It's A Thursday

Quick reference: Most people hate Mondays because they seem to be the predetermined day in which you have a BAD DAY.

Hahaha. I bet your Mondays can't hold a candle to my Thursdays.

These past couple of weeks seemed to be a series of Thursdays all piled together.

First, my mom got sick. Not COVID. Still sucks and she was out of work for about four days. I covered those shifts. Which meant for a week, I was stuck in the freezer, the dairy cooler, and the beer den. For hours. At a time. I have yet to properly thaw.

Next, we go into our holiday weekend. And wouldn't you know it, my mom is sick again. This time it's even worse. So again, I cover her shifts and she schedules doctors appointments.

Now here's the irony in all of this: if I'm having a really, really, horrendously bad day, it's a Thursday. Doesn't matter which day of the week it is. Any Bad Day is a Thursday. Well, this one really did happen on the Thursday before the holiday weekend.

You see, I worked til 9 and when I got home I was informed by my mom and sister that my dogs had gotten into an actual fight. This has never happened in the five years of Echo's life. Since the humans were on the front porch at the time, the cause of the fight could not be determined. (Betting on Binoojii getting into Echo's food and him finally standing up for himself, but that's a theory.) Since both dogs were shortly busted and no injuries seemed apparent, we all called it a learning experience.

We were wrong. So, so wrong.

Binoojii is my fourteen-year-old mutt. She's my baby. Part Chow Chow, Rottweiler, and Beagle (and that's just what we know of) she is a unique specimen. Rott build, Chow coloring (including the black tongue), and some hint of the beagle just in the stunting of the Rott size. At her last appointment she weighed in at around 60 pounds.

(Echo is on the bottom left. Binoojii is upper center.)

What's the point of this description? To point out that Binoojii has the Chow folds around her face. Which is really apparent when she's standing at the top of the stairs looking down at you and her entire face seems to fall forward to cover her eyes. It's the epitome of cuteness and forces me to do what I call 'squish you face' on a regular basis.

I'm in such a habit of doing this to her, that when I got home from work and the dogs had finished their sniff test of me, I grabbed both sides of Nooj's face, squeezed, and shook.

She yelped and my heart seized. She took off into the dining room and I followed. Tried to grab her collar to find out what was wrong and immediately noticed that a drop of blood had landed on my niece's walker. Cue Freaked Out Mom Mode. I hit that light, grabbed around her muzzle, and brought her face to mine. And found the far corner of her left eye dripping blood.

My baby was bleeding. This was a Defcon 2 scenario. I had to make it stop. Luckily, it did not too long after that.

Now it was going on 10pm. My mom was sick and my dogs listen best to me. (This is going to be really ironic in a minute, so pay attention to my bragging.) Which is why my sister hadn't taken them out for their evening bathroom break.

It's dark here by 9 now, so if I take them out after hours, it's for a 'piss break only'. I say this to them before we go out so that they know to immediately go to their designated spots for the night, pee, and return to the porch. Now, both dogs used to be REALLY GOOD for this. Then Nooj got old, pretended to go deaf, and now has no problem deciding to trot off in various other directions and pretend she can't hear me calling her. That's fine, I've adjusted to it and now play goalie between the yards so she can't escape me. She's also old enough to finally be slow enough that I can always catch her, so that helps a ton.

Echo I never usually have to worry about. He's learned his commands and he follows them–albeit at his own slow pace as he sniffs everything in the yard; he's a Bluetick/Beagle mix, it's to be expected.

Now, please remember that this is, in fact, a Thursday.

I let them out. Told them "piss break only". They both went out and did their business. And as I'm getting ready to grab Nooj's collar and take her back inside, Echo launches himself straight up the hill toward the grocery store that we live behind. This same store where trash bags were left beside an overflowing dumpster and a creature was tearing into them at night.

Can you guess what that creature was? Do you understand yet just how bad this Thursday was?

Up the hill Echo went. Around the house I darted. Down the hill Echo sprinted. The skunk waved its tail in the air in triumph.

What came next is to be expected. Got both dogs back in the house. Took Echo straight to the bathroom and enclosed him in there. Gagging, I went upstairs to ask my SICK MOTHER to help me de-skunkify her baby.

Together, we gathered together all of the materials I had heard would help with this noxious poison. And I immediately forgot the recipe for such items, so I literally doused this dog in Dawn Dish Soap (blue original), Apple Cider Vinegar, Hydrogen Peroxide, and Baking Soda. Plus some old Skunk Off that we'd gotten many, many years ago from his last run-in with the formidable species. (This same run-in being the reason he now does not venture from the yard, ironically enough.)

For the record, the combined ingredients DO WORK to cleanse the smell. IF you can safely apply them to the most affected area.

Go ahead. Guess where this dog got hit and why my house still smells like skunk.

Right. By. His. Eye.

Oh, I got his whole body fresh and clean. Even got most of his muzzle, despite the neck aerobics he performed in the bath. But I could not get close enough to his eye to rid us of that last despicable remnant. Damn it all to hell.

This was it. This was the final straw to the worst Thursday I'd had in a long time. I was over it. Done.

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA.

Do you want to guess what happened next?

I came out of the bathroom with a wet dog shaking his skunk water all over the place ... and found drops of blood all over the dining room floor.

Binoojii's eye had started bleeding again. This time, I couldn't get it to stop. For half an hour, I tried wiping it up, holding paper towel to it, and overall chasing this dog around the house while dead tired from work and breathing skunk musk. So yet again, I had to ask my mom to come help me patch up my baby. So I held her while my mom used sticky wrap to cover her eye with a washcloth. Cool. All good. About a half hour later, my mom says we need to change it out because we didn't want the washcloth to get stuck to the wound. So we found some non-stick gauze. Cool. Wrap her up a second time. Nope. Keeps sliding off the affected area. Try one more time. Same problem.

I sat there for I don't know how long and cried as I kept trying to readjust her wrapping. My baby was hurt and I didn't know how to help her and my one solution was failing miserably. Finally, I knew I just had to get it off of her and let it bleed out until it clotted. So that's what I did.

And I stayed up all night watching a K-drama that my sister got me hooked on ("Crash Landing On You" for those of you interested in snark and cuteness) and periodically checking on my baby while Skunk Butt slept on the couch next to me.

By morning, Binoojii had black streaks of dried blood on her face. Which won't get cleaned off for another few days so that I'm positive her wound has healed. And I've not squished her face since.

As if that's not bad enough, Saturday night, my mom felt so bad that she went to the hospital. My sister drove her and stayed in the car with my niece. After work (I got out at 10pm) I drove straight there (30 mins away) and traded off with my sister so that she could take my niece home and put her to bed. Turns out, my mom has severe inflammation that was turning into an infection, so after her course of antibiotics and a liquid diet, she should be just fine. Today we had a doctor's appointment to confirm other things and he gave her a note to take off work until Friday.

The kicker?

Friday is the start of her vacation. So at least now we know she'll have a full week to recover from this and will return to work in much better condition.

On the plus side, I got to read the latest book from my favorite authors in one long uninterrupted sitting. ("Emerald Blaze" book #5 in the Hidden Legacy Series by Ilona Andrews)

And that concludes this life update.