Seeking to Understand

I’ve been so busy lately that I haven’t had time to update ya’ll on my life. I’m sure there’s countless people out there who have been holding their breath for a week or two now waiting for me to post something. (Course, if that’s the case, those people are probably in the hospital due to lack of oxygen in the brain and won’t be able to read this anyway… ah well.)

Our new house is awesome. It’s so huge compared to the last places we’ve lived - but as houses go, it isn’t actually all that big. It’s plenty for us, though. We have a bit of a yard, a deck, a garage, and more rooms than we know what to do with. It’s nice to have carpeting again - and it’s weird that Melody and can be in one room and I in another and we can’t tell where each other are. Sometimes it can be a challenge just walking around trying to find her to tell her something.

Melody graduated from college and managed to get hired at the local humane society a few days later. She’s going to be scooping poop, walking dogs, and training humans as a part-time job now. She’s quite happy about that.

Speaking of dogs… We got a puppy less than 24 hours after moving in. She’s a 3.5 month old black lab/retriver mix we got from a farmer and she’s uber cute. It hasn’t been easy, though. She was an outside dog, not house trained, not trained to be on a leash, and she likes to chew on things. (I suspect it is no accident than the word “puppy” is so close to the word “poopy.”)

The stress of dealing with a puppy is far greater than either of us imagined it would be. She’s getting better at being a city house dog each day, but it’s still quite hard to relax when she’s in the room. She’s got a lot of playful puppy in her, of course, and every time she gets up to sniff around the room there’s an overwhelming sense of paranoia that she’ll leave a puddle behind for us to find.

It is awesome to be in our house, but it perhaps wasn’t the best idea in the world to get a puppy that wasn’t house trained so soon after moving in because it has made it quite hard to just sit and relax and enjoy our new life. Oh well. She’s here and she’s getting better - so it’ll settle down soon enough. Besides, things can only improve after what happened yesterday…

I think yesterday was one of the most disgusting days of my entire life. Those with weak stomachs may want to look away….

After doing mother’s day things with Melody’s mom and a brief visit with my mom (who was sick, sadly), we headed home. Melody got to work in the kitchen cooking up a taco salad of sorts while I putzed around with the dog, caught up on emails, etc.

Dinner was served and it quickly became apparent that Melody had gotten a tad too overzealous with the hot sauce. Some bites were like how I imagine eating burning glass would be… It was by far the hottest thing we’d ever tried eating. We can handle spicy and our friends and family frequently sit in amazement at the scoville scores we can ingest - but this was a bit too hardcore. It tasted good, but amazingly we were unable to finish eating it all.

Things went downhill from here…

As Melody cleaned up the kitchen a bit, I went downstairs to play with the puppy who had spent many long hours inside her crate (since we were gone most of the day). Her energy level was somewhere near the spicy level of our dinner and it had to be dealt with.

Things were going good - we had played some fetch using a tennis ball and after Melody came down, we played hide and seek. That was pretty funny. We’d hide behind really obvious things and then call our puppy’s name (which is Daboo, btw). She’d run all over the place trying to find us - often completely missing the obvious places to look. Silly puppy.

After hide and seek I got down to some serious puppy wrestling. I was on the floor and things got a little confused as she rolled over on top of me and flipped toward my head. In the heat of the moment, she found my ear - and clamped down.

The pain was so sudden and unexpected that I didn’t even know how to yelp for a full 2 seconds or so. By the time I got to yelling, she thought we were just playing and it took a few more seconds for Melody to figure out that something was seriously wrong. Once we got the puppy off of me I could feel the blood dripping from my ear. I put my hand up to my ear and there was an instant shock of pain and slippery, gooey liquid. I looked at my hand - it was very bloody. Then I felt blood drip from my ear and down my face. This was not good.

Things get slightly fuzzy here because I can’t actually remember how I got upstairs to the kitchen, but I did. Melody must have helped me. I remember standing at the top of the steps when I began to feel faint. The world was closing in. The darkness was overtaking me. I couldn’t hear anymore. I couldn’t see. I could only feel the blood and the fear that my entire ear was shredded or tore or somehow mangled.

I found myself sitting on a kitchen chair and I remember fighting back against the closing darkness. I told Melody I was either going to faint or hurl. Naturally I hurled.

In the history of the world there has not been a more violent and complete stomach eruption. I very nearly covered my wife with it because I wasn’t able to signal that it was coming and there would be no stopping it. The first wave of vomit spewed forth from my mouth and, of course, went all over the floor. Then a second wave. Then a third. I believe it was the third one which was so heavy and so voluminous that my throat and mouth was too little to contain it - so some came out my nose as well. If you’ve never vomited through your nose before, I wouldn’t recommend it.

As if this wasn’t bad enough, we had just gotten done eating the spiciest meal of all time. Anyone who has eaten a truly spicy meal knows what happens - your sweat can get spicy to the point where it actually hurts. Your mouth can stay on fire for a long time after eating and your stomach can keep you warm for a good while.

Imagine, for a moment, the pain of vomiting after such a meal. The spicy molecules get everywhere. My entire throat was on fire with the burn of stomach acid and capsaicin. The inside of my nose was melting. My sweat (of which there was quite a lot at this point) fried my forehead and face. Everything was on fire, I was weak, light headed, cold, shaking, bleeding from my ear, and pretty sure that I was going to drop dead any second and collapse into the disgusting puddle of vomit pooling around my feet.

All at once my head cleared and I felt a bit better. I could see the world again. I could hear again. I could sort of talk. Melody blotted my ear and checked the damage. It wasn’t pretty. I headed for the shower and she somehow cleaned up the floor. I love my wife. I don’t know she does things like that. She’s cleaned up after the dog a few times, too, and that sort of thing just makes me sick. I suppose it’s a good thing she can do it given the nature of her new job.

During my shower one of the most disgusting things of all time happened. My nose wasn’t feeling good. It was sort of running. I farmer-blew my nose and out popped a huge blob of nasty. A chunk of ground beef, a piece of tomato, a hot pepper, and some yellow slime I only assume used to be cheese. I almost spewed again at this point - but there really wasn’t anything left so nothing happened. The thought of having partially digested food sitting in my nose was, to say the least, unpleasant. A couple more farmer blows yielded a few more bits of food and goo and I could finally breath again. Yes - my nose was clogged with vomit. Isn’t that awesome?

After my shower the blood in my ear had been mostly washed away and it was easier to see the wound. It looks bad now, but not as bad as before. It doesn’t look like my ear was pieced all the way through, but it certainly was close.

Poor Daboo was so scared by all of this that she spent most of the rest of the evening sulking. I think she knew she did something wrong - even if she wasn’t sure what it was. We left her locked in her crate for awhile. Melody and I were pretty mad at her - even though it wasn’t really her fault. She’s just a dog. We needed to cool down for awhile.

After we let the dog back out, she seemed almost apologetic. She licked my hand a lot and wanted little more than to cuddle up close. Poor pup. The three of us watched TV for awhile and I started to feel bad again. Light headed and cold. So we went to bed. I slept like a log and somehow managed to avoid rolling over onto my ear. This morning, though, I could barely talk. My throat had been so abused last night with stomach acid and spice that it felt utterly raw. The inside of my nose felt the same way. I was dried out and my ear was pulsating. But after I got up and drank things started to improve a bit. I took Melody to work, stopped at Starbucks, and came home to walk the hell hound.. er, I mean “puppy.”

She walked like an angel today. I was grateful for that because I hadn’t much energy to spend fighting a puppy on a leash. As I sit here typing this, she’s resting at my feet and probably forgetting the events of last night. It’ll be awhile before I forget, though. I’ll likely have a permeant scar on my ear from this - and she’s lost all play-biting privileges. (She probably should never have been allowed to have any in the first place.) Oh well, though. I still have my ear, and I think it’s still in one piece. Life will go on. On the plus side - she’s very nearly fully house broken!

I think caring for a baby would be easier…

This entry was posted on Monday, May 14th, 2007 at 9:19 am and is filed under Life. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.