So the neighbor’s fucking asshole good-for-nothing dog streaks out of nowhere last night as Zeke and I are leaving for an evening walk, and attacks poor old Zeke, clamping down on him but good around the earal region. Zeke — who in 15 years of life has never until now met a dog who he couldn’t win over with his boyish charm — falls right over. Brando (the fucking asshole good-for-nothing dog) lacerates his left ear.
So we go to the vet this morning, me half expecting that they’ll screen, clean, and betadine Zeke and hand him back to me with a bill. But the vet is concerned about a couple pounds of weight loss in the last two weeks. He wants to do some blood work and a couple more X-rays. I leave Zeke at the vet, though not before he shoots a look of utter betrayal at me as they hustle him through the back door of the exam room.
The blood work is due back tomorrow. The new radiography shows no sign of tumors, no enlarged heart, nothing really out of the ordinary.
But when the visiting consulting radiologist there today took a look at Zeke’s pelvic X-ray, he pointed out some slight deterioration in a couple of Zeke’s vertebrae that had been mostly masked by the left pelvic “process” — which is a cool, complexity-studies-flavored word for “bone.” The vets hadn’t seen the deterioration before, because it was really pretty hard to see even when pointed out.
Arthritis. Not degenerative myelopathy. Arthritis. Routine, annoying, painful, increasingly treatable arthritis.
Insert Howard-Dean-style scream here.
Zeke, who right now has a couple little sores on his ear held shut by superglue, still has a shot at becoming the world’s best 20-year-old dog. And the owners of the fucking asshole good-for-nothing dog are getting a significant bill handed to them.
Posted by: Chris Clarke
Categories:
Zeke
The Neighborhood
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