At about 8:40 on Saturday night, March 21st, Tessa held up what was left of Moose's rope toy and asked, very calmly, "Where's the rest of this?" It had been a thick braided rope with a knot at each end. Now it was one knot and about four inches of frayed rope. Moose was stretched out on the living room rug looking pleased with himself, which is never a good sign.
We checked under the couch, behind the chair, in his bed and in the backyard with a flashlight. No rope.
The decision to go in
I called the 24-hour emergency animal hospital we'd looked up when we adopted him and had never needed. I described the toy, his size (about 70 pounds) and the timing. The person on the phone said that with a long piece of rope they'd want to see him, and sooner was better than later. We were in the car by 9:05. Moose thought it was the best night of his life and rode most of the way with his head out the window.
I'll keep the medical part short, because I'm not a vet and nobody should treat this as advice. What the vet explained to us, in plain terms, was that string and rope can cause problems in a dog's gut that a solid object usually doesn't, and that rope doesn't always show up clearly on an X-ray. They took X-rays first. Since he'd eaten it fairly recently, they gave him medication to make him vomit, and up came a wad of rope that, laid out on a paper towel, accounted for most of what was missing. Then they kept him for monitoring and took a second set of X-rays to look for anything left behind.
No surgery. We brought him home around 2 a.m., groggy and smelling like the clinic, and he slept on our bed because neither of us had the energy to argue with a 70-pound dog.
The bill
Here it is, as itemized:
- Emergency exam: $165
- X-rays, two sets: $468
- Medication to induce vomiting, and administering it: $142
- Anti-nausea injection: $68
- Hospital monitoring: $315
- Take-home medication and bland food: $82
Total: $1,240. We paid at the desk with a card and moved the money over from the emergency fund on Monday morning.
How the emergency fund held up
We keep two buckets. The house fund, $250 a month, covers repairs on the Cape. The emergency fund is the older and bigger one, meant for nights like this and for the lost-job scenario we try not to think about. We had just finished refilling it in February after it covered $730 of the water heater in November. So it took two hits in four months, one from the house and one from the dog, and both times it did exactly what it's there for. The bill stung. It didn't change a single plan, and that's the reason we built the fund in the first place.
Without it, this would have gone on a credit card and sat there for a while. That's the version of the night I keep thinking about.
What's changed
Rope toys are banned. All of them, including the two still in their packaging from Christmas. Moose has hard rubber toys now, and we're both quicker about taking anything away once it starts to fray. His chewing habits are a conversation we've also had with our regular vet.
We are also, in Tessa's words, "reading about pet insurance." That's honestly where it stands: reading. The plans we've looked at differ a lot in monthly cost, deductible, how much of a bill they reimburse and what they leave out, and anything that happened before you sign up seems to be the big sticking point. I don't know yet whether a policy would have come out ahead of just paying this one bill, and I'm not going to guess. That's a question for our vet and a lot more reading.
Moose has made a full recovery. The surviving knot of the rope toy sits on the shelf above his food bin, and he looks up at it every morning like it's an old friend who moved away.
