Christmas Eve - Warning: It's a Novel

It's hard to see, but this is one blood-splattered door.

Another war-zone

Zoro's ear with a chunk removed

The removed chunk

The crate Zoro tore through

Jack and Zoro

This year, both Chris and I had a few days off before Christmas together.  We were pretty on top of things and had all of our Christmas shopping done BEFORE Christmas Eve!  I was pretty proud of us.  We were boarding a dog, Zoro, who is just a little smaller than Jack, but has 10x the energy. Saturday morning came, and  we had a busy day planned.  We were supposed to get all of our stuff packed up since we were going to spend the night at my parents' house, get the two dogs ready for the day, take all of our stuff (minus the dogs) to my parents' house in Sandy, go to a movie with Chris's family in Holladay, open presents at Chris's mom's house in Murray, come back to Riverton to pick up the dogs, and then drive back to have dinner and spend the rest of the evening with my family. That was the plan.  I woke up and decided it would be a good idea to bathe both of the dogs.  I bathed Jack first.  Easy as pie.  That dog climbs in to the shower himself, then stands there as I soap him up and rinse him off. I shut the shower curtain when I am all done and he shakes off and then he stands in the shower while I towel dry him.  Like I said, simple.  Then I went to bathe Zoro.  Not quite the same experience.  I had to call Chris in just to help me get him into the shower, then we both had to hold him in the shower as we attempted to soap him up and rinse him off.  In the meantime, he was constantly shaking and we got drenched.  Not fun.  Finally both of the dogs were bathed and I was feeling pretty good about life.  I wish I could say that the bathing was the low point of Christmas Eve.  That is just not true though.  About 10 minutes after the dogs were both bathed, they were playing with each other, which they do so well, and I heard Zoro yelp.  I went to separate the dogs and noticed drips of blood on our carpet.  It took me a second to realize that Zoro was bleeding pretty bad, but I couldn't tell where it was coming from.  I ran him outside and yelled for Chris, who was in the shower.  I noticed a little piece of what looked like a piece of a stuffed animal laying on the floor right where they had been playing.  I later realized that was part of Zoro's ear.  Jack had taken a piece of Zoro's ear while they had been playing.  I googled what I could do to get the bleeding to stop and found out dog's ears have a lot of blood vessels they use for temperature control, which means they bleed really bad, even if the cut isn't extremely severe. We tried for a long time (5 hours) to get the bleeding to stop.  It wasn't working.  We would get it to the point where it wasn't dripping blood but as soon as Zoro would shake his head, blood would splatter on the wall.  Our house looked like a war zone.  While Chris was working on Zoro, I ran to the store to get hydrogen peroxide to clean the carpet.  That worked pretty well.  I called my visiting teacher, who works at Sandy Animal Clinic, and asked what we could do.  She told me to put corn starch on his ear.  We tried that but it wasn't working.  Zoro is just too energetic and wouldn't sit still.  I asked if there was anything to give him to calm him down and she suggested Benadryl.  I ran to Walmart and got Benadryl, more hydrogen peroxide, and some Cobain wrap.  By the time I got home, Chris had the bleeding stopped. He had put some super glue on the dog's ear, then just sat on the couch and pinched Zoro's ear as tight as he could the whole time I was gone.  We watched him pretty closely the next couple hours (by this time we had already missed the movie with Chris's family) and once the Benadryl kicked in that helped a lot.  Every time Zoro would shake his head Chris and I just held our breath and waited to see the blood fly, but it didn't. We spent the next couple of hours cleaning carpets and walls, then just relaxing with the dogs while we waited to make sure the bleeding was really done.  We did make it to Chris's mom's for a short visit and to my house for dinner. At that point, I was still a little stressed from the day, but was starting to come out of it.  When we got to my house, my parents had picked up another dog that we were supposed to be boarding for the week.  This one was a little dachsund mix named Duncan.  For some reason Zoro was not a fan of Duncan.  Duncan was also a little nervous around the big dogs, so he stayed in his kennel most of the time.  At one time I was holding Duncan and Zoro tried to attack him.  Needless to say, Zoro went downstairs into a crate that my Brother had let us borrow. We then blessed the food and by the time the blessing was over, Zoro appeared in the kitchen.  My heart dropped.  We went downstairs and he had clawed his way through the screen on the crate.  I lost it.  I was so drained from the day.  I didn't know where we could keep him the rest of the night.  I didn't want him outside in the cold, but if we put him in a room, we were worried he would do some major damage to the door of the room.  Fortunately, Chris came through.  He called everyone in his family and finally tracked down a hard plastic kennel that belongs to his brother-in-law's brother.  We ran to Holladay to pick that up and brought it home and put Zoro in that. At that point, I was finally able to relax.  It was definitely a Christmas Eve we will remember, and not one that I would ever like to repeat.