Stupid, Stupid Dog (And Current Doggy Drama)

In honour of Waimak's genius attempt to ingest a sewing needle last week, here are the stupidest things he's done to date:

1. Eating poo.  I know this is a fairly common dog thing, but...  ewww.  (At least he sticks to the poo of other animals??)
2. Tried to play with the cat.  She may only be a tenth of his size, but she has big, scary, sharp claws.  It took ages for his nose to heal.  (I think he's finally figured out that when she hisses and snarls at him, it really means "piss off, stupid dog!")  
3. Picking fights with dogs twice his size because, Buddy, you're gonna lose!
4. Chewing on a sewing needle.  It took me about two minutes to fish the needle out of his gums and he was a trooper.  I was less of a trooper and got rather grouchy when I stabbed myself multiple times with said needle.  Gah.  (When I first noticed that he had a needle stuck in his gums, I felt somewhat homicidal toward someone who left sewing needles on the coffee table where dogs and babies could potentially get at them.  Not cool.) 
5. Eating a bottle of synthroid.  I was pregnant at the time, so panic came to me fairly readily.  I called the vet, who gave me the animal poison control centre number, who charged me $75 to say that he'd be fine since dogs metabolize much higher amounts of thyroid hormone than humans.  ARGH.

The current drama with the boy is a wee bit more stressful.  While we were in Hawaii, he stayed with my inlaws.  Who think it's perfectly ok to leave him in the backyard on his own for hours at a time.  We do not.  When we got back, we immediately noticed that he'd both rubbed a chunk of his nose off at some point, as well as developed a growth of somesort on his foot.  To top it all off, he thought a two-week long bout of diarrhea would be an excellent Welcome Home present.  *mumble-curse-mumble*

The nose has been healing well on it's own and we figured that the diarrhea would resolve itself after a few days of eating a nice bland diet of rice and ground beef, but... no such luck.  We'd also been keeping an eye on his foot, hoping that it was just from a scratch of somesort and would heal on its own, but it's only been getting worse.

So.  Today I took him to the vet.  (The last time I took him to the vet for yearly vaccinations, he was terrified.  He urinated on the vet from being so freaked out.  On top of that, I got stabbed with his rabies vaccine because he flinched.  Incidentally, I went into labour two hours after the visit.  Huh.)

Anyway, the vet is lovely.  Friendly, relaxed, very professional.  Waimak, however, is the biggest scaredy cat that I've ever met.  He was sooo submissive and he really did a great job (quaking the whole time) as she checked his ears/teeth, manhandled his feet, poked his gut, stuck a thermometer up his bum.  (She said he looks great, btw, and isn't too worried about his tummy - the diarrhea is probably stress-related.)  When it came time to bring him to the back of the clinic for the biopsy of the growth, and away from his mum, he was beside himself.  She had to drag him along the linoleum to get him to come with her... He was so scared that he urinated all over the nice vet techs.  *sigh*

(We waited for the pathology results.  Looks like it's probably just an infection, but if the antibiotics don't work, we're going to have to get it removed.  Gah.)

After a fun-fun hour, a checkup, a lab test, powder stuff for his tummy, antibiotics for his foot, and his regular summertime worm-tick pills, I'm $236.74 poorer.  Stupid, stupid dog.  (Too bad we love 'im.)