1) my computer is still broken. i don't see anything forcing me to address that issue until school starts in september. i'm happy to loll around in my laziness at the moment.
2) i spent monday and tuesday subbing at the preschool where i once taught. i didn't even consider the possibility of getting a cold until i got there and remembered there is no escape. i have worked a total of ten hours there thus far this week and it is only wednesday and KABAM, i already have a sore throat and sniffles. seriously, the military should check out the bioweapons lurking in preschools. i'm sure it would save zillions in medical research.
3) i applied to a production company to be cast on a paranormal activity investigation reality show over the weekend and scored an on-camera interview yesterday. as hilarious as it was and as pleased as i am to have yet another crazy thing to tell a story about, i absolutely will not be chosen for the position, perhaps mostly because (as my mother told me after i discussed my interview outfit) i fall more into the "scientist" category than the "sexy" category, and sex sells, darling.
ok, quick updates are finished. here we are at the grand finale: we may have found the source of our adorable dog's nearly year-long battle with terrible health. on sunday, we visited my grandparents, and in the car on the way there, dess looked like this,
which is to say: normal. on the way out of the car, she hopped from the back seat into the front of the car and smacked her head into the center console. she takes after me in that she's an epic klutz and is used to minor injurious encounters with inanimate objects, so she was totally unfazed by this and we all spent the beautiful day in/by the pool.
at the end of the day, my brother clay noticed that her head was swollen just above her right eye, but it was relatively minor and we all attributed it to her small accident in the car. imagine our surprise then, when by last night (tuesday), the bump was even bigger and she seemed to be running a fever. i woke up around 4 am to find her curled up in what i can only assume is the canine fetal position on the couch, with a scorching fever and zero energy. by 8:30 this morning, we were at the vet, where i guess i assumed he would tell us she had a bee sting or an allergic reaction, hand us medication and let us take her home. instead, he immediately diagnosed her with a massive abscess and told us to pick her up in the afternoon after her surgery. i can proudly say i waited until we got to the car until i dissolved into hysterics.
luke went to work, promising to come home early to help me bring her home, and i spent the day cleaning, sweeping and folding laundry to try to distract myself from feeling like a horrible mother.
i don't have a photo of her head lump pre-surgery mostly because i was content to think it was just a knot resulting from her bumping her noggin. however, you can pretty much assume that whatever she looked like when we dropped her off, it was overwhelmingly horrific to pick her up looking like this:
her abscess lanced, draining tube in place, with blood and pus running down the right side of her face. it is horrific in every sense of the word. the vet pulled us aside before he gave her back to us and told us it was one of the worst infections he'd ever seen. apparently, it had been festering long enough to dissolve some of the bone of her skull, so much so that he even found pus in her sinuses. a closer look:
the first thing we did when we got home, after feeding her several treats and making sure she could still drink out of her bowl with that cone around her neck, was to sit next to her with paper towels and a bowl of warm water and wash the dried fluid off her fur. as unbelievably terrible as it looks, the swelling is enormously improved and her fever is gone, so i guess she's on the road to recovery. still, the idea that this shy, adorable, cuddly mutt, who is our first child in many ways, has an open, draining, odorous* wound on her face is heartbreaking.
the worst part of all of this is that this dog has had a raging infection in her skull for probably the entire time she's been with us (since we picked her up from the rescue last november) and we had no idea. luke and i are trying to be positive and focus on the fact that we have maybe at last hit upon the root cause of all her other, less traumatic medical problems. this centralized condition could have been the source of all her previous ear infections and recent eye problems. by addressing this larger issue, we're hoping we'll remedy her problematic health.
i'm still completely blown away that a) she had such an ugly infection and no one knew and b) that the abscess went from nothing to full-blown baseball size in three days. i'm crossing my fingers and my toes that once she heals up from this, she can enjoy many, many years of health. right now, though, i'm just hoping for rest and a speedy recovery.
*i've smelled a lot of unpleasant things in the last year, but i can solemnly swear that nothing has smelled as bad as the weeping wound above dess's eye. it smells like sickness and i think that makes it worse.
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