The Foster Chronicles: Tulip, Week 2, Days 1-3

Day 1

Tulip goes to a mobile spay & neuter clinic a couple miles from my house. I pick her up after work. The vet tech tells me she doesn’t have mange. My head immediately stops itching. The hair loss on her ears is probably from poor nutrition. Once she’s on a steady diet of good food, it may or may not grow back.

She does have heartworm. :( (Public Service Announcement: Do not search Google Images for ‘heartworm’.) The doctor even found one “in her abdomen”. Tulip will have to go to Greensboro for treatment because there’s a place there that does it way cheaper for the foster organization. She’ll spend the night in the facility and then need to remain calm (read: crated) for six weeks. See, if her heart rate gets raised, she could “develop severe pulmonary thromboembolism”. That is, the dead worms could break off in a big pack and clog her arteries up. Grossest, most horrifying thing ever? Pretty sure yes.

Tulip’s dopey and sweet after her surgery. I actually let Violet and Redford interact with her because she’s so stoned. It mostly goes well, but at one point, when Tulip frog-dogs on the floor and Violet goes to sniff her butt, Tulip rrrrs at her a little bit. Maybe too close to the sensitive parts. I separate the dogs, just to be on the safe side.

Tulip won’t take her pain pills, even when I smear them in peanut butter.

I think about the two-week shutdown, and now the six weeks of keeping her heart rate low. It makes me sad.

I put her in the spare bedroom but don’t have the heart to lock her in her kennel for the night.

Day 2

I have insomnia again. Up at 5:00 after tossing for an hour. I check on Tulip and find she has peed, pooped, and spit up. I clean everything up and offer her breakfast. She’s still dopey and completely uninterested in eating. She drinks some water; that’s a good sign. I lie down with her on the couch. She grunts and squirms for ten minutes, jumps off the couch and spits up the water she drank.

By evening, she still hasn’t even eaten the biscuit I put in her crate when I went out. I try to get her to lick up her peanut buttery pain pills. She slurps at them and spits them out.

I have a visitor after supper. Tulip gives the visitor as much love as is dog-ly possible for an hour.

Then she eats about 1/8 of a cup of food. I rejoice.

Day 3

Still not eating. Still kind of lethargic. But is it possible she’s gotten cuter since I got her? I think so.

In the afternoon, I have another visitor. Again, Tulip pours sugar. Even does a little shnurffly hump-monkey on her. No, Tulip. Shnurffles, yes. Hump-monkey, no.

About 7:00, Tulip and I head to a dog-friendly beer garden to meet my friends. She’s a little nervous, but six people come over at different times and pet her. Sweet as pie. She sees other dogs and strains against the leash, wagging, wagging. She wants to make friends so bad.

So, 90% of my prophylactic eating is to numb feelings, but 10% is to avoid blood-sugar crashes like the one I have when I arrive at the restaurant. I haven’t had any meat all day, which is usually when it happens: I get woozy and sweaty and shaky. I feel like I can barely pick up my water glass.

The food comes, and while I’m palsy-ing fish into my mouth, Tulip’s leash slips away from me, and she heads over to another table to make friends with two dogs she’s been dying to meet. When she gets to the little black and white one, there’s a similar interaction to when she met my dogs. Something like,

Tulip: Hiiiiii! Oh my god, I love you. Do you want to be friends?

Little dog: Ew, scary. Mom! Get it away from me!

Tulip: Oh yeah? Well, fuck you then.

It was literally one second of snarling, nothing injurious, but still. I snatch Tulip away, saying, “Sorry, sorry, sorry!” and take her back to our table. After I get her secured and get a drink of water, I go back to the other dog’s people and say, “I just wanted to say sorry again. She’s my foster dog. She was a cruelty confiscation. I’ve only had her nine days, so I’m still getting to know her quirks. Anyway, my apologies.”

The people give me close-lipped, condescending smiles. I walk away, my face burning.

It was my bad. I probably shouldn’t have had her out yet. But I want her to get socialized, and I want her adoptability to be advertised, and I want people to know that pit bulls are wonderful dogs. And then shit like this happens.

The Foster Chronicles: Tulip, A Photo Album