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April 29, 2005
Safe pet toys keep doggie, hubby injury free
I dropped everything and ran to the source of the desperate cries. What I found was my husband wrestling our 60-pound black lab-cattle dog mix on my 15-year-old living room carpet that really needs to be replaced, but not until after the boys stop spilling chocolate milk and pizza sauce. I noticed that Trixie - that's our dog - had a ball in her mouth. So I instinctively commanded her to drop it. That's when my husband looked at me hard and frantically explained, "No, she can't. It's stuck on her tongue!" "Stuck on her tongue? How could it be stuck on her tongue?" I asked. However, I did not get an answer. Instead, my husband instructed me to hold Trixie down while he tried pulling the blue rubber ball off her tongue. So with all the strength I could muster - she is 60 pounds of muscle with four legs and lots of leverage - I put my arms around her and held on tight. Hubby pulled, but Trixie responded with a yelp and a nip. She didn't exactly break skin, but to hear my husband describe the bite as he held his hand up to his chest, you would've thought she swallowed his thumb and part of his index finger. I let go and began petting our shaking, drooling dog. I needed to step back and calmly assess the situation. It's amazing how calm and patient I can be under pressure, considering calm and patient are not among my well known character traits. I didn't want her to choke, but clearly this ball wasn't going to just slide off her tongue. She was breathing fine, but she was in distress. At least she still trusted us, as was evident by her staying close to us on the living room floor as opposed to taking off for another room or the door to the backyard. I knew the ball had a hole, because that's where her tongue was lodged. But it was hard to tell how big the hole was with all the slobber she was producing. That's when it hit me. We couldn't pull the ball off her tongue because the more we pulled; the tighter the ball gripped her tongue. It was like one of those finger toys we got at the dime store when we were kids. The whole idea was to get our friends to put a finger in each side of the little braided paper tube. When they did, we instructed them to pull their fingers out. The width of the tubes shrank as the ends were pulled apart, and our friends' fingers became stuck. I remember this one kid who almost lost his fingers trying to "beat" the paper tube. He spent the day pulling and tugging until his fingers were numb and blue. Finally our teacher cut the tube off his fingers and sent him to the school nurse. We all lost recess for the rest of the week. Getting back to Trixie, I thought about the situation and came up with a plan. "I'll hold her, and you slide your finger down her tongue and stick it into the hole of the ball," I explained to Hubby. "That will release the suction, allowing you to squeeze the ball and slide it off her tongue." "What?" I'm not sure if Hubby didn't get it, or didn't want to do it. So I explained my plan again, but this time with a sense of urgency and a tear or two, begging my husband to please do it now so our puppy wouldn't choke. Again, I mustered up some strength and braced Trixie. My husband looked at me with one of those, "I'm not convinced, but what have we got to lose?" looks. Then he put his hand back in her mouth. It took two tries, but my plan worked. Our very grateful canine wagged her tail and licked us both. Then I got her a fresh bowl of ice water for her tongue while Hubby cut up and discarded the rubber ball. Then I researched "safe pet toys" on the Internet, where I found more than 900,000 Web sites on the subject, before heading out to buy Trixie a few things that won't get stuck on her tongue. Bare is a columnist for the Arkansas News Bureau and the Courier-Tribune in Asheboro, N.C. She lives in Asheboro with her husband and three children. Her e-mail address is mickibare@earthlink.net. |
