Return of the e-collar

Well folks, I had sworn off ever having an e-collar present itself in our home again. If you weren't around the defrosting Polar North when Scrubs previously had to don a collar, you can reminisce with me by visiting the past blogs here or here.

As you can see from the pictures above, Scrubs' is now bonding with e-collar all over again. The reason? Well, a bunch of stitches and five staples for starters. The vet wanted to give him a new collar, but we insisted he use his old one which has properly rigged to prevent neurotic Scrubs from busting out of it.


Needless to say it was quite a long evening in our house last night. It all started when JB and I decided to take Scrubs over to the bay. We do this quite often, but lately, John especially, has had his doubts about whether we should take him there. He's made a new friend: a 10 month old lab named "Deuce". They play so well together and have a great time. But when you put two puppies together, they listen even worse than they do when they are solo. Deuce's backyard borders the bay and there are no fences. Keeping Scrubs out of the water when it is just Scrubs is fine. But add Deuce, and Scrubs has no intention to heed commands whatsoever.

We've also been worried because we have heard of two other dogs cutting themselves in the bay on clams. And then, last week, Scrubs went in for a drink and came out with some cuts on his pad. Not too bad, but bad enough that it was bleeding and caused him to limp for a few days.

So all that leads us to last night. We headed over to the bay, and Deuce immediately came running out to greet Scrubs. His "mom" Bobbie came with, and we had a good time chatting until the dogs decided to head down to the water and then take off down the beach. When Scrubs came back, he was bleeding pretty badly and had sliced his leg open somewhere along the way. Unfortunately, it was very deep, and we could see the muscles in his leg! Deuce was fine, but mainly because he is nursing a shoulder injury and moves a lot slower than Scrubs. Scrubs has only one speed -- all out blazing fast. Deuce was fine with taking his time navigating through the clams. Smart Deuce!

JB debated trying to fix thewound himself. He felt he could do everything but sedate Scrubs, and with as deep as it was, cleaning the wound and stitching it up would hurt pretty bad without sedation drugs. It would have been very cruel. So off to the emergency vet we went. A bunch of stitches and five staples later, he was free to go, unable to sit up without falling over due to the loopy drugs they put him on.

The bummer of this situation is that we can't take Scrubs over to Deuce's backyard or the bay anymore. It's just not worth it. I'm not sure if we can find him somewhere else to swim so this may prohibit that favorite activity. JB said that we were lucky it was his leg. It could have cut his abdomen, and we'd be looking at something a lot more serious.

I also felt really bad because we saw this coming, and I, especially, didn't listen to JB or my own gut and instead, let Scrubs go off and frolic yesterday instead of leashing him as soon as he got into the water. Now, he's got an e-collar and a cut up his leg that we'll have to deal with for the next 7-10 days. We also had to pay a pretty penny to get him fixed up. The hardest part is you can't really leave him unsupervised at all in this get-up in fear that if he manages to wrangle his way out of it, he could pry out his staples leaving us glued to the house for a week. He also has a superficial wound on one of his pads that they said needs to be treated gingerly. "Gingerly" and "Scrubs" don't really go well together.

Anyways, so that was the start to our Monday. Pray that I can find things to keep this energetic young pup busy while we wait this out!