Start with a sting

6/8/07 Friday
No sense starting my birthday out without a little bang. Our routine in the morning is to get the puppies outside the minute we open the door to the front porch, what we now call the “puppy room”. There I run with them and congratulate every expellation of bodily waste with the enthusiasm of a sports fan when his team makes a miraculous touchdown. “Oh yeah!!! GOOD JOB!!!”. I run and they scamper after me, turning summersaults each time they misstep. My aim is to get them exercise but the reality is I get short of breath and they wonder why I stopped. But it is such fun.

I sat down on the steps as they continued, with enthusiasm, to investigate and get into everything on the veranda. Trixie goes for the food bowl and I can hear her scooting it over the bricks as I watch Rascal play. Then I hear a loud Yelp Yelp from Trixie and turn to see what happened. It was loud enough and of such a different tone that Cherie, the consummate mom, came running out saying “What’s wrong”. Trixie hobbles to me with her front paw raised. I figured she got into another sticker so pick her up and look. When I didn’t see anything but she continued her cry’s I looked at the food bowl and saw a scorpion with it’s tail curled to sting. “That’s what happened” it dawned on me.

Now it’s panic time for mom. “What do we do?” she anxiously asks and I really don’t have an answer. For us adults we just take the stinging pain till it goes away but for puppies it’s an area I am clueless about. “Go online and see” I told her as we brought the whimpering puppy in. I comforted Trixie as Cherie brought her laptop in and typed “scorpion sting puppy” into Google. The site she first looked at was not encouraging as it described the potential death of a puppy from a scorpions venom. Trixie was settling down, crawling under a pillow to feign sleep and Cherie was unsettling. I too was worried after reading this online account. We called the vet and left a message on her machine as it was just barely 7:00. Dr. Law called back in about three minutes and reassured Cherie that things should be just fine unless there was a rare strong allergic reaction. “Just relax” she said “This is just the start. They’re going to be getting lots of stings as they grow up”. We are both much more at ease now.

Carman kitty came up on the bed while the puppies were zoned. This is the first time he has approached them and sniffing the air with trepidation he inched closer. Cherie, fearing he would attack, put her arm around him and told him reassuringly “That’s alright. They’re puppies. They won’t hurt you”. It didn’t take long for Carmen to decide he had gotten close enough to these invaders of his domain so he took off to places he didn’t have to see or hear these guys.

So that’s the start of the day. There is a cold front in so I want to go out and continue putting mulch around the plants in the garden. Unfortunately I am suddenly getting the can’t keep my eyes open tired that is sometimes the onset of a partial seizure or the mental fatigue issue that plagues me. I pushed hard last night, mulching till after dark when I could no longer see what I was doing. Kinda afraid to go look at what I did now that it’s daylight. The beans I planted are springing up aggressively. Caterpillars are quickly discovering these delicious morsels so it’s time to spread more of the sulfur around the borders to reduce this incursion.

Time to get moving, thus fighting the tiredness that is trying to seduce me back to bed.