Grady is now five months old and 61.7 pounds. How do I know this? Because they weighed him at the emergency room yesterday afternoon. Ugh. Let’s start with the good parts of the day: a beautiful walk through town where Grady met cute babies, saw beautiful trees, and chased dudes riding broomsticks.
can you believe this guy is a pup?
STICKS.
beautiful yellow trees.
he's really tall.
then this happened.
UVa chapel.
surrounded by holly trees.
Anyway, as we whipped back around to head toward Main Street and eventually to Belmont, I looked down at Grady and noticed his mouth was full of blood. We sat down with him, and discovered one of his front teeth was loose, bleeding profusely, and had a huge chip in it. We both started panicking. What did he eat? Did he find a rock? Was he in pain? Was he going to lose this tooth forever? We called our vet, who informed us that they close at 2PM [it was around 1:45] and suggested we take him to the emergency veterinarian. I sat with Grady, shaun sprinted home for the car, and off to Greenbrier Emergency we went.
It was hard to tell whether Grady was in pain or just exhausted from his walk. He wasn’t crying, but he did lay down in the car and mope during the drive. As soon as we got there, two nurses came out and weighed him. One said, “looks like it’s going to fall out,” and they took him back to an exam room. Shaun and I felt like failures. How could we let our tiny puppy, who just started getting his adult teeth, lose one of those teeth permanently, and so soon?
Within seconds, the nurses returned with Grady to give us the news. We braced ourselves. “It was just a baby tooth,” she said. It was just a baby tooth. He was only losing a baby tooth. We took our dog to the emergency room because of a baby tooth. Now, Shaun and I felt like super embarrassed failures. The vets tried to comfort us by saying things like this happen all the time, especially because puppies’ baby teeth tend to become brittle and chip apart as they fall out – so if you happen to notice it happening, it can look pretty bad. Better safe than sorry, they told us, as we sheepishly took our horse-dog and slinked out the door.
Better safe than sorry, alright. Thankfully, they didn’t charge us for an exam. Double thankfully, the pup is alright. His owners, however, could feel a little less silly.
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[...] spent a good portion of that time vomiting and crying. He went to the emergency room last night [for legitimate purposes this time] for x-rays and they found some inflammation and a few unknowns in his digestive system. According [...]