Four Legs, Four Toes

Georgia post-surgery  (c) Shutterbug

I knew it was going to be trouble as soon as my wife spotted it.

Even though I am an experienced pet owner, I have given up trying to trim my dogs' nails. The dogs freak out, I'm unsure of how far back to cut the black toenails, and it's just easier on all of us to leave it to the professionals.

Georgia went in for her usual nail trim recently, which includes a difficult rear dew claw. Two days later my wife found a hard, purple abscess where her freshly trimmed nail appears to have cut into her toe, which has swelled to completely encompass the nail. Back to the vet, where my gorgeous girl's tail never stops wagging. She was placed on antibiotics and given a topical ointment as well, which I felt confident would be useless.

And so it was. More appointments and discussion ensued, and we came to the conclusion the only sensible thing to do was surgically remove the dew claw. No admission was made on the part of the vet techs for having caused this situation, which ticked me off.

Our vet had no surgical time slots for an entire week, which wouldn't work when I could tell my dog was in discomfort. Enter my lovely high school chum Dr. Jennifer Newhouse at the Taunton Road Animal Hospital in Oshawa (if you need an excellent vet in the east, do call her). She is an amazing veterinarian and a wonderful person, and she stepped up to fit us right in.

My wife drove Georgia all the way out to Oshawa in morning rush hour traffic to drop her off for surgery...and came home to discover that some brazen asshole had stolen our beautiful new e-bike from under its tarp on our driveway. We live on a main street, with neighbours on both sides who are home during the day, and I can hardly wrap my head around the balls and effort it took to steal this 400lb vehicle in broad daylight on a busy street. It's unreal.

Maybe this person did us a favour; I was very concerned about my wife being in an accident in downtown traffic. Perhaps an injury was in our future that has now been avoided. But it was ours, we had saved for it, waited for it, and treated it with care. People are just so disappointing. There have been workmen mucking around with a flip project across the street for months who park across our driveway and behave like assholes on a regular basis, so we think it must have been one of them. It really would have taken two people and a large truck to transport this thing away without a key.

We tried hard to keep it in perspective, and my wife fought rush hour traffic again at the end of the day to pick up our beautiful little Georgie, minus one toe. In the eight years I've had her she has cost me next to nothing and brought me boundless joy. I doubt I will ever know another creature like her; she is pure love through and through.

A $2,000 loss of the e-bike and another $1,000+ vet bill made for a very expensive day when we can ill afford it. Surely there is a winning lottery ticket in our future...