freaktoe

warning: gross description of oozing dog wound

max is old and full of bumps. if you know him, you know this. if you read this blog, you also know he has suffered through two poisonings and a de-toothification of terrifying proportions. recently one of max's bumps began to develop its own personality. it ceased to be a little black dot on him and began to grow. because max's small body appears to be some sort of special growth medium for these bumps, we didn't pay it much attention. it was not unusual. it sat on top of one of his back toes, covered with fur.

max ignored it. it didn't hurt. it didn't interfere with walking. but the evil thing kept growing. i suggested maybe an undeveloped twin had migrated from his innards to his toe in an attempt to escape and start its own life. no one else seemed to like this idea, so i gave up on it for a while. but the thing kept growing. at first, it was a little flat, black, fur covered thing but by last week it was the size of a grape. we took him to the vet. they stabbed in a syringe and drew out what looked like an extra store of old blood. max was not happy.

the vet planned to test the hideous syrup from max's toe bump and sent us home. last night i noticed that his bump looked like a squished grape and all the toe fur on it was gone. max, who hates the vet, managed to find the hole the vet had punctured in him and siphon off all the remaining hideous syrup from the now-deflated bump. evidently gross toe growth syrup is tasty because max continued to lick his wound after he's slurped out all the insides of it until all the fur was gone. i am not a squeamish person, but this tested my limits.

the hideous bump immediately refilled itself with fluid and even swelled up a little. chris tried squishing some of the fluid out and was successful, but he also managed to crush something he described as being like a corn chip inside the toe bump. i returned to my original undeveloped twin theory, speculating that chris had just crushed the bones of max's tiny, freakish brother or sister .

we woke up early this morning (4:30am) to go upstate, to see two good friends and their small baby, to see my apple tree and to check on the peonies, which have been taunting me with ant-covered buds for weeks. max was grumpy. he hates driving, so when he's in the car it's tough to tell how he really feels because he really feels like he hates everything on top of whatever else might be happening. we got to the house and there were tiny apples just starting up on the tree and several fat, fragrant peonies in the yard. in the house max plopped into his dog bed and did his best impression of a dying animal. we looked at his toe and what had been a mildly creepy bump yesterday looked like a new internal organ somehow lost and wandering around on the outside of poor max. it was smooth and purple and shiny and looked like it would explode. and max was limping.

so we called all the vets in our little town and the nearby towns and nobody is open on saturday to care for animals. this seemed strange, but there wasn't much we could do but call our brooklyn vet who offered us an appointment at 4. it was 11am and we'd been on the road since six with just an hour to rest at the house. but max in pain is a terrifying thing to see, so we called the friends with the baby who were on the road to visit and told them to drive back home and we hopped in the car and headed back to brooklyn. max did not seem to notice.

back at the vet's office max tried to bite lots of people who were helping him and he had to wear a little blue cloth muzzle. when his teeth were decomissioned, he tried to maim people by writhing around and banging his head into them. he has a lot of faith in his own power. the vet took him upstairs to open his bulging wound and then wrapped it in red bandages. he has to go back tomorrow for more draining and bandaging and then surgery on monday. he has expressed his unhappiness about this numerous ways.

because this problem all started when max began devouring his own boo-boo, he got one of those awesome satellite dish collars to wear. the woman who brought it out tried to hold it up and measure it against max's head and he tried to bite her. when max tries to bite, he involves his whole body. in this instance his short legs were flailing while his blood tipped tail (somehow the whole end of his tail was blood-soaked on his return from bandaging) whipped around and his long dachshund body writhed so that a person (me) trying to hold such a mess has quite a bit of trouble controlling things. chris and i both attempted to put the collar over max's head. this is another thing he hates. he whipped out the fangs of fury, which are all the more terrifying because one of the actual fangs is gone along with five other teeth, allowing max to bite deeper and more dangerously with some parts of his mouth. so i carried him to the car without the stupid collar. eventually, through cleverness and trickery, max found himself in the collar and he entered the house limping with a little red boot and swaying his angry head like a horrible bell of vengeance. guthrie and the cats kept out of his way.

here we are at home with an angry, snaggle-toothed dog who is in pain and is having trouble navigating because of the big plastic collar and i have to give him bright pink medicine in a syringe. chris holds max on his back so his face is in the bottom of a plastic collar funnel and he carefully peels back some very uncooperative dog lips. then he pries open the very dangerous snaggle fangs. i hold the syringe in front of max's mouth and press the plunger just as he goes into something like an alligator death roll. i get most of the medicine inside the dog, but there's plenty on his nose and ears and there are streaks of bright pink all over the inside of his funnel collar. the bright pink smells good. he begins to lick the inside of the collar, spinning it to get all the medicine.