Tag: dog boarding

The Vet (Part 1)

I grew up with girl dogs. I love girl dogs and boy cats. Granted, there is nothing inherently wrong with boy dogs. I struggle with them wanting to pee on walls and every other tree, but other than that, I am just biased towards wanting a girl dog because I grew up with them. My husband had the same experience growing up so we ended up with a female husky.

The thing that sucks about owning a female pet of any kind though is that getting them spayed is not cheap. Nothing at the vet is cheap, and this is why my frugal self does not like going to the vet. I do take my dog to the vet because I need her to have her rabies shots for my safety and to have her in my apartment. She needs her distemper and Bordetella in order to come to work with me.

Regardless, setting up her spay appointment was not something that I was super enthusiastic about doing, but I did schedule it right away when I got her. I hit a minor speed bump though when I called in late November, and they said that I could not bring her in until February… late February, two months later.

In case you don’t know, a female dog can go into heat anytime after she turns six months old… at which was the exact age I acquired her. This was one of those things that I really, really should have asked her previous owner if she had already been in heat because I basically had to just stare at my dog awkwardly watch for signs of going into heat.

You might say, “what’s the big deal? You live in an apartment. It’s not like she’s wandering around through the neighborhood getting to know all of the other dogs.”

I would say back, “You don’t understand. I work at a facility which has plenty of dogs who are not fixed and the one place that I can let her run around unsupervised has an intact male labradoodle currently.”

Also, if you read the Potty Training stories, you know that whenever she is left alone at home too long, my apartment and sanity suffer for it.

My husband had the smart idea of calling another vet.

Here’s the thing, I am not arguing with his logic, what I am saying is that I am frozen into going to the same vet until they do me wrong. Vets are one of those things where I feel obligated to go to the same one. I also did not want to go to another vet only to find out that they thought I was the worst pet owner in existence because I did not give my dog fifteen different supplements, depression medication, and a raw diet as a cherry on top.

Even though it literally makes absolutely no sense for me to drive forty five minutes for me to go to the same veterinary clinic when I live within fifteen minutes of five different veterinarian hospitals. Anxiety over new things can almost never be talked out of its irrational behavior, and to be honest, I just didn’t want to go to a different vet.

Also, so what if she went into heat before her spay, I knew that I would just have to keep her away from the very horny male dogs. Easy peasy. Besides, it’s not like they can’t fix her while she’s in heat, right? Right?

Her heat lasted about two and half weeks which was a hassle in of itself. Thankfully her bleeding was not as heavy as we had expected. We did buy her doggy diapers, but they were not entirely necessary and more work than worth it to get on her and keep on her. I mean, Ginger is the kind of dog that I would spend ten to twenty minutes struggling to get winter boots and a harness on her.

So when the bleeding stops, we should be in the clear?

Nope.

Don’t be so optimistic.

I found out through some more obsessive Googling that it would be another ten days of a fertile window. So more time, of trying to keep an eye on her to make sure that no horny males found her. Neither I or Ginger particularly enjoyed this time because it meant less time to play and more time in the kennel.

Her bleeding stopped about a month before her vet appointment. A new set of questions entered my Google search… “signs of pregnancy in dogs.”

Now I need to say this.

I did not see anything happen… but again due to the nature of my job and the natural order of things with animals. I always suspected something may have very likely, quite possibly occurred between her and another dog.

The unhelpful thing about Google is that it will give you some very irrelevant and useless information about rare, but wait no, not rare, actually it is very wrong, nope, now this is a common occurrence.

One of those unhelpful things is the notion of phantom pregnancy which is rare, but also quite common in dogs, or so Google tells me. Phantom pregnancy is when a dog shows all symptoms of pregnancy and adopts her toys as pups even though the animal is not in fact pregnant.

So what did I do?

I watched closely and waited…

We are NOT getting a Dog

Despite me being the oldest and supposedly most responsible child, I have this very inconvenient personality clash. The clash is between my impulsiveness and then the anxiety that usually locks me into a plan so as to find security. This impulsiveness sends me out on quests that I somehow planned out within the span of two minutes and think that somehow there is nothing that could possibly go wrong. Consequently, things do go not quite to plan, my anxiety climbs in the drivers seat and runs me into a ditch where I lie there unable to comprehend a solution… even though there are literally hundreds of them calling to me from the edge of the ditch.

Getting a dog was one of those impulsive things where for some reason my anxiety and the more common sense side of my brain remained on sleep mode until the dog came into the picture. Then I could see the problem clearly, but before I go into that, I should really start from the beginning.

In my planner brain, my husband and I agreed on early in our marriage that despite us both loving animals. We were not getting a dog until we were moved into a house. Our first apartment did not allow any kind of pets, and both of us were working full time. We didn’t even have time to think about a dog.

Life changes though.

We moved to a pet friendly apartment, but I was still at Walmart working eight hour shifts. I remained firm in my position that we were not going to get a dog. Josh talked about getting a lizard for a little bit. A lizard, however, did not require nearly as much attention and work as a dog. A cat would be nice, but I did not like the idea of a litter box. I was slightly allergic to cats and dogs anyways so it would be an absolutely terrible idea for us to get any kind of furry critter in a two bedroom apartment.

I was getting bored and fed up with the retail world though, and it was not long after we moved into our new apartment that I put in my two week notice without a job lined up. (Another impulsive quest for the win!) I knew the basic idea of what kind of job I wanted. At least two people had mentioned the idea of working with animals to me. I had never thought about it before, but I loved animals so I started calling all of the dog boarding and/or grooming places in the area. I knew that with the labor shortage that at least one should be hiring.

By God’s grace, I did find a job at a dog boarding and grooming business. (Yes, I did this despite being slightly allergic to animals. My love for animals is stronger than my allergies.) In the interview, they told me something that my random brain should not have heard… if I took the job, I could bring my dog/dogs to work with me. My future doggo could come and be my work buddy.

I kept telling myself after that however that we just couldn’t afford it. I had looked at the pet amendment for our apartment when we first moved in and was convinced that it was far too expensive for a couple where one of the partners was now working a part time job.

That’s when I made a mistake… I started looking at puppies and dogs on petfinder.com, gooddog.com, and different social media rehoming groups. The planner side of my brain starting churning out a plan. I would save up enough money to buy the very specific kind of breed that I wanted. It would take quite a while to save up for one since the breed I wanted was usually well above $1,500 in a lot of cases. The dog breed was called Samoyed.

Samoyed, known for herding reindeer in Siberia

I had started putting money away and things were going smoothly. I knew my goal, and I was going to stick to it… that is until something came across my screen that I really couldn’t resist…