Mock’s Dog Drama

For those of you who don’t know me personally, you may not know I have two dogs – Ella, who’s an almost 9-year old yellow lab, and Maizie May, who’s a 4 year old black lab mix – a rescue we got two years ago.

I love these girls with the fury of a billion suns. Elladog is, as Daisy has always described her, a professional dog. She went through 18 months of intensive training to be a service dog, but failed out of the program because she couldn’t help being affectionate and licky while she was supposed to be working. In other words, she’s the perfect family dog – PLUS she knows all kinds of cool tricks, and she’s marvelously well behaved.

Maizie, on the other hand, has always been kind of a problem child. She’s got all kinds of food allergies so she has to be on expensive hypoallergenic food, and she is prone to demonstrating her irritation that she’s ever left without human company by getting into trash cans, or chewing stuff she shouldn’t chew, etc. But she’s dainty and sweet and very loving and I can only ever stay mad at her for like 2 seconds.

For the past year or so, she’s been really really good – no accidents to speak of, well behaved during our absences…until a few weeks ago after we’d been in Hawaii for 8 days. That, apparently, was too long of a vacation, and Maizie didn’t approve. She held in her rage until last Monday when I went to my son’s lacrosse game in the evening, which was out of the ordinary in that someone is generally always home in the evenings. When we returned, she’d gotten into (and devoured) an entire box of protein bars that Mr. Mock had left out on the counter, she’d peed on the family room carpet, and she’d left a larger mess in the dining room.

Mr. Mock got all of that cleaned up, but then the next morning, as if to further hide evidence of her misbehavior, she ate a giant hole into the family room carpet where she’d peed. We moved a rug into the room to cover it, but for a few days after that, she kept pulling the corner of the rug off to chew at the hole she created even more.

I finally got that sorted out by spraying that bitter apple spray on it, and felt like she was sort of back to her normal self, until this past Monday night, when I went to another of my kid’s lacrosse games. We were gone for three hours. When we returned, we discovered that Maizie had gotten onto the kitchen counter again, and pulled down a loaf of bread, and two unopened and sealed plastic jars of nutella chocolate spread. She devoured it all, presumably while Elladog watched and judged her, because Elladog NEVER misbehaves like that.

Obviously, since I’m well aware that chocolate is poisonous to dogs, I freaked, and called the vet. They told me to rush her in (this was at 9.30 at night) so they could induce vomiting, and once I got there it turned out she’d have to stay overnight for observation, with IV fluids and all kinds of tests, to the tune of TWELVE HUNDRED DOLLARS.

Long story short, she’s home now, and is exhausted but seems OK, and as long as we get her through the next 72-96 hours without any severe symptoms, she’ll likely be OK long term.

While I was waiting at the hospital for her to throw up the entire contents of her stomach, I texted my sister and one of my BFFs Marcus (you may remember Marcus from such things as this hilarious episode when he called our show to talk about a date he’d been on), to fill them in on what was happening, and you HAVE TO HEAR their responses you guys.

Dogs. Life with dogs is full of surprises, sure – and they’re not always GOOD surprises – but HOW CAN PEOPLE LIVE WITHOUT DOGS? I did it for way too long, and I don’t ever wanna do it again. I have already told Mr. Mock that when we move to South Carolina someday, we will have #ALLTHEDOGS.  (So far, he’s only agreed to three, but I’m still working on it.)

Anyway, so far so good. I told Maizie that I was going to tell y’all about her incident with the nutella, and she gave me Kermit face.

Tell me your stories about weird stuff your dogs have eaten!!!