AJ and his Ball

About three months ago, I was looking into the Pet Health Care plan that my work offers. It makes sense, since vet bills can get so high, and you never know what’s going to happen to our little bundles of fur. But, it was a little bit more than I wanted to pay, and didn’t cover as much as I wanted it to, so I decided it would be wise to wait. Oh the irony. On Monday night, AJ decided to eat a tennis ball. The entire thing! I was sitting at the computer writing James, and assumed AJ was in the living room sleeping, since it was almost midnight. AJ likes to go to bed early, while I like to stay up late. When we first adopted AJ in Texas, he would always go to bed at 10. We’d be in the dining room or the living room, and AJ would jump down, and walk down the hall and hop in bed. It used to make me laugh so hard! You could hear his little tags jingle down the hall (and it was long because we had a three bedroom) and then silence before the plop. But Monday night, AJ decided to be rebellious. He’s always chewed up his toys, and has sometimes eaten small pieces of them, but he’s never devoured an entire toy. By the time I found him, there were just a few tiny pieces left that he was trying to gulp down. I’m pretty sure that tennis fuzz and rubber could not possibly taste good, but apparently it was the thing to do. I did some googling, and realized that rubber can clog the intestines of dogs, at best, and at worst, can sit in their stomach. Everything said he needed to go to the vet immediately so they could induce vomiting. I called the emergency vet, and the vet said that if he chewed it up into small enough pieces, then he was probably fine until the morning. (It was after midnight after all…and emergency vets are soooo much more expensive than the regular ones.) So I waited until the morning, but didn’t get any sleep because if he started throwing up, I was supposed to take him in right away. I called AJ’s regular vet first thing in the morning, and they said to bring him in right away. He saw a new vet, and she was amazing! She loves poodles, which is always a plus, and AJ didn’t even try to bite her. They took some x-rays, and thankfully, AJ chewed the ball up into tiny pieces so it should all come out naturally. If he hadn’t chewed it into such small pieces, they would have had to have induced vomiting, taken a long thing down his throat and pulled pieces out, or opened him up with surgery to take the pieces out. Eating rubber is not fun and games! So, as you can see, there are pieces of a ball throughout AJ’s insides. Thankfully, they have started to come out. I’ve never been so excited to pick up his poop before! She said that AJ seems to have a great deal of pent up energy that needs to be expressed, which is why he is patient enough to chew balls into tiny pieces. Most dogs she sees eat toys whole or in large pieces, and they have to go in to get them out. She suggested that we do agility training with him, because he is smart and has a lot of energy. How funny would it be if we trained AJ to do show dog stuff? I don’t think he is socialized enough to do it, but it does look like it could be fun. And she also recommended moving AJ to a sweet potato and pinto bean diet?? Weird, but surprisingly not weird after a few minutes of google searching. So maybe we will turn AJ more into a California dog by giving him a specialized healthy diet and taking him to intense gyms. Praise the Lord that AJ is okay! I don’t know what I would do without him out here by myself. And for a few hundred dollars, we got some awesome pictures of his insides.