After tomorrow, only four more Wednesdays from Hell! God, I can not wait until this semester is over. Not that I don’t appreciate getting the extra composition course, and not that I’m not unutterably grateful to end up with four sections this semester. I am, ohhh I am.
But I’m tired.
This is my third week of being sick with a stupid cold. As usual, it will NOT go away. Invariably it takes twice as long for me to shake off a virus as it takes normal human beings. I’ve missed several choir practices and songfests because I can’t speak, much less sing, without falling into a coughing frenzy.
Under the best of conditions, Wednesday is a Day from Hell. After coping with the puppy from 8:00 to 10:30 a.m., I get to stand in front of classes for five hours straight with no break; then come back, cope with Pup for another hour while bolting down a meal; then shoot out the door for choir practice, where I have to be “up” for another two hours. By the time I get home, I’m beat, and I haven’t even begun to look at student papers or read copy.
Last Wednesday, though, took the Devil’s-food cake.
I let the Wednesday-only afternoon section go a little early because I just couldn’t talk anymore or even stand up. Stumbled in the house around 4:15 or 4:30, dizzy, nauseated, so sick and so tired all I wanted to do was fall into bed. That, I knew, would be impossible with a 300-watt puppy anxiously waiting to be let out of his crate.
Sick as a dog, I was. But not as sick as that dog. Soon as I walked in the door, a great stink walloped me in the face.
Oh.
No.
Oh, yes. Charlie had squirted diarrhea all over his nest and got it all over himself and all over the floor and…what a mess!
So I had to shuck my clothes and shoes, grab the squirming 45-pound puppy, drag him outdoors, wash the shit off him with shampoo, wash the shit off me with more shampoo, towel him as dry as possible. Then drag him back in the house and tie him to a doorknob while I dealt with the unbelievable stinking mess in the living room.
Thank God for tile floors, anyway.
Before I could put the blanket in the washer, I had to haul it out to the backyard and hose the crap out of it. Drag the wet, heavy, stinking blanket through the kitchen and out to the washer in the garage and run that through with plenty of hot water and detergent.
Then take the crate apart so I could remove its plastic floor, which was covered with puddles of shit. Drag that outside and wash it in the hose.
That was when, yes. I stepped on the honeybee.
That’s right. I stepped on a dying honeybee that was flopped in the water on the pavement.
It drove its stinger into my foot, between the large and second toe. Oh SHIT did that hurt.
But at that point I was up to my ankles in dogshit and water, struggling with the large, clumsy plastic bottom to the crate. By the time I got to the point where I could disengage from that mess, the bee’s venom sack had pumped about as much poison into my toe as it could.
Retrieved a knife, scraped the venom sack and stinger off my foot. Dog is hollering and straining to get free.
Stumble back in the house to clean up the remaining smears and puddles of doggy diarrhea, which are still decorating the living room tile. Another 20 minutes or so of scrubbing and upending of the dog cage and scouring the wire walls and doors and it was time to run the blanket through the washer a second time. It seemed a wise thing to do.
Hosed the remaining shit and the deceased honeybee off the back porch. Soaked the burning foot in the cold swimming pool water. Dosed the puppy with Pepto-Bismol. Dosed myself with two Benadryl, not knowing how the body with its recently acquired panoply of allergies would react to the second bee sting of my lifetime.
Climbed in the shower and scrubbed the stink off myself.
Doorbell rang. Charlie broke free, raced for the door to greet M’hijito in a frenzy of dog joy. Caught the flicking leash on the coffee table, dragged the table across the living room floor, slammed it into the sofa, and flang the pottery riding it to the tiles, where it broke into a zillion pieces.
Now my son is pissed off at me because I fly into a rage because now I have ANOTHER mess to clean up and I’m barefooted because my foot hurts like hell and the dog is bouncing up and down in the center of a lake of shattered stoneware and because I did NOT want that piece of hand-thrown stoneware to end up in a thousand pieces on the floor!!!!!!!!!
Shovel the kid and dog out the door. Lock Cassie in the bedroom. Spend another 30 or 40 minutes sweeping up the large pieces and moving the furniture and vacuuming up at least a jillion tiny sharp pieces of broken pottery, some of it thrown all the way into the hall, 15 feet across the room.
Retrieve the blanket from the washer, hang it on the line in back.
Feed Cassie.
By now the Benadryl has taken full effect. It’s only just after dark, but I’m so zonked I can barely wobble down the hall. Fall in the sack and pass out, along about 7:30.
Wake up at 2:30—at least I got seven hours of sleep. That’s something. Anyway.
Friday the dermatologist told me that after his wife stepped on a honeybee on the beach at Rocky Point, it took about three weeks for her foot to stop aching. This being almost a week after the fact now, I’d guess that’s about right.
Oh, yea…while all this was going on, I was also nursing stitches in a surgical wound.
He did say, however, that the lump he biopsied was not a leiomyoma but was indeed, a plexiform neurofibroma. That’s good in that it’s not an indicator of kidney cancer. Not so good in that it’s hereditary and can cause some big problems in one’s offspring and one’s offspring’s offspring…like bone deformities, mental retardation, widespread disfigurement, internal tumors, high blood pressure, susceptibility to cancer. About 10% of people with these charming little lumps do see them morph into cancer. And the ugly things cannot be removed from one’s shoulder, where they frighten passers-by, without causing significant scarring and worse disfiguring than the ugly lumps themselves.
{sigh} I don’t know where this came from. Don’t recall either of my parents having anything like this. But then you don’t have to actually manifest the lumps to pass the defective gene to a child. And I never saw either my grandmothers or my grandfathers.
Enough, already. I can’t stand it anymore.
🙁
Is there any way that the dog can be left outside when you’re gone, now that it’s cooler? Can your son find another arrangement for the dog for which he is primarily responsible? Coming home to find that the dog had crapped everywhere would send me over the edge right now LOL Well, really it would send me over the edge any time because the memory of diapers of yore is never far from mind…..
Do you get flu shots? They do wonders for me. I no longer get colds that linger for months.
Your son had no right to get pissed at you. He needs to apologize to you immediately.
🙁 Tomorrow has GOT to be better…
Is the dog yours or your son’s? You seem to have it more than he does. If he can’t care for a dog then why did he get one? Does he pay you?
Also, I would have made him clean up after the dog, at least part of it. Seems like he fed him something he shouldn’t have. Didn’t he also run out of dog food for it? You really seem to bear the brunt of the care of this puppy.
@ Karen: actually, he does clean up after the dog. No, he doesn’t run out of dog food, but I did one day, not having given him enough advance warning to renew the supply. Pup is now at the height of his caloric needs, so it’s pretty clear that we each need to have a full bag of the stuff at our respective castles — M’hijito brought a whole bag over the other day and presumably will be doing that off and on for a while.
The dog-sitting is temporary, until such time as Pup is old enough to sustain a day at the M’hijito Manse without succumbing to any desires to eat the furniture. Actually, the little guy is progressing surprisingly fast: he’s now fully house-trained, he knows sit, stay, down, come, watch me, and leave it, and he’s almost stopped pouncing the corgi. Inside a limited area, he now will heel (after a fashion) when appropriately bribed, and outdoors he will heel briefly until distracted (which just now is still most of the time…). He’s been off the lead most of today, which is a first and is just great.
@ Quest: The pool is unfenced, and there’s $10,000 worth of irrigation equipment, desert landscaping, fruit trees, and ornamentals out there. I really, really do not want to come home to find a doggy corpse at the bottom of the deep end, nor do I care to have the backyard excavated. Pup is good with staying in his (vast!) crate for a few hours at a time, and given our respective schedules, about four hours is as long as he ever has to stay penned up. Also, part of our contract with the breeder is that we will NOT leave him locked outside. That’s considered inhumane in these parts. Under some conditions, it’s animal abuse, which (interestingly) is punished more severely than child abuse.
@ Stephen: You have to appreciate what “fly into a rage” actually means in my case. Even the most stable of sons might feel a certain degree of…discombobulation.
Yes, I did get a flu shot. But it came 8 days before the drinking fountain episode. Flu shots require two weeks to take effect. They are wonderful, though, aren’t they???
I think this is probably not the flu. There’s a really heavy cold making the rounds, and that’s most likely what I picked up from the kiddies. Normally the flu elicits arthralgia and muscle ages in my bod’, and I haven’t had either of those, nor have I had a credible fever.
And @ Quest & Karen: Dog-sitting until Pup reaches Dogship was my idea: it was a birthday gift to my son, who has wanted exactly this sort of dog for a very long time–years. I’m experienced with raising and training big dogs (and actually DO know better than to leave breakables sitting on a coffee table, especially when a powerhouse of a pup is dragging a 15-foot leash behind him as he tears toward the front door).
This probably sounds crazy, but if you don’t already use an electric toothbrush, you might give it a try – after about 3 months after getting one [dentist orders to keep gums in better health], I realized my chronic (10 mos/year, at least 10 years running) allergies cleared up my other sinus issues are very minimal, and no colds.
I can fully understand the need to deal with the diarrhea mess sooner than later, but if it were me I would have re-crated the dog and had the son clean up the other mess instead of kicking them both out.
@ valleycat1: Yeah, electric toothbrushes are AWESOME!!!!! They really do help a lot.
Dentist event is occasioned by the fact that teeth still do need to be cleaned professionally now and again. Plus as you age, your teeth shift. My lower teeth have now moved to the point where they’re actually uncomfortable and are abrading the tongue. So I’d like to talk with him about Invisalign or traditional orthodonture to bring lower jaw back into something more like normalcy and maybe even to push the Vampire Fangs in a bit so I look less like an escapee from a freak show.
I actually didn’t kick them out. M’hijito got off work and came by to pick up Pup on his way home. The occasion for the charge on the front door was the usual evening Dance to Joy at his routine arrival.
re: birthday gift. Ok, I see. I’m glad you initiate the offer. Sometimes children can take advantage of parents (speaking as a child/non parent). You’re a better woman than I. I don’t want to deal with puppyness.