the magnificent exploding max

max fell out of bed. at 4:40 this morning, i awoke to a thump. it's the sort of thump that lets you know a medium sized dog has landed on his back from a few feet up. the thump wasn't on my side of the bed, so i woke the sweetie, who insisted max just jumped down to get a drink. now, max is gearing up for his sweet sixteen this fall and he's not the jumper he used to be. back in brooklyn, we have little steps so he and guthrie can get up and down from the bed without breaking those short little legs they insist on having. here, we lift the old guy up and down by hand, the way they did it in the olden days. max won't jump down himself. instead, he'll put himself very near my head and will cry a sad, horrible cry for as long as it takes to wake me and let me know he needs to get down. this does not work with the sweetie as he could sleep through an explosion, so max doesn't bother.

so it was no surprise to me when we turned on the light and max didn't look quite right. well, max has never really looked quite right, but this was different. we've noticed he's going deaf and we've also noticed sometimes he stares off into space for a while. none of this has really changed him all that much. if anything, he's been more wonderful in his ancientness. but when i reached down to pick him up he snapped at me. this made me think he broke something in his fall. all his bones are about the same age, so it could have been any of them, but he was standing when the snapping occurred, so i figured it wasn't a leg, back or head bone. probably a rib. scary. ribs are always snapping off, puncturing lungs and other horrible things. we saw this a few weeks back on deadliest catch, and if it can happen to a ship captain, it can happen to max. the sweetie insisted he was fine until the snapping turned his way. then, suddenly, he came to the conclusion, based on all he'd seen, that max fell out of bed.

which meant that in the still dark morning we all four (guthrie is a worrier and needed to be right up next to max) went downstairs (max had no trouble here, which really narrowed down the possible bones he'd broken) where the sweetie took max out for a walk because nobody could sleep. this meant guthrie stood inside with me worrying up a storm. he is, after all, my dog. when everyone was back inside we continued to look at max's grumpy side. this particular side harbors many of his old dog bumps. you will remember from a few posts ago we had to have a particularly hideous bump removed from one of max's back toes. and a few years back, while he was under for something else, we had one removed from his back, right in the prime pet zone. so this side, his grumpy side, was grumpy far before he fell out of bed.

and what we found when we examined the horrible side of max is that one of his awful old dog bumps had been torn out by the roots. we did not find the actual bump, which we suspect might be somewhere inside max. it's best not thinking about that sort of thing. what this means is that max had a gaping hole in his side the size of a pencil eraser that went right into him. we are, at this point, pretty well able to deal with any sort of external grotesqueness max can create. and now that we weren't worried one of his ribs had leapt off it's mooring and skewered a lung or two, everything was fine. max was still in a lot of pain and feeling pretty stupid for falling out of bed while gnawing off one of his bumps. we waited for daylight. then we waited for the drugstore to open. the sweetie went to get a bandage and other max repair items. we hoisted him into the kitchen sink (his least favorite place in the house) to bathe off what looked like a tunnel into max. then we wrapped him up like a fighter with taped ribs.

for the first fifteen minutes, he was so humiliated, he just sat, staring into space. i reminded him whose fault all this was and what time the sweetie and i got up to investigate all this drama. i let him know guthrie had stood by him, staring, clueless for hours. suddenly he recovered. he has five or six bumps left right now, but he can only reach two. i'm sure he'll be dramatic when the time comes.