Wednesday, May 5, 2004

Beagle cysts

Well, the good thing is that Edina the Beagle is out of her five day "crapping on the bedroom rug" stage. However, she's entered a new stage. You might be thinking "what could be worse than a Beagle who craps, pisses, and pukes her way through life on various expensive carpets?" Well, you might want to skip ahead if you don't want to find out.

Edina has been blessed with several benign cysts just under her skin surface. They're anywhere from dime to quarter-sized. They've started to burst through her skin. THe first sign that a Beagle cyst has burst is that the cyst has flattened out, replaced with a hole that looks like a pitted Bing cherry. The second sign is the oozing cyst juice that mats her hair and drips off her.

Edina exchanged biz cards with the vet, and returned home with tubes of burst cyst ointment and pills that can only be hidden by deboning a chicken leg and inserting the caplet where the bone had gone. Fortunately, a Beagle can swallow a half chicken in one gulp (although for some reason it takes them five minutes to eat a single blueberry), so that's not that big a deal. The ointment however...

You think you're doing the right thing. You close your eyes, grit your teeth, and rub the ointment on the Beagle scab twice a day. But is it the right thing? No, of course not. After a few days, you're told by the vet that you're SUPPOSED to be lifting the Beagle scab and rubbing the ointment on the still-raw Beagle cyst hole. Oh, and don't let the Beagle see that you're distressed because it will hurt her self-esteem and body image.

I tried to trade her in yesterday, but her value has plummeted to the point where I can only get a lease on a Pekingese. Which seems all well and good until you see the balloon payments on one of those fuckers.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

I am very careful about the beagle body image deal, absolutely imperative that all things seem perfect or the dog will stare a hole through me for hours from his lambskin covered leather sofa. But yeah, eewww. Would love to read a book written by you... thanks!