Last Friday I returned home from work both giddy for the weekend and a bit put-off by the fact that I still had a 35-minute run to complete before I could sit back and enjoy a dinner out with The Wife™. But as I keyed into my front door, everything fell by the wayside, including my stomach, my appetite and my sense of all things good and holy in the world. A bit of warning, before we proceed. Not that I’m going to tell you what you’re being warned of. Just a note of warning. So don’t say I didn’t tell you.
What hit me as I both pushed through the threshold and the emerging tears was a tidal wave of nastiness so completely heinous it could only bring one thought to my mind: DOG!
Apparently at some point over the 9 hours of being alone in his crate, Jonas had lost all control of his bowels. I found him lying in a lake of his own by-products with the most pathetic look of, “yea, so…while you were gone, I ran into some problems with this ‘can’t poop outside thing.’” Indeed.
Since I can’t be entirely sure of what happened, I have attempted to piece together the events as best I can. I think it’s safe to assume that sometime between the hours of 7 a.m. and 4:30 p.m., Jonas had a large-scale case of code-red colon blow. This, mind you, needs to be differentiated from the oft-confused and less severe “ass blow,” which is in a totally different league, folks.
I’m guessing after he looked around frantically for a diaper, a pail or some other receptacle other than that in which he was sitting, he succumbed to nature and painted everything in sight. Having witnessed an explosion of such depressingly epic proportions he then lost control of his gag reflex and compounded the mess by vomiting. To be fair, you would likely do the same if you had just let fly a tsunami of diarrhea all over yourself and knew you had to just chill for, oh, 8.5 more hours? The final, glorious product was what I like to call vomarrhea. Our dog vomarrheaed the sh*t out of our house. And it smelled just as good as you think it might.
Upon finding this gem, yours truly did the only logical thing he could think of: let the dog outside and call The Wife™ to ask permission to run instead of cleaning up Lake Lostalunch. And she agreed. Because she is the greatest person ever to walk this earth. True, if I was going to get my run in and shower before our reservation it had to be done. But without a doubt she took one for the team on Friday, even though 35 minutes of running with that smell wafting through the vent above me almost me ME lose it. The only thing worse that running is running while smelling vomit and/or diarrhea. You can just trust me on that one.
You would think that was the end of it, but no. By now I was showered and she was flustered (and a tad bit wet from the hose, I might add) and as we talked about how we were going to handle feeding Jonas dinner, we neglected to notice the 12.5 gallons of water that he was sucking down. We did, however, take notice when he trotted over to the hardwood floor, looked up and vomited enthusiastically like that moron kid who just took the “chug a gallon of milk” dare. And then an encore when he did it on the living room rug. And then the kitchen floor. And then the kitchen rug. He was like a programed robot seeking out all things textile. And let me tell you that I was THAT CLOSE to saving the last rug from desecration. I guess I was just too awestruck by the voluminous capacity of his stomach.
By the grace of God we made it to dinner (albeit a tad late and paranoid that we smelled) and spent the rest of the evening with a loudly protesting, starving dog. When we tried to satiate him with some plain white rice, he looked at us like, “This? This is supposed to cut it? I find no humor in this you peons. Now give me the real stuff!”
Luckily, within 24-hours everything had returned to normal and we did not have to live in fear of Mount Jonas erupting again. The only thing is that now when I even think about running I almost throw up. As if I needed more help with that.
