One Man's Sunday

The weekend from Hell continues unabated. Carl the Cattle Dog spent the morning at the vet's, and what I'd hoped would be a simple rash around the eye has turned out to be a Medical conundrum that has baffled the greatest veterinary experts that Woodinville has to offer. I suspect Carl's doctor hopes it will be named after him (the vet, not Carl) as Carl is brought before the Royal Society as some latter day canine Joseph Merrick. For my part, I am hoping that it will turn out to be a fungal infection and the ointment the vet gave us will clear it up before we have to take Carl to the doggy dermatologist. Yes, I was surprised to discover that there was such a thing, too.

I was not, however, surprised at the wrestling match that Carl put up when I tried to apply the ointment to his eye. Though I was somewhat consoled by the fact that when we got Carl I was sure that ointment would come into it somewhere along the way.

The rest of the day was the usual evaporation of time that marks any weekend-- until, that is, it was Emma's bedtime. There was usual ritual of bargaining over when bedtime exactly was, the possibility of one more cartoon, etc., but it ended with her in bed with her bottle while I took Carl for a walk in the Garden.

Five minutes later, the wife is calling from Emma's window wanting to know where the nebuliser is. I rush in to find Emma having trouble breathing and her lips expanding to the size of Angelica Jolie's. It wasn't hard to figure out what happened. I'd bought milk at a different market than our usual and instead of getting it in a plastic bottle it came in a carton-- a carton that looked almost exactly like the ones that Emma's soy milk comes in. A quick whiff of Emma's bottle confirmed that I'd got the cartons mixed up and Emma had just drank two ounces of dairy death.

So, it's off to the local hospital where Emma calmly declares in the triage room that she's going to throw up and proceeds to do so with a alacrity that would put Linda Blair to shame. She is also turning bright red and is covered in welts. It has not, thank God, triggered an asthma attack and so we're more or less in the clear. A quick jab of epinephrine, a dose of Benadryl and around half-past midnight we're in the drive through of Jack in the Box with a stoned four-year old who is looking much better and is sliding into sleep.

Needless to say, said four-year old was not happy on being reawakened a half hour later when we got home and she had to take a bath to get all the traces of milk off her and help get the skin irritation to go down. She was even more unhappy a half hour after that when we tried to get her out of the bath.

Carl was utterly confused by all this, and as we were far too paranoid to allow Emma to sleep in her room that night, we ended up four in our bed-- one of whom was a dog who could never seem to find quite the right spot.

Crisis over? Not quite. Fate left me a parting shot when I went up to my office early this morning to discover on the landing that the vaccination shots the vet had given Carl the day before had, as a side effect, given him a nasty little case of diarrhea (Carl, not the vet), which Carl later confirmed not once, but twice.

As a wise man once said, we're going to need a lot more carpet cleaner.