Curse

I’m convinced by piles of anecdotal evidence /snark: it’s a pet peeve of mine that scientifically illiterate people believe that anecdotes can serve for facts or proof of anything, so I’m using “evidence” with some literary license/ that I have a curse. Before every upcoming trip, be it for business or pleasure, one of the menagerie experiences a health crisis that requires veterinary intervention. I don’t want to provide a detailed list of several years’ worth of crises as that will only make me sad. But I can give you a few details about the most recent data points.

We begin with Azza. Although technically this particular item isn’t a crisis, I decided to have her spayed before I go out on holiday. I’ll be gone for a month and the last thing I wanted was for her to have her first season while I was gone. She and Mimi still get along amazingly well (Mimi is displaying depths of patience that I had no idea that she possessed) but I am not sure how their relationship will change as Azza matures. Getting her spayed at seven months seemed to be a reasonable idea.

These operations are laparoscopic these days and the vet neatly closed the small incision with dissolving sutures. The site is healing cleanly. The problem was keeping this crazed beast calm and quiet for at least a few days to give the incision a chance to close up a bit. Azza is so large that it is hard for me to remember that she is still a baby. And quite unlike any other desert dog that I’ve worked with (I’ve now had close training experiences with about 10 of them besides her), she loves to play and wrestle with quite a bit of enthusiasm. If she isn’t exercised enough, she gets pretty manic and that’s not a good fit in my tiny hovel. Kinky was no help at all because he loves to play with her, taunting her by running back and forth and as a last resort leaping onto her head and rabbit kicking her in the face. I finally resorted to crating Kinky in order to give Azza a chance to chill.

The second data point concerns Tsingy. I don’t write much about her. She’s shy and spends most of her time in her room. For the past couple of weeks, she’s had this clear pink liquid coming out of one eye. Finally, both eyelids got red and inflamed. Took her in two days ago, and a really cool fluorescent dye test showed that she had something stuck in her eyeball, inside her cornea! I hauled her back to the vet yesterday for surgery, which took far longer than planned. The vet said it was a long piece of very soft wood (I can’t figure this out since there is no wood in her environment and she doesn’t go outside). He unfortunately couldn’t avoid some damage to her cornea in his efforts to get it out so she will end up with a small whitish-grey scar on that eye ball.

Now I’m treating her left eye for the conjunctivitis (already greatly improved) and her right eye with some special drops. And she has to go back to the vet tomorrow for a follow up.

So in the week and a half before I head out, that’s a total of four vet visits.

Having identified this curse a few years ago, I now simply assume that something is going to come up right before I leave and plan for it (I literally plan for it here by making sure I have some extra cash at home and a flexible work schedule). Of course, you might think that by being so hyperalert I am possibly manufacturing these events. But they are quite real (a piece of wood in Tsingy’s eyeball was the result of nobody’s imagination). And now I can take my trip knowing that the crises have already happened and no new ones should pop up at least until I get back.