Saving dogs and shaming owners: A guest post from James!

Here's the deal:
James texts me around 8am, long after I had left for work, the message simple states: "Just saved a dog's life'.
Of course, I am like, "wtf?"
Then he sends another text... a picture... of blood splattered over his white T.
Of course... I am like, "WTF?!"
The response I get? "Something to do with popcorn'

Then nothing...

I waited... for 3 whole hours before he got to work and was able to email me the story. And what a doozy it was. So here you go... a surprise guest post from James. Now, he doesn't know that I have posted this email, but I thought it was incredibly entertaining and why not share it?

I may not have mentioned before, but James has already proven that he is the man of my dreams, many times over, by stopping to let turtles cross the road. Seriously. Any girl who isn't wooed by a stone cold hunter, outdoorsy, manly man who stops his F-250 in the middle of the road, gets out, and carries a little turtle from one side of the street to the other, is simply unwooable.

So here you have it: The story of Lucy the Labrador and her Lame Ass Owner, as told by James...

I had just stepped out of the shower when I heard something that sounded like thunder. I waited…. then I heard it again. "What the hell... that’s someone knocking at the front door!" I wrapped my towel around me and went to peak around the corner. Sure enough someone was standing out on the front porch (I was making water and it looked like the were messing with my buckets). I ran back into our room and threw on some boxers, shorts, t-shirt and Sperry’s and sped to the door. When I got there this lady was in the yard with a bucket, bent over something. She turned around, saw me and shouted “My dog is dying! It’s bleeding out of it’s mouth!” She comes running over to the porch. “It ate something while we were walking through the movie theatre parking lot and now it’s coughing up blood!”

Now the dog manages to stand up and starts walking towards the porch. It looks like it’s possessed and probably has rabies. It stumbles up to the porch and I can see the blood coming out of it’s mouth. She starts splashing water from the other bucket on the porch into the dogs mouth. Doesn’t help. It stumbles and almost falls off the porch.

I told her, “Lady, you need to take this dog to the vet! It’s going to die if you don’t! Bring it around to my driveway and put it in the back of my truck and I’ll drive you home so you can go to the vet.”

She says, “It’s too heavy I can’t carry it.” So, I go back inside, grab my wallet, keys and phone, and run out to the building to grab the wheel barrel. I wheel around to the porch and yell at her to put the dog into the wheel barrel. No surprise here…the dog is still too heavy. At this point the dog was coughing, obviously couldn’t breath and was starting to shit on itself. I yelled at her to grab it’s back end and I would grab the front end and we rolled it into the wheel barrel. She said that she only lived just down the street. I sped off with the dog in the wheel barrel running down the sidewalk with her behind me hysterically crying, “Her name is Lucy and she’s eleven years old!”

We get to her house (she lives next door to Roman) and I pull around to the driveway and tell her to open the car. She runs to the back yard, going on and on about the baby pool and water and getting the dog to drink so it could throw up. I said, “Lady, you’re taking this dog to the vet. Get over here.” She’s still running around acting crazy. So, I go over to the deck with the dog and she throws down the baby pool and turns on the hose. I told her to lift the dog out and put her in the pool. Surprise again, it was too heavy. So I wheel barrel dumped the dog in the baby pool and called Johnson Animal Clinic while this lady ran off into the house.

Johnson Animal Clinic told me the situation was an emergency…(Really? I hadn’t guessed that.) and instructed me to call and emergency center located on outer loop (where Mason died.) I told her the dog would never make it that far so she gave me the number of a place in Fern Creek, I think. I called them they said to bring the dog in immediately.

I looked around and couldn’t find the lady. Finally she came out of the house and I said “Hey. What are you doing? Do you not have the money to take the damn dog to the vet or what?”

She said, “No, I can’t afford it.”

So I told her “Well. Get over here and watch this damn dog die then. I’m not going to sit here and watch it die while you run off and hide!”

So she came over and by this time the dog had been wallowing around in the pool and I thought it was already dead once or twice. After a few minutes it seemed to not look as delirious and even started to drink a sip or two of water. Then another sip. Finally it sat up right and it’s breathing seemed to slow down, the bleeding stopped, and it was getting less frightening to look at.

Now, the lady proceeds to tell me that they were on a walk through the parking lot at the movie theatre, and the dog ate an entire bag of popcorn and started coughing. I’m guessing it got something lodged into its throat and couldn’t breathe. Remember now…Dog’s don’t sweat and they regulate their body temperature by respiration (panting) when a dog can’t pant they can’t cool themselves. I think the dog was choking on popcorn and couldn’t breathe which lead to it overheating internally and it essentially was baking from the inside out.

So, the water was cool enough to reduce the dogs body temperature enough that it didn’t die. And once it seemed to cool down it was able to drink some water and dislodge the popcorn that I assume was the culprit of this whole damn scenario.

By the time I started back home with my bloody wheel barrel. Eleven year old Lucy was standing on her own under the deck and out of the kiddie pool. She seemed like she was going to be ok. I’ll know for sure when I go to mow Roman’s yard this week. Lucy religiously meets me there to bark through the fence while I’m working.

Now... let me just say that on this particular day it was already over 90 degrees by 8 am, the heat index was up into the 100's, and James already hated popcorn.