Bitsy

Last Tuesday was a pretty awful day for Bitsy. It started with a dream come true for a big-boned dog like her: an open bag of treats left near enough the edge of the kitchen counter for her to swipe it to the floor. But once she got it down to a manageable level, her dream became somewhat of a nightmare for both of us.

A little background: Whenever Jimmie and I get ready to leave home without the dogs, we give them a treat. We figure it takes the edge off being temporarily deserted, and it’s an easy way to distract them from trying to scoot out the door with us. Failure to give pre-leave-taking treats assures us of their displeasure, perhaps in the form of an “accident” on the den floor or the disappearance (if not the outright destruction) of one of our possessions.

So before leaving for a hair appointment that morning, I dutifully opened a new bag of peanut butter treats and gave one each to Bitsy and Moxie. But in my rush to get going, I apparently neither properly sealed the bag nor placed it out of Bitsy’s reach. After discovering her good fortune sometime during my absence, she pushed the bag off the counter and, being the equivalent of a canine vacuum cleaner, literally sucked up the contents. The ENTIRE contents. From what I could tell, Moxie never had a chance.

I should note that the treats came from Sam’s Club, so if you’re thinking we’re talking about a small bag of Beefy Bits or a few Cheesy Chunks here, think again. It was a giant economy-size bag of the warehouse retailer variety.

By the time I returned home, Bitsy was waddling blindly around the living room, having gotten the empty bag stuck on her head in a greedy quest for every last crumb. And thanks to the bloat from her binge, she looked like a mini version of a balloon in the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade.

She had already regurgitated a fair amount of her mid-morning snack onto the kitchen floor and made a mess of herself in the process. So the first thing I did was guide Bitsy into the bathroom and hoist her into the tub.

But something about the bath evidently set Bitsy’s insides to churning. As she headed down the hallway to crawl into her private under-the-bed hideaway, she stopped every few feet to heave an undigested pile of dog treats onto the carpet. After that, she was notably less bloated, and the look of overstuffed desperation had faded from her eyes.

Bitsy was clearly feeling better. I, on the other hand, was not. Talk about a nightmare. Somebody had to clean up the mess, and there was nobody else around but me.