Why my veteraniarian suspects me of drug addiction

Last September we found a dog. A stray dog. She was young, some kind of mutt, medium-sized and yellow. She was thin and wearing a green collar that was too small. We found her wandering around in front of Dyer Hall on the UC campus. Obviously someone wanted to ditch her, and the UC campus seems to be a favorite spot to dump unwanted dogs. We called her Daisy.

So we brought the dog home and fed her. We already had adopted an enormous lab mix we named Solomon. We thought it would be good for him to have a friend, since we are usually at school and the dog might be lonely. A friend recommended this idea to us.

So Daisy and Solomon ran around our yard, trampled most of our grass to death, and devoured shoes, upholstery, and wooden furniture. They had a great time.

But then I noticed that she was having lady problems. I took the dogs to the dog park regularly so they could run around in the mud and smell other dogs' butts and stuff - since those are important doggy activities. But a problem arose. The male dogs chased Daisy relentlessly and and tried to corner her and mount her. I realized she was in heat. Then her uterus shed its lining and she bled all over my kitchen floor. That was an entirely new experience for me.
A few months later I took Daisy to the vet and explained that we needed to get her spayed. We were not down with the notion of suddenly having ten puppies to deal with, in addition to being full-time students, working, and owning two large dogs and a decrepit house with orders on it from the Building Department. We had enough shit going on already.

I picked Daisy up from surgery to find that she had been stapled back together and, surprisingly, did not need one of those big plastic cones around her neck to keep her from eating her stitches. The vet handed me a small orange and white bottle of doggy pain medication and told me to feed her one pill every day for the next two weeks as she healed. He said there might be some "seepage". Wondering what exactly that meant, I brought her home.

There was indeed some "seepage". Daisy's incision wept what appeared to be a mix of blood and water for days. Not a lot, just a trail of dribbling reddish spots on the floor. Fortunately the other dog, Solomon - ever alert and inquisitive - cleaned up most of these spots with this tongue, to my relief - since I have fairly low standards of domestic cleanliness. I love how dogs will clean up really gross stuff for you by eating it and then lick you on the face. A goldfish or a parakeet just won't do that.

Meanwhile I was keeping Daisy's pain medication on the back of the kitchen counter along with some bottles of vitamins and spices. Our other dog Solomon is huge enough that he can jump up and stand on his hind legs and grab things off this counter, which he occasionally did. Having the short-term memory of a senile bovine, I had forgotten this.

One day Daisy's pain medication was missing. Totally friggin' vanished. I looked everywhere. Finally I found all that was left of it - a chewed up plastic white pill bottle lid - in the back yard. The jar and its contents were nowhere to be found. I realized that Solomon had probably eaten them. I watched him carefully to see if he was going to O.D. on pain pills like trailer trash and/or a rock star, but he appeared to be acting completely normal. Apparently he has a high tolerance for doggy oxycodone. I made a note of this for future reference, should the issue arise.

But Daisy was in pain. The area around her surgery began to swell. She winced when she moved around and acted like she was really suffering. And one of her staples was gone.

I took her back to the vet and told him the story. When I got to the part about the missing pain pills he lowered his eyebrows and glared into my eyes. Bear in mind that I am a fairly grizzled and disheveled individual and that I was wearing dirty clothes spattered in house paint. Obviously I he thought I had eaten all of my dog's pain pills, washed them down with a 40 of Steel Reserve, and then had the audacity to come back to his office looking for more. This made me feel really bad about myself, since I don't take pills, drink malt liquor, or generally pull crazy stunts to get my hands on controlled substances.

The vet apparently decided that my suffering dog was more important than my probable substance abuse problems and he gave me another week's worth of doggy happy pills, along with a very stern look. So all was well. But I had the distinct feeling that the receptionist staff of the vet's office was watching me with intense disapproval when I left. Trying to ignore them, I calmly led Daisy out to my battered 82 Dodge and drove back to the inner city, happy that I had accomplished my mission.

And that's the reception I generally get in the following settings: professional, suburban, middle-class, health care, government office, job interview, shopping mall, police interrogation, and family holidays on my father's side. It keeps things interesting.