Vet Abby

One of the reasons we were so excited about buying a house is that we would finally have a backyard for Kota to hang out in! Kota spent the majority of his first year of life cooped up in our duplex and only experiencing the great out doors when we were with him. Needless to say, the backyard was quite a shock to him and it took several months for him to adjust to staying out in the backyard.

The one thing we didn't prepare for as we dreamed about our backyard was the {lack of} quality grass in Abilene. If you drive past a really nice looking yard in Abilene, I am 97% positive that it was sodded. For the rest of us folks, we have a lovely yard full of stic-rass, or as you may know it, stickers and grass.

It wasn't a big problem during the summer when our grass was nice and alive, but now that it's starting to die, the stickers are OUT OF CONTROL. Every day when we come home it's a process to get Kota to sit still long enough for us to pick out the stickers. Even though we were trying hard to stay on top of them, we noticed that he kept biting at his front right paw and he developed a limp, trying to stay off of it. As he limped in from using the bathroom while we were home for lunch, I leaned down to pet him and he immediately started growling and running away from us if we touched him. That was the point when we knew something was definitely wrong.

He was too wild for us check his paw out over lunch, so we starting looking at it after work. Cody gently touched all over it and there wasn't a specific spot that made him growl, so we knew it wasn't broken or something major. As we looked closer though, we realized there was a huge sticker caught at the base the main pad of his paw. {This is kind of hard to describe on a blog if you don't have a dog. Imagine having a sticker caught in between your toes. I assume they are similar pain spots.} I grabbed the tweezers to try and dig it out and Kota went crazy. We obviously found the source of the limp.

We knew that he was so wound up and hurting so much that we wouldn't be able to get it out on our own, so we used the help of our best friend: the sedative! We gave him a tiny pill just to help calm him down and went for a run. {Cody and I. Kota was benched.} After we got back, we grabbed all of our supplies and got to work. This time, Kota was just like a bag of potatoes in our lap and it took about 30 seconds to get the sticker out. I feel sorry for the guy, as there's a decent sized cut on the side of his paw pad where I'm guessing it was stuck in him. I'm debating putting neosporan on it but I'm not quite sure it has the same effect on dogs as it does humans.

We're now enjoying a much quieter night than we normally get. It will take Kota a few hours for the sedative to wear off and I plan of taking advantage of his cuddly nature.

Part of me wonders what I'm coming to when I spend my nights blogging about a sticker in my dogs paw. People, this is the exciting life that we live! I kid. Kinda. The moral of this blog post is: next time your pet is sick, call Vet Abby. With my sedative and tweezers, I can fix anything!