Maybe he’s more of a Bob the Builder guy

Roscoe and The Bandit

The Idiot Dog was fixed on Saturday.  I’m here to tell you, you’ve never seen a more pitiful thing in your life than a bloodhound after surgery.  They sent him home with the cone around his head and, if we thought he was droopy before, well he’s reached a whole new level of droopy pathetic-ness the likes rarely seen before.

My Honey and I took him to the vet first thing in the morning.  He was all excited to get in the car and he watched out the window with glee.  My Honey kept apologizing to him in advance – clearly it’s a guy thing we women just don’t understand.  I guess after your fourth annual pelvic exam, your sense of pity is seriously diminished.

We arrived and, when the vet tech came out to collect Roscoe, the dog seemed a little wary of this change in circumstance.  However, when she gave him a reach around his opinion rapidly improved. 

She said all matter-of-factly, “I’m just going to check to see if he has both…”

I swear to God, Roscoe looked right at his dad with both eyebrows high as if to say, “Hey, I’ve heard about these massage parlors!”

The poor, misinformed dog blithely trotted after his new lady-love to have his naivete crushed under the tennis shoe of a woman in puppy dog scrubs.

Many hours later when we picked him up, the lobby was full of people to see the doctors for more routine reasons.  The Bandit, who’d become completely obsessed with the idea of what Roscoe was losing, continued to ask questions that I didn’t mind answering, but didn’t necessarily want to discuss quite so loudly in a crowded room of strangers.  I tried to keep my blushing to a pale fuschia and explained for the umpteenth time about testicles and doggy birth control.

When the door from the surgery opened, poor Roscoe literally staggered out.  He looked worse than a sailor on a three day drunk.  His ears hung limply down the sides of his plastic cone, his eyes sagged low forming little bloodshot pockets of pity down his cheeks, and his front legs kept crossing as he walked.  I could tell his eyes weren’t really focusing.  The entire room stopped its chatter and as one said en masse, “Ahhhhhhhhh,” with as much feeling as they could muster.

He literally collapsed on the living room floor when we got him home.  He didn’t even have the energy to defend himself when the cat came out and made fun of him.  The cat stuck his head all the way inside the cone to check out the dog and then walked away in disgust.  After all, the cat has been a eunuch for years and I’m sure he was wondering what all the fuss was about.  Roscoe promised to chase him later in the week.

It’s been a day and a half since.  He’s loving his pain meds and he’s sleeping a lot, but when he’s awake, he’s definitely the same Roscoe as last week.  We’re trying to keep him calm, but he took a freedom run, albiet a short one, down the street before he realized he was wearing the ever present cone and came to a stop about a house away, humiliated and chagrined.

The after surgery instructions suggest leaving the cone on for ten days, but I’m actually concerned he’s going to break his damn-fool neck.  You certainly don’t have to concern yourself with him sneaking up on you because you can hear him crashing his way through the house from one end to the next.  He never clears a doorway on his first try and collides with the step every time he tries to come into the kitchen.

My Honey has started calling him Satellite Dish. 

Wouldn’t it just be easier if we made him put on a pair of the Transformer underpants The Bandit refuses to wear?