How to Milk a Dog

I had a great post to write for this morning and I was all geared up in my head to write it, when life changed my plans as it is wont to do. Last night, as my wife and I sat around being typical human beings, we noticed something troubling. My wife lifted the dog up and pointed out to me that there was a huge lump on Anna’s belly. I thought she might have just had to go to the bathroom, as it was in the shape of a long cylinder leading towards her back end, but that wasn’t it. Something was wrong with Anna.

It is very hard to enjoy your evening when you are thinking that your puppy has some sort of horrible cancerous disease ravaging her cute little body, so I spent the rest of the evening not enjoying it. When I woke up this morning, the large sausage-shaped lump was even bigger, and I called the vet. Fortunately they had a spot open right away, and we sped over there to find out what was wrong.

Turns out she has a mammary infection, which is giving her a sort of a false pregnancy symptom. That huge lump under there is actually milk. And this is a very serious thing, I was told. If we had waited another day or two to notice or call in, well, at least we got her in there today. She had a slight temperature, and would have quickly gone downhill in the health department, but she got a nice fun shot of something that she did not enjoy, plus 14 pills for 2 more weeks of fun, so everyone was happy. Hopefully this will fix things. We’ll check in with them again later. Oh, except for the one small thing I have to do at home first.

For her to really get better, and do it quickly, she cannot have all of that infected milk inside of her. So they told me that I needed to get it out of her. I thought that’s what I was paying THEM for! Nope. My job this morning is to milk the dog. And it is going to take a while. So I cannot write that other, much more interesting and amusing story about ice cream like I was going to. Instead, I am spending the day on the kitchen floor.

To start with, they told me to take a warm, wet cloth, so I did. I got that. Then, well, that was all the instruction that I got. So my hope was that I could just give the cloth to the dog and then she would go off and drain her mammaries herself. Sadly, Anna does not seem interested in doing this. It looked like I was going to need a step two.

Step two was to get the dog to lie down on the kitchen floor, but that step did not go so well. Anna did not want to lie down on the cold hard tiled kitchen floor. She wanted to lie down on the carpet in the living room, but I’ll be damned if I’m going to milk a dog on the carpet! No, we were going to do this in the kitchen. After some aerial maneuvers and some twisting and turnings, I finally managed to get the dog onto the floor, and then I took out my warm, damp cloth and put it over the lump, assuming that it would quickly draw out all of the milk by osmosis. Crap. I’m going to need a step three.

Not to get too graphic, but step three involved infected dog nipples and a lot of uncomfortable sounds coming from both of us. It also involved a few molecules of milk being transferred from the dog to the cloth. The work required was apparently going to be much higher than the results obtained. Anna, for some reason, was not interested in me continuing the process, so she took off back to the living room and licked herself vigorously in a vain attempt to remove the shame, while I did the same on the kitchen floor, minus the licking. We had another go, and then another, and it has now become clear to me that this is literally going to take the entire day. Awesome.

So we’re on another break right now. Edward went off to play outside, because there is only so much dog milking action that one can take before the excitement just becomes too much to bear. Anna is sitting on the carpet with her comfort items of Edward’s pajama pants and my right shoe, which she specifically selected for unknown canine reasons. And I am writing this short message to you to explain why you are not reading about happiness and ice cream. Maybe next week. But for now, break’s over. I’ve got a sick puppy to milk.