Have you ever had sympathy pain for someone when they were hurt? I have heard many stories of men having sympathy pains for their wives while in labor. Do your eyes water when you see someone get poked in the eye and their eyes are watering? Mine do, I'm a self proclaimed sympathetic eye waterer. People come into the clinic all the time with very red watering eyes and within seconds the flood gates open and there I go. Have you ever yawned after watching someone else yawn? The answer to that question is probably yes. Someone in a group yawns and before you know it, everyone is yawning. Finally someone will yell out "Stop That" like it was someone's fault. Y'all know what I am talking about. Studies show that it's an empathy or bonding response with others that is not completely understood.
Well besides being that guy who's eyes sympathetically water like Niagara Falls at the sight of red watery eyes I unfortunately have a second sympathetic response that is far more unpleasant than your typical red eye. I am in fact a sympathetic gagger as well. If you start gagging or tossing your cookies I am right there with you gagging away myself. I have been in medicine twenty nine years and as soon as I see someone gagging in the ER I jump right on the gagging band wagon with them. It's almost as if two of us are engaged in this at the same time then it some how speeds up the process and the mission is accomplished much quicker. Do any of you remember what the old Double Mint chewing gum commercial once said "Double your pleasure and double the fun" so surely two gaggers are without a doubt much better than one. lol.
The worst part about me being a sympathetic gagger is that it's not subtle. I'm one of those loud gut wrenching toe curling guys. If gagging was made into an Olympic sport I could be a gold medalist for sure. I know this sounds kind of gross and the reason I bring it up (no pun intended) is because this happened at my house several weeks ago but fortunately Red Dog and I weren't the participants. It involves my wonderful wife and our ginormous house cat Mr. Buttons.
My wife Debbie prides herself at being a loving attentive wife and mother. Over the many years of raising kids she has done every nasty smelly gross mommy job under the sun. I have seen her clean up some of the stinkiest little rear ends on the planet and wrestle messy poopy diapers off of those same little bottoms. She has endured white smelly baby vomit running down her chest, washed wranglers that look and smelled like they were drug through a cow lot (which they were I might add) and watched her bathe two large stinky dogs covered in skunk spray without blinking an eye. She is Wonder Woman, Cat Woman, Bionic Woman, and Xena the Princess Warrior all wrapped up into one when it comes to taking charge around the house but the other day I witnessed a chink in her armor and no one was more surprised than I. It came in the form of one of the largest nastiest looking hair balls that a cat has ever produced in the history of man kind. All compliments of Mr. Buttons our two ton lazy house cat. I mean this thing was nasty with a capitol "N" and here is how it all went down.
It all began on a very pleasant warm Saturday morning. We got up and headed off for our regular Saturday morning breakfast date like always. We made our usual stop to the feed store on our way home to pickup some scratch for the chickens. Once home I sat back in my over sized comfortable recliner with a hot cup of coffee to finish my morning with a weekly deer hunt on the Outdoor Channel. My morning was slowly winding down and the plan of hunting until lunch time was coming along quit nicely.
I decided to make myself a sandwich and then see how much nap time I could squeeze in before supper. (Deer hunting always makes me hungry and sleepy...lol). My plan was working out very well until I suddenly (and loudly I might add) heard Debbie scream " No Mr. Buttons!!! No!!!" It wasn't one of those "you are in so much trouble" type of screams that I have personally heard many times during thirty two years of marriage but this one was different.
Out of pure instinct I sheepishly sunk deep into my big fluffy recliner just in case she was screaming at me. I know I said she screamed out Mr. Buttons name but from past experience my wife has called me by all of my kids names, my brother in law's name and she even sometimes goes through the whole family tree before getting to my name when I am in trouble. All you married guys out there understand what I'm talking about, right? Well if your wife hasn't done it I know your mothers certainly have and when we heard our first, middle and last yelled out by our mamma's, we knew there was trouble in River City. But there was something different about this particular scream. It was more of a panic like scream but I still tried to make myself invisible just in case. Then I heard Debbie yell out again "Oh No, Oh No" and she swiftly darted out the front door. Since my back was to the door I couldn't see a thing and heard the door slam shut behind me. I said to myself "self you may not be in trouble here". But before I could muster the courage to come out of hiding I heard the front door open and suddenly slam shut again. I also heard her yell out "Oh No" again as well. By this time I figured out that she wasn't yelling at me so I walked out the front door to see my poor sweet wife throwing up in her flower bed in the front yard.
I must admit that my initial thought was oh crud she's pregnant again and unfortunately for me that was the first question that came running out of my mouth (there are days when my thought filter doesn't work very well and this was one of those day). There she was on her hands and knees in our front yard violently vomiting into her poor pitiful looking flower garden that has been devastated by a four year drought and she looked up at me like I was the most ignorant man on the planet and snarled "No I'm not pregnant, I've had a hysterectomy". Duh! It wasn't one of my finer medical moments to say the least and that old saying about there is no such thing as a dumb question, well, I have news for you, there is!
So after asking her if she was ok I cautiously asked a second question. What made her sick. She told me that Mr. Buttons hacked up the grossest hair ball she had ever seen on the carpet in our bedroom and when she reluctantly attempted to clean it up she started to toss her cookies so she ran outside. Of course I had to ask the most obvious third question which was much safer than question number one.
Why did you run outside to get sick when the toilet was just a few feet away? Her answer was that she did not have time to clean the toilet before she vomited. What!!! She wanted to clean the toilet before barfing in it. I was very confused at this point. Then she told me she refuses to stick her face in a place where people sat their naked bottoms (that's necked bottom if your from the south)without cleaning it first!
I remember her telling me this in the past but just thought she was pulling my leg. Apparently there isn't any leg pulling when it comes to the issue of vomiting in the toilet and as I thought about her clean toilet issues it began to make some sort of sense to me. You don't sneeze on someone else's meal and we don't slobber in someone else's ice tea so I guess it's reasonable to think that we shouldn't stick our face in the toilet before it's cleaned. I think it was Jim Croce who said you don't tug on Superman's cape, you don't spit into the wind, you don't pull the mask off the ole Long Ranger and you don't vomit in a dirty toilet or something like that. Once again I have been enlightened by my wonderful wife.
So what is the take home message of today's adventure. Well first, I would say never own a two ton indoor cat because bad stuff could show up on the bedroom carpet. The second would be to never ask the wife, who has had a hysterectomy, if she is pregnant while she is barfing up her toenails because you will become the dumbest person on the planet in her eyes. Thirdly I would say never use your toilet ever again for its intended purpose because your wife may need to vomit in the next century. And finally, if for some reason your wife does need to go vomit in your front yard "DO NOT" remind her that barfing in the front yard on her hands and knees might have been entertaining for the entire neighborhood or you might find yourself eating bologna sandwiches for the next several days. Until the next adventure God bless you all.
Since the recent birth of our first grand kid many old memories of when our kids were born came flooding back to me and over the years I have come to realize that as a parent I didn't have a clue about what I was doing. I am so thankful that Debbie's parents lived down the street a few blocks for helpful advice or I might have been hosing those little goobers down in the back yard with the water hose at bath time and duct taping them to the hood of my pickup to dry them off. Good thing duct tape doesn't stick well to little wet bodies. lol. Clueless would have been an understatement as far as my daddy skills went. The only thing of any real value that I knew about little kids was that they liked to be tossed straight up into the air and caught again. My dad, who was known as "Uncle Alvin" by all of my cousins (which were many), loved this activity. He used to grab them under the arms and basically launch them from a standing position high into the air with his brute strength and catch them on their way back to earth under their arms before they hit the ground. It was amazing to watch young children in perfectly good health leave the ground like a tomahawk missile, disappear into the blue sky then suddenly reappear as a blurred shadowy figure returning to earth. The cousins just loved this and all of them would stand in line for hours begging "Uncle Alvin" for more. I think dad enjoyed it as much as the kids. One important rule that had to be observed during this process was never launch them facing the sun for the obvious reasons. For some reason most mothers had trouble getting their minds wrapped around the thought of someone launching their little darlings into the stratosphere for fun but my cousins were convinced it was nothing less than Six Flags Over Hooterville. On a rare occasion a kid would slip through Uncle Alvin's grasp and have what NASA would call a "Hard Landing". But once the dust settled a cousin would get up and clean themselves off and hurry to get back in line (although some were slower than others because of their newly acquired limp). It became an unspoken rule that if you were involved in one of those "Hard Landings" there was no crying because once one of the Mommas heard their little darlings boohooing it was "Game Over". No one really ever took Dad to task over a "Hard Landing" because everyone accepted the fact that even the great Dallas Cowboy Bob Hayes dropped a pass once in a while. Although my dad taught me many wonderful things about life and how to be a good dad, the skill of launching young children into outer space with brute strength captured my attention the most. It wasn't helping my sweet wife clean house, give baths, warm bottles, wash clothes, change diapers or rocking babies to sleep. It was throwing those little goobers in the air and praying I didn't lose sight of them in the sun. Now that was a cool daddy skill to have.
So the only reason my children have turned out to be anywhere close to normal was because of my wonderful wife's strong parenting skills but weak upper arm strength. I can only recall one failed decision Debbie made with our first born and it was to use cloth diapers instead of disposables. I was perplexed by this because given the choice of throwing a poopy diaper in a trash can verses washing them out with your bare hands I would pick the trash can every time. But since my secret objective was to avoid those stinky baby chores, I agreed to see where this would lead.
Well after three days of rinsing poopy diapers out in the toilet
I noticed Debbie's resolve was waning. I came home from work on Day Three of cloth diaper use to find a pile of brown colored cloth diapers piled high in the toilet. The baby was crying, the bath room was stinky and I knew it was time for our family to start producing our very own "environmental footprint" because she was done with cloth diapers . So I made the thirty five mile drive to the grocery store and walked into the twenty first century by purchasing several boxes of disposables. The rest of the old cloth diapers became cleaning rags (minus the stinky pile I mentioned above) and parenting got a tad bit easier from that day forward. I will tell you that over the years when my kids wore disposable diapers, there were several times I considered suing all of those diaper companies for false advertisement. As you might remember, each box of diapers came marked with a weight limit on it such as "10 to 15 pounds" or "15 to 25 pounds" right? I must tell you that no matter which diaper brand or size we bought, none of them ever held that many pounds of poop between diaper changes and trust me I gave it the old college try. I decided it was all a big con by corporate America to make us dad's look bad. If your bottle of coke shows to contain 20 ounces of soda why shouldn't us dad's expect that those diapers should hold that many pounds of baby poo? I have yet to find a lawyer willing to take my case.
The reason I bring up the subject of diapers is that at age fifty Debbie and I had no clue we would be forced to start buying diapers again and it wasn't for our new granddaughter Zerah or her fifty three year old grandpa!!! It was for Red Dog's pesky little sister Rosie. Yes, Rosie our 10 month old ridgeback. Since some of my readers are youngsters and I don't want to go into great detail about the birds and the bee's (even if most of them already know more about that subject most of us old toads) I will just say that Rosie came into her "special time" so she could have puppies some day. (Note to readers: Please pause at this time so that the youngster can explain to you in more detail what "special time" means lol). With three women living in my house most of my married life I have unfortunately become way too familiar with "special time" over the years and I thought these days were long gone but I was "WRONG". "Great", now Rosie has to have her "special time" and we have never had indoor dogs to deal with "special time" so I'm flat clueless (which is not uncommon for me about females) as to how to take care of this blessed event. My first thought was to banish her to the back of the property until the "special event" was over but then I thought what if some gentleman caller finds his way under the fence and we end up with a gaggle of puppies because it would be just my luck to be stuck delivering those little goobers and I don't recall being trained in puppy birthing during my medical education. So what do we do? Well it just so happened that my oldest daughter and husband were in town and she had the answer for the situation. Baby diapers and little girl panties! That answer wasn't even in my top 100 of solutions. Diapers and panties.....hmmm! Now folks you have to remember I am not necessarily anatomy ignorant and have been in medicine in one fashion or another for almost 30 years so how do we fit two legged equipment on a four legged problem with a tail? And the answer is........(ding)....scissors! Ok, now we have baby diapers, little girl panties and a pair of scissors but we still have a dog, four legs and tail. If we are going to cut off a couple of legs and a tail I have power tools that would do a much faster and easier job than scissors and I think teaching Ms. Rosie to walk on two hind legs will be way too difficult especially given the fact she will have just lost two front legs and a tail. Well my daughter quickly remarked (while rolling her eyes at me) that there would be no need for any type of amputations today. So off to the Dollar General Store went the girls. For those of you who have never heard of a "Dollar General Store", it's the Hooterville version of WalMart (I am now expecting an advertisement check from both companies for mentioning their names on my blog in my dreams of course!) and for those of you who are too young to know where "Hooterville" is, well that's what "Google" is for (there's another advertising check right there, I wish!) so grab your tech gadget and look it up. When they get back from DGS they have baby diapers and little girl pink panties with multiple Tinkerbell characters on them. My daughter eye balls Rosie's rear end then takes the scissors and cuts an x in the center of the panties and diaper. She then grabs Rosie, plops her on her back and slaps the diaper on then tapes it around her middle. She then grabs the pink little girl panties with Tinkerbelle on them and shoves Rosie's two hind legs through the legs holes and we now have a doggie diaper safe and secure. I bet by now your asking what did she do with the tail, well that's where the x came in on the diapers and panties and it wasn't quick and easy to tackle. First trying to poke a wagging tail through the cut in a diaper and panties was like trying to poke a wet noodle through the eye of a needle. It took several tries to hit the bulls eye. What was even more difficult was when poor little Rosie realized that the object of the game was to grab her tail and poke it through a hole she went into immediate tail tuck. I mean that tail of hers was locked down so tight between her legs it nearly took a lift jack to put it into threading position but finally Ms. Rosie caught on as to what we here trying to do and relaxed. So now we have the blood line of a great lion hunter in diapers and panties, how proud her ancestors would have been. But to Rosie's credit she stood up and started prancing through the house with her new homemade pink diaper panties then went outside to sun bathe to show off her new drawers to the world.
I am not quite sure what the take home message is about Rosie and her new "Doggie Diapers". I guess it could be whether you are man or beast wear your diapers with your head held high and keep on enjoying life. But mostly I just find it really strange to see a dog, especially one who's heritage is to track down and kill lions, walking through my house with a diaper and Tinkerbell panties strapped to her rear end. But I guess that's just how we roll at the Howard house these day. Until the next adventure, God bless you all.
Six months seems like a long time but now that I am back writing about Red Dog so let me tell you about this latest little adventure. "Warning" if you have a vivid imagination be prepared to hit the delete button in your brain because this one might be a little gross but sometimes life gets a little smelly.
The story starts with my wife and I becoming brand new first time grand parents to the prettiest baby girl in all of Texas. She is an absolute blessing and we are proud to be this little girl's Gigi and PAC. In case you are wondering what PAC means it's the acronym for Physician Assistant Certified. A title I worked my tail off to obtain several years ago. Besides there are plenty of Pa's, Papa's, Poppies, Grandpa's, etc. I know one guy who's grandkids call him Doc since he is a veterinarian. I even have an old marine corps aviator friend who's last name is Bandy and his grandkids use "Moe" as his grandpa name because that was his call sign as a fighter pilot. How cool is that! I know that PAC doesn't sound very cool and it may even border on dumb but it's unique and I kind of like unique. Besides PAC is a much better choice than the first grandpa name my wife and kids wanted to use. When we first found out we were to be grand parents my wife decided she wanted to be a Gigi and she suggested I needed to be Pee Pee!!! Yes a Pee Pee!!! So when she told the kids of that brilliant idea they thought it would be great (especially after laughing about it for five minutes) and that's when I knew I better come up with something else or I would forever be known as Pee Pee to all of my grand kids. "Heck No". So PAC it is. lol.
The weekend after Zerah Grace was born our oldest kids came to see their new niece and brought their Ridgeback Mattie with them. You remember Mattie, she was the first Howard family Ridgeback and we were so impressed with her manners that we got a couple ourselves. Mattie comes to visit every time the kids come to town so when we get three large Rhodesian Ridgeback roaming around the house it gets a little crowded. It's a Ridgeback here, a Ridgeback there, every where a Ridgeback. Walking across the room with the three of them lounging around the house is like trying to roller skate through a buffalo herd to coin a phrase from back in the day. They just love to be rubbed and scratched on but there is apparently a fear running through the pack that one dog
might get a tad more attention than the other two so they all dart your direction trying to grab all the petting they can get their paws on. I can see a hip fracture in my future as they all bolt my direction and knock me to the floor. It is highly probable that these mutts are spoiled and get their way to often.
These three, who's ancesters were rugged tough lion hunters living on the arid African plains now live a life of "swimming pools and movie stars" as far as dogs are concerned. It's a dog version of "Life Styles Of The Rich And Famous". They all have a special bed to sleep in, get their own personal eating bowl, and have their own private concierge medical practitioner who many times is me ( I'm apparently a very diverse practitioner caring for people and now Ridgebacks). Mattie is the real city girl with a special prescription diet, lives in an high rise apartment and is well acquainted with the lights of the big city. Red Dog and Rosie live in a small rural town in Texas but have a well groomed yard in which to poop in, a 17 foot long back yard water feature in which to swim in, an enclosed high fenced 3 acre compound in which to roam in (it also makes for great protection from the larger intruders in the area like cougars, coyotes, feral hogs, bobcats, and the occasional crazed gray squirrel) and last but not least is central air conditioning and heating for that year round pleasurable climate controlled living experience but they still have to endure the occasional inconvenience of outdoor living (like real dogs) I know, I know. The humanity of it all.
After a wonderful weekend of drooling over our new grand baby our oldest kids realized they had no one to dog sit Mattie before their trip to the comfort of the high mountains of New Mexico over their upcoming holiday so Debbie and I agreed to let Mattie stay the week with us while the kids were traveling. Now we have the blessing of three pony sized Ridgebacks leaving the dream in this climate controlled Doggie Oasis for the next 10 days. How did we get so lucky? What's next, Bob Barker jumping out of the closet saying "IT'S A BRAND NEW CAR"!!!!! I sure hope so. Well anyway here we are me, the wife and 3 red Clydesdale's trying to occupy the same living space. "IT'S GREAT".
I think I mentioned earlier that one of these spoiled mutts has a special doctor prescribed diet? Well today we found out why Ms. Mattie has this "special diet" and will get to that in a few minutes.
When I was a kid I had the blessing of having an old Heinz 57 mutt wander into my life. He was named Lion Dog. He got this name because my sister and I thought he looked like a lion. Well old Lion Dog just showed up on our front porch one day and never left. He took to us like ticks on a hound dog and would play with my sister and I for hours on end. He was the best but he never got to live indoors like the Ridgebacks. Lion Dog slept outside come rain or shine heat wave or blizzard. I do remember once dad relented to let him stay in the garage during a blizzard because the snow had drifted over the top of our house and he didn't want Lion Dog to suffocate or freeze to death. Don't get me wrong my dad loved dogs and growing up he had a loyal companion named Laddie for many years but dad was raised on the farm and that meant all critters lived outside. It also meant that the dogs ate left overs from grandma's cooking or they went out to catch their own supper. Lion Dog didn't have it quite that tough. His meals consisted of our left overs and co-op dog food because it was the cheapest priced dog food in town . No special diets for those guys so I guess that's why it seems weird that Mattie needs one. She's a dog and should eat regular dog food not prescription dog food in my way of thinking. Brother, was I wrong about that one.
A few mornings ago Debbie and I learned a valuable lesson about the importance of Mattie's specialty prescription diet. Have you every heard the one about the older gentleman that woke up in bed early one morning and thought his water bed had sprung a leak overnight and as he laid there wiping the sleep from his eyes he suddenly realized he did not own a water bed! Well this particular morning I woke up and as I laid there in my comfortable California king sized pillow topped perfect sleeping man sized bed I noticed a not so alluring fragrance filling the room and as I wiped the sleep away from my eyes I thought to myself "Wow supper really gassed me up during the night". The longer I laid there I tried to think which foods created this extraordinary aroma? As I was mentally going down my culinary check list it dawned on me that I only saw Red Dog and Rosie go out the back door when I let them out around 5:00 am. As I continued lying there in the warmth of my toasty sleeping spot with my beautiful bride snoring (LOUDLY) beside me I started thinking about how much trouble I was going to be in when she woke up to a stinky bedroom. So I began to formulate a plan to keep out of trouble. I first thought that playing possum would be a good idea and when she woke up I would plead my innocence or ignorance which ever worked. That's when it hit me. "Bam" as Uncle Si would say. Mattie was still in the house and she normally goes out to potty around 6:00 when my son in law comes home from fighting crime for the police department and it was now 7:05. I yelled out a very loud "OH NOOOOOO" and jumped to my feet. Well that "OH NOOOOOO" was very effective in waking up my sleeping bride and her ultra sensitive nose which immediately knew what had happened. She jumped out of bed and starting yelling at me as she ran across the room to turn on the lights as the room was still dark. At this point I'm a little confused because I'm not exactly sure who is she is upset with, me or the dog so I began to yell out Mattie's name just to be sure I wasn't going to get the blame. When the lights came on there it was or should I say there "THEY" were. Ms. Mattie not only left a smelly gift that was the size of a small log home but added a couple dozen stinky mud pies on the carpet as big as the dots in the Milton Bradley kids' game "Twister" minus the bright colors of course. Oh My Lord. How could one dog produce this much poop in one hour. It had to be some kind of a record! I just stood there in shock. I couldn't believe my eyes (which were burning by the way). The carpet at the foot of the bed looked like the Keebler Elves broke into the house and used it as a baking sheet to make some Jolly Green Giant sized cookies. What a "Ginormous" mess. I just stood there staring at the mess then I looked over at Debbie and then looked back at the mess then looked over at Debbie again. After doing this about 5 times Debbie looked over at me I and said "WHAT"! I replied, how in the world did you run all the way across this room and maneuver through that stinky mess and not once step on one of those lovely little gifts? And in the dark none the less! I don't know if I was amazed or in shock that she made a clean pass (no pun intended) through the disaster zone as I watched her carefully inspect her feet. No melt down meant no mud pies between her toes. Luckily for me I was running late for work by this time so I did what any hard working man would do. I cautiously tip toed through the tulips and made a mad dash for the shower then out the door like an Olympic sprinter. Well to spare you too many more gross details, a six pack of Charmin, three pack of Brawny and barrel of hand sanitizer later the poo was gone but the stains remained. On my drive home from work that evening I decided to prepare a small sermon to speak over Mattie's grave as I knew my kids would have wanted her to have a Christian funeral. I arrived home expecting to see a HazMat team in my front yard with yellow tape wrapped around our house and the neighborhood under full quarantine but to my surprise there wasn't even a sign of a cleaning company in sight. I was shocked when I walked into the house and saw that the carpet was spotless. My loving wife put her mad computer skills to work and Googled up a recipe of Dawn dish washing soap and white vinegar that cleaned the spots right up. DEBBIE'S THE BOMB!!! I think she deserves a special smooch from me, that is if she's speaking to me after abandoning ship earlier in the day.
As I sit here trying to think of what the life lessons are about this story, here is what I came up with.
1. Dogs who are the size of Clydesdale's should live outside for the obvious reasons no matter how much you loved them.
2. Marry a wife who has crazy foot working skills. But maybe put her through some type of NFL workout with tires and ropes before you propose so you know her skill set.
3. Always pay close attention to the words "Special Prescribed Diet" whether its your dog or a family member because you don't want to clean up after either of them.
4. Always have an exit strategy in case your pet blows up the house over night. You are not Mike Rowe and don't want to get stuck with the "Dirty Job".
5. Have a good internet provider because you need Google in case there's an emergency.
6. It's last but far from being least and I've not mentioned it since the opening of this story. Go out and get yourself some grand kids, "THEIR GREAT". But what ever you do never agree to dog sit when your on a "grandpa high" because bad things can happen and that "bad thing" probably isn't coming from the new grandbaby if you own a herd of Ridgebacks!
Until the next adventure, God bless you.
