The day I saved Ollie's life

As you can see from the many posts today that I am a little behind. But I just have to post about a traumatic Ollie incident.

Knowing that Ollie chews on EVERYTHING I left a collapsible camping chair in the backyard that was broken. I just considered it a free chew toy. On a Wednesday morning during the summer I let him outside to play and noticed that he had drug the chair to the upper terrace of our yard. I thought to myself that I should get the chair out to the garbage, but I didn't. A little while later I heard this high pitch squealing coming from the backyard. I thought it was a cat and when I went to investigate I saw Ollie struggling to get away from the chair. My initial thought was that he had impaled himself with the leg just under his collar. When I got closer I could see that the leg had actually gotten twisted up in his collar. It was so tight I couldn't even find the clasp to undo the collar. The only thing I could think of was to cut the collar off of his neck. I frantically yelled to the kids to bring me scissors. Kendall very carefully brought me her pair of kids scissors. That did not work! I yelled for my kitchen scissors which Hayden brought to me and didn't work either. Hayden then brought me my best Cutco knife. That didn't work. I then remembered that I had put a utility knife on top of our second refrigerator the day before. I ran to get it, meanwhile Ollie is struggling to breathe and terrified. I straddled the dog and began sawing his collar with the utility knife. About half way through I was exhausted (remember that I am pregnant) and thought to myself, "I don't know if I can do this." But I continued and when it came apart I could see that I had another layer to saw through. For some reason the second layer seemed easier. Maybe because I stopped caring if I knicked his skin with the knife, I just wanted to get the collar off. Finally, it broke free and our happy dog was back. But Ollie smelled awful and the only thing I can relate it to is the smell of death. I wondered if maybe he was emitting a hormone that caused the smell. It lasted a couple days.

After the incident, I called Tadj and cried through the details. I wasn't sure if I should take him to the vet. Tadj didn't think so since he seemed to be fine. But his comment to me was, "See, you do like the dog after all." My reply, "No, I was just thinking of how much money we have invested in him and that I don't want to start over." Actually, Ollie is starting to grow on me even though this past week he has chewed the swings off of the kids playset and ate the steering wheel off of a plastic toy car we had in the backyard.

One more Ollie thing:

Ollie was also neutered this summer and we tried to explain to the kids what was going to happen. But ended up just saying that his boys were going to get cut off. After we picked up Ollie from the vet, Hayden lifted up Ollie's tail and exclaimed to everyone in the office, "Yep, his boys are gone!" I was so embarrassed but I can laugh about it now.