Separation Anxiety

My Sadie girl is getting her teeth cleaned at the vet today. She is going under anesthesia because she may need a tooth pulled (probably b/c of this picture - we think she got a piece of wood lodged in her gum and now there's a small slumber party of infection going on under her gumline. Poor baby.) The bad part isn't so much that she's in pain (I've had her on pain meds since we've been back from vacation), it's leaving her at the vet all day long in a crate where she probably is losing her mind.

She isn't exactly an enclosable beast. When we first adopted Sadie, she came loaded with love and a severe phobia of all things crate. We learned of this quickly after she gnawed her way out of her first (and last) metal crate on four separate occasions when she was a year old. She was quicker than Houdini with barely a silver stripe on her ivory teeth as tell tale that there was not an extra key to her prison stashed inside her purple collar.

Then there was the time she got stuck in the master bathroom of our townhouse (rental) where she took out copious feet of carpet, door handles, door jams, sliding glass door handles, curtains, if memory serves a fan blade somehow Dear God I don't know how, and basically anything standing in the way between her and the great outdoors. We stopped trying to crate her after she ripped off her dewclaw.


Ah, but yes I recall a few years ago, maybe for good measure and as a reminder to her thoughtless owners who dared leave her alone in unfamiliar surroundings, she chewed her way out of drywall, door jams, and a wood floor in my brother's house. It was probably her greatest escape. Even my brother, who has seen some professional demolition in his life, asked if she was for hire. Thankfully he was renovating that bathroom or else he would not have been so cool about "Marley" with her Jaws of Steel.

When the kids and I had to turn and walk away from her this morning, I did what they always warn you not to do. I cried. She knew it. I could see the panic in her beautiful maple eyes. She yipped and bucked in the hands of the vet staff and gave him a good yank before I rushed us all out the door and into the van.

"Are you going to cry all day long?" asked Grayson who is more boy each day.




















"I miss her already," says the little Animal Rescuer Girl.

Me too. My phone cannot ring fast enough.