Poor, poor Moses

Here is a story for ya...

The day this picture was taken, about a month ago, we had some friends over to play, when Moses (my brother's dog who we are watching) was running with a stick in his mouth and tripped and fell, evidently in some pain as he whimpered for about 5 minutes afterwards. The kids all ran in to tell me, I checked it out and saw no blood whatsoever, no wound, no signs of any stick to the back of the throat. We all thought he was OK.

Next day he looked like this.....We had to carry him in a wagon to get to the car to get to the vet. She checked him over real good. The vet inspected thoroughly and did not see anything in his throat either. He did, however, have a fever, which we chalked up to some unrelated infection, put him on antibiotics, and sent him home.



So about a week ago, his neck swells up to the size of somewhere between a grapefruit and a cantaloupe. Took him to the vet again, still no sign of injury anywhere. We assumed he got bit by a spider or a snake, and again, treated him with antibiotics and waited for the infection to go down.

Then I told you how the abscess bursted all over my carpet a couple of days ago, and has been draining since. So imagine my utter horror last night when I saw, sticking straight out of Moses' swollen and bloody neck, something that looked like a bone!! Both John and I were afraid to look but I did manage to muster up the courage to poke around to see why a bone was sticking out of his neck....

It wasn't a bone...It was the STICK that has been lodged in his throat for a month, that finally managed to exit through a hole in his neck. Oh my! 

In all my years of nursing and parenting I have never seen anything quite like this. I am thinking it is a miracle he is alive. And for your amusement, and since now we know he is going to be OK, here is the culprit....the two inch stick fragment.

And that, my friends, is why your mother always told you to never run with a sucker in your mouth!!!!