Doggie Devotion: You Have To Laugh

Much to my dismay, and near constant need to collapse in a fit of giggles, our westie, Roxie, has decided that the cure for whatever ails me must be found in her sticking to me like glue.  She knows something is wrong, because I'm bandaged up, moving slowly and with occasional moans of pain, and sleeping a lot.

But her little dog brain cannot grok it any further than "must fix mom and guard her obsessively."

This morning, as I sit here in my desk chair typing away, she has repeatedly thrown herself at the sun room windows to ward off the scary birdies on the feeder so that they do not get too close to me inside the house, even though they cannot get in here through the windows and she knows it.  Then she began barking incessantly at the UPS truck as it trundled by on Main Street nowhere near our house.

Although, to be fair, she barks at the rumbly UPS truck that way every day, despite the extra helping of doggie lunacy in today's pitch and timbre.  Something in the sound of the truck's engine rattle drives her bonzer yo yo every single day.

Heaven help us if a squirrel shows up on the feeder this morning.    The coming of the four horsemen of the apocalypse would be nothing compared to "operation save hurt mom from the fiendish squirrel" lunacy, I can tell you that.



All weekend long, she has followed me wherever I do go.  If I crawl back into bed, she has to be there, too, smooshing up against my belly so tightly that I cannot move without having to squirm out the other side.  That's not exactly easy when you are sore and have a giant, healing hole in a very tender area, and a tempurpedic mattress that makes easy movement in and out of bed a comedic masterpiece of rolling idiocy on the best of days.

You try getting out of our bed without yanking your stitches and see how well you do.  Then add a crazy dog who refuses to move away from your side to the mix, and add a dash of obsessive limpet-clinging lunacy, and you'll see what I mean.

When I made her scoot over last night, she got up in a huff, stalked over to the other side of the bed and laid down with a harrrumph worthy of Winston Churchill, only to slink back over against my belly the moment I conked back out again.  Her stealthy need to snug up against my side is going to kill me, or at the very least make me sweat to death.

The funniest thing thus far, though, is her newly intense jealousy of my ice bag.

I caught her eying it suspiciously last night, and growling ever so slightly under her breath as it got tucked against my incision area.  She, the dog of great love and tenderness and guarding awesomeness, SHE is forbidden from getting near my incision side since she tried to paw and lick my wound in an attempt to make things better.

But that ice bag was not.  It was tucked carefully right up against my side, and she was not allowed to get over there to make sure everything was okay.

Uh.  Mah.  GAWD.  

As of this morning, she has not forgiven me the slight, trying at every chance to get back over there to at least sniff and figure out why I'm so tender on that side.  The more I won't allow her near my incision, the more obsessed with it she becomes, and the more annoyed with the ice bag she gets as a result.

I can see it in her eyes this morning:  "Why is that thing allowed near mom's side while she keeps me away?  I am watching you, ice bag."  I'm going to have to keep the ice bag up and away from nibbling teeth for the forseeable future, I can already tell.

Hilarious.

If the ice bag survives the week, it will be a miracle.  In the meantime, I've at least gotten a really good giggle out of all this.


(Photo by Christy Hardin Smith.  This is Roxie with her favorite hedgehog, giving the camera the very same eye -- the one that says "mine, now back off or else" -- that she is now giving my ice bag.)