SteelyKid needed some minor surgery, which led to a long night in the hospital (everyone is fine), and also the furnace in Chateau Steelypips has given up the ghost (it was installed in 1994, so it’s not like it didn’t have a good run) so it’s been a little on the cool side in the house of late. And then there’s Charlie the pupper…
When I got the news about my grandmother, Kate and I were in Cabo with a bunch of my close friends from college, on an extravagant trip to celebrate our turning 50 this past year. We were actually on a chartered boat cruise when the call came in, and I spent a lot of the trip back to port by myself up in the bow, trying to keep it together.
In the car on the ride back to the resort, Kate’s phone rang, and it was my dad (who was in Niskayuna with the kids and two dogs), letting us know that Charlie had been hit by a car.
The gate to our back yard doesn’t latch very well, and apparently one of the neighborhood cats had dropped by; Charlie chased the cat (who he really hates) out, and in the process must’ve popped the gate open, because he ran out into the street in hot pursuit, and got clipped by a car. The details here are a little fuzzy, because my dad didn’t actually see it; he was inside getting started on dinner for the kids, and had left Charlie and his yellow Lab, Argos, out in the back yard. We tend to leave the back door unlatched when we do this, so the dog can get back inside without us having to call for him, or wait to see when he’ll decide he’s done. After getting hit, Charlie ran away from the driver, back into our yard, and came inside as usual.
My dad didn’t know anything had happened, but noticed that Charlie was moving a little slow, and didn’t want to eat. He learned about the accident when he went outside for something and our next-door neighbor, who had seen the collision, asked “Hey, how’s Charlie?” Thus, the second unpleasant phone call we got in Mexico…
They took Charlie to the emergency vet, who checked him out and didn’t see anything major wrong; some elevated levels of something associated with his liver, but they said that might just be shock. He got some pills, and instructions to keep quiet for a few days, and that was it.
(Remarkably, he actually was kept pretty calm for the next few days, as Argos seemed to sense that something was wrong. Usually the pair of them just chase each other around and wrestle more or less constantly from the moment they’re let out in the morning until it’s time for bed. During the required convalescent period, they mostly just sniffed around and slept, and didn’t tussle. They’re knuckleheads, but fundamentally Very Good Boys.)
Fast-forward to this Tuesday, when Kate and SteelyKid were coming off their night at Albany Med, and I had a long afternoon of meetings at work. When I came home that night, and Charlie greeted me at the door, I was alarmed to see his tail between his legs. Usually, he’s wagging so hard he almost loses his balance, but not this time. I took him for a quick walk around the block, during which he seemed oddly agitated. When we got back, he refused to sit (he couldn’t get his tail out of the way), and even when lying down kept shifting more than usual. So, we were back on the phone with the vet once again…
We were intending to take him to the emergency vet, but when we called they said that since he ate his dinner and was peeing normally, it didn’t count as a real emergency, and would thus be hours before he could be seen. So we opted to just keep him home and keep an eye on it.
Happily, his wag has come back. His tail was still very droopy the next day, but when our dog walker showed up for his mid-day walk, he managed some wagging for her (she’s one of his very favorite humans in the world). Thursday morning, I got medium wagging when I let him out, and he was holding his tail high on our walks; this morning he was more or less his usual wiggly self.
This whole thing has been really weird; our best guess is that it was something like the “frozen tail” issue that has sometimes hit my dad’s Labs when they swim in too-cold water. Tuesday was kind of chilly, and the rain was absolutely bucketing down during both his morning and mid-day walks, so maybe that was it. On reflection, the weird agitated walk we took when I first noticed his tail was probably a combination of him picking up on my being anxious, and a fear that the short walk before dinner meant that I was going to take him somewhere in the car. (He haaaaaates riding in the car; has to be lifted in, and just quakes the whole time, even if one of the kids is next to him offering reassurances. This is a shame, because he likes being in a lot of the places we go in the car (the dog park, the groomer, the boarder when we go out of town), but getting him there is very stressful.)
Anyway, he’s back to pretty much normal now, which is great, because as noted above, he’s a Very Good Boy and we love him. He really hasn’t been doing much for the ambient stress level in Chateau Steelypips, though…
Another bit of personal catharsis, here; apologies if you were just hoping for deep thoughts about politics or something. Anyway, here are the usual buttons:
And the comments will be open.