Why I need to be more like my dog…even though he eats pieces of string for breakfast.

Ok, so Chip had to go to the vet yesterday - for what we thought was some kind of stomach virus. He had been sick for a few days, and we figured that he had caught some kind of bacteria while hiking, since he likes to spend a lot of his hiking time in the streams eating muddy leaves and such.

First, let me begin with the fact that this dog LOVES the vet. As soon as we pull in - his ears perk up, his tail wags, and he is dragging us through the door to get to anyone in the clinic. He loves them all. Doesn't matter if the worker is taking his temperature or not (you know how they do that, right?) he has kisses for all of them.

So, the vet believed us, but not really, that he was sick yesterday. Her only words were 'he doesn't look sick'. Which led her to believe that his issues were something else…which led to a little X-ray, which led to finding a piece of metal in his stomach.

After watching it, and observing him, she said that the only way to get it out was to cut it out…so little Chip had a little surgery.

I learned a couple of things about my dog yesterday:

1. He has super dog strength. After having his stomach cut open and stapled back up (14 of them if you're counting) the vet called right as he was waking up from his surgery because she had "never seen anything like it". Instantly, he bounced up and was ready to play. She had to sedate him so that he wouldn't hurt himself. I was kind of annoyed that he was being so frisky, but also kind of excited that surgery didn't even phase him!

2. He does not let pain get in the way of what he's doing. After opening him up and finding the baseball sized tangle of string and plastic that had gotten caught around the wire that he ate a few weeks ago - the vet said that this should have taken him down a lot earlier, and that he must have been in a lot of pain. Apparently no one told him that!

3. He stays focused. Even though, he was consuming a toy that we gave him in January bit by bit, (late Christmas present - as if he knew the difference) we never noticed. But every morning for the past few months, he has worked diligently on chewing a huge string ball that weighs about as much as he does. Little did we know, that each day he's actually been getting closer and closer to his goal, of consuming the entire thing.

He got lucky and we bailed him out. And we'll obviously be focusing our training on not eating 'non-food objects' for the next few weeks between his bouts of being a conehead! It's been an annoying lesson, but one that we'll all be learning from!

And in the end, I like to think that he knows we had his back. (I have to think of him as tiny little puppy from time to time - it helps me not want to be mad at him!) Here's to being open to learning from all types of teachers!