In trying to fashion improving my situation, I took the hound to a training evaluation while leaving the wolf loose at home in the front room, thinking that I could trust her.
But in the wolf’s vexed “I can’t believe you didn’t take me, too” reaction, she somehow got ahold of cat medication (we have no idea where it was for her to get it – and it clearly was not where we thought it was!).
I came home to torn plastic sandwhich baggies and a partially ripped-open once tinfoil-sealed capsule packet from which two pills has been released, with one whole and one chewed on the end and discarded.
Then I found a semi-moist mound of barf on the carpet and a wolf beginning to move away from me nonchalantly.
Alarmed, I gently thwapped the edge of the packet against the her nose as she turned and tried to avoid eye contact.
“What were you thinking?!” I admonished while sending her outside as extreme panic began welling up inside of me.
Was she now poisoned?
Did she also have tinfoil inside of her?
I gave her food and water, thinking since she had already expunged that food would help settle her belly.
This gave her ability to grace the entryway floor with two more large puddles of upchuck.
I put on gloves and scooped the piles into freezer bags so that I could analyze the contents.
It turned out that there had been a paper bag and the outer box to the pills that she had eaten as an apetizer.
Wt-beep and why?!
To top this off, I later found that she had additionally torn into a pill bottle of the cat’s other liver medication, of which she had consumed all but one tablet.
I had already called emergency vets and checked Google for side effects, as well as had analyzed contents and the situation, so I gave her food and water again to see if anything more would come up.
Nothing did, but she kept lying on her side like a deflated dead weight, so I decided we had better get her moving.
Had she been patient and kept faith in me, I had already intended to take her for her own walk with me when the hound and I returned home.
However, I now realized that my ideal of gentile walks with each dog individually was unrealistic and must be pushed aside as a mere pipe dream.
Therefore, the hound, the wolf, my walking sticks, and I proceeded out of the house with makeshift harnessing of the two dogs together.
This would let them pull against each other and take some of the pressure off of me, and I would direct them with separate leads attached as “reins.”
The lovely neighbor lady observing me as we began leaving had likely heard my earlier distress upon my kid walking in through the garage door unannounced.
Having been startled in mid crisis’s find, I had reacted briefly with semi-loud sobbing of “I can’t do this anymore. No matter what I do, it is never enough!”
And so, as the dogs and I left the yard with my grim-faced tangle-prepping departure, she said she knew that I “wasn’t ok” and tried offering to help – but I was in a mode.
To her last call after me as I paused farther down the street for final harness group adjustments, I called back in upbeat yet hardened determination, ” Don’t worry – the only way forward is UP from here!”
I am back to climbing mountains.
Candid Corvid Productions 