Woofer.

Hoo boy. Well, remember yesterday, when I sort of mentioned that today I would have an entry today that doesn't suck? Probably not after all.

Why? Because I was sitting in the vet's office after work yesterday, waiting for Nipper to get treated in a last-minute appointment. And the treatment resulted in this.

Nipper had a skin infection on his face that came to our attention a couple of weeks ago. He's super fuzzy and God knows how long he had it before we even noticed it. Initially the vet said he couldn't tell if it was allergic or fungal or bacterial, so he gave it a shot of cortisone and recommended bacitracin. A week later it had gotten worse, so we saw another vet in the same office who ratcheted it to 11 immediately -- powerful capsules of antibiotics, 2 per meal, plus an antibiotic ointment, for 14 days.

This seemed to go okay at first, as we were able to trick Nipper into taking his meds with soft food or cheese or Greenies Pill Pockets. But that ended suddenly on Tuesday, after a week of pills, when we couldn't get him to eat anything. His appetite had dwindled to nothing, and even his favorite treats went uneaten. So, back to the vet.

The vet agreed that it sounded like the drugs were upsetting his stomach, and since he has to eat, other steps must be taken. It appeared that Nipper had been scratching at the patch more than we'd even thought (and we thought: a lot) because it hadn't healed as it should have. No amount of antibiotics, the vet said, would make the hot spot go away if he kept reinfecting it. (I didn't tell him that big dog Tralfaz had kept licking Nipper's wound this whole time, because Tralfaz causes enough disruption at the vet's office without being thought of as an idiot.) So the answer was to stop the antibiotic and get the Elizabethan collar, or E-collar, or Cone of Shame.

And here we are.

Nipper HATES THIS CONE, of course. And he's scared of it. He couldn't figure out how to jump into the car with it, so I had to lift him in, all 101 pounds of him. He bonked into every %#$*@! thing he got near all the way home. And all the way into the home. And all the way through it. He couldn't go down stairs. He couldn't eat or drink. He couldn't figure out how to sit or lie down. If not for my wife's boundless compassion and patience with him, I think he'd have been standing in the same place all night, panting, whimpering to be set free from this horrible head-prison.

No way could he sleep in his crate, because he wouldn't be able to move in there with the cone on, so we left him downstairs and I slept on the sofa next to him. He whimpered from about 12:30 to 1:30, despite my efforts to console him. I think he was trying to get on his side, because he would move about an inch at a time, and slowly turned so he was pointing at me, and the cone magnified the whimpers like a speaker. I eventually crashed on the floor next to him, which helped for a while, but then we had to go outside. I guess he peed but he can neither move well nor properly sniff the ground in the cone, so I'm not sure. It was a bad night. 

Is there a takeaway from all this? Maybe just: Sometimes you just have to do things that the ones you love will despise for their own good. And it really can hurt you more than it hurts them, even if it's just the pet. Maybe God feels as I did when he knows we have trials we must go through that we can't understand, but His heart bleeds for us as we do.

Or maybe it's just this: Remember when Mom told you not to pick at your scabs? She was right.