Holidays

During March we had to go to a wedding in Surrey. This meant finding a kennel to look after Henry and Molly so after much asking around we finally found a lovely lady called Heather who runs a kennels, cattery and also rescues animals that need a home.

It was the first time Henry and Molly had been in the kennels and I was rather worried that they would be ok but Heather assured me that everything would be ok and after I finished all the paperwork we went out to the car to fetch the dogs. Once back in the kennel compound Heather took both the dogs leads and off they went without so much as a glance back at me.

So much for my worrying, both dogs were fine and actually I think they rather liked it in the kennels as they both seemed more interested in Heather than in me when I went to pick them up. So that was one big thing off the doggie owning list, a good reliable kennel where the dogs were happy.

A few weeks later I decided to go and visit my parents in Kent. I almost always drive down as I'm often quite bad at eaking out another couple of extra days in the sunshine down there. Our neighbours sister lives in London so she came along for the ride which was good company and also a great help with the dogs on the way down.

During the afternoon before while I was packing both dogs and especially Henry were looking rather unsettled, I suppose they knew something was afoot. In order to take my attention away from packing and then going away the dogs started bouncing about the house so I let them into the garden where they embarked on some mad running. It was quite funny as they were bombing about the garden like mad things barking and springing about. But then Henry took it a bit too far and ran right into Molly while barking loudly. Molly immediately took offence and snapped back at him which resulted in a loud yelp from Henry.

Henry came straight over to me like a small child about to tell you that the bog boy did it and I noticed that he had a cut on his side. On further investigation I found that it was quite a big tear and that the skin had been pulled away from his ribs, ouch!

What was more of an ouch was that I was going to Kent in 12 hours and now I had a dog with a hole in his side. My first thought were to try a bit of first aid myself. I'd been back and forth to the vets with Henry on a regular basis and I was getting a bit embaressed by it. I had a think about how I'd fix it if it was me and then realised that I'd need some of those butterfly plaster things. My brother used to work for a ship and aircraft company and he specialised in servicing the first aid and rescue equipment so we are more than prepared for a major disaster but not if it needed butterfly plasters.

After searching through two marine and one rather cool Japanese aircraft first aid pod, getting a vast amount of iodine all over my hands and becoming rather afraid of the sissors and tweezers for more serious events I gave up on the first aid kits. I did briefly consider sticking Henry together with super-glue but having tried to do this once on myself I decided against it as the risk of getting bitten was quite high on that one.

So it was off to the vets once again. The vet was as usual really nice, and Henry seemed as pleased as ever to be in there, he must be the only dog in the world to actually wag his tail and pull on the lead to get into the vets.

In his excitement Henry refused to keep still while the vet clippered the area of the tear in his side, resulting in a much bigger and quite wonky area of shaved fur, which in turn made the whole thing look much worse. The vet then got out the dreaded staple gun. This is something to make your eyes water but it is a very efficient way of fixing cuts and tears but it is rather painfull and after the third staple Henry did a big slump and gave up, it was really sad to see him just give in to the pain but two staples later and it was all over.

The vet told me to keep Henry from bouncing. Hmmmmm, not much chance of that! We also had to put one of those big white lampshades on him which we already had at home so off we went with a stapled dog to resume packing.

Once home I tried the lamp shade on Henry but it just wouldn't stay on his head. He seemed completely adept at removing it the moment I turned away so I gave up. He didn't seem too interested in the staples so hopefully they would remain unchewed.

Wrong. The phone rang, and after about five minutes I noticed Henry licking himself out of the corner of my eye and didn't think any more about it until I finished my conversation and found that he had expertly removed one of the five staples. Problem.

The problem was solved, this time by a large winter dog coat, probably two dog sizes too big for him but it fitted right over the stapled area in his side and prevented Henry from getting at the wound. Genious.

The next morning we set off with our neighbour to Kent. The dogs were really pleased at coming with us, I think they thought they were being left behind or something. The only thing I couldn't do was get Henry to wee before we set off,I'm not sure if it was wearing the big red dog coat or not but I really didn't want him weeing in the car....

After a couple of hours Molly started to fidget so we stopped for some lunch and to let the dogs out, again Henry refused to wee, this was not good, normally on a drive to Kent I'd only stop once if at all so I knew if Henry didn't wee now I'd have to stop again and the more stops the more chance we'd get of getting caught up on the M25 during rush hour.

A couple of hours further south we stopped once more and still no wees from Henry, I was begining to get some rather funny looks from people as it was quite a warm day and Henry was still wearing his huge red coat. Molly was an angel, performing almost on command and being really well behaved in the car.

We'd arranged to drop our neighbour at Stanstead so she could get the shuttle from there into London and once more I attempted to get Henry to wee. And once more he refused. This is the dog that won't go a day without having an accident in the house yet he was travelling almost the length of Britain without a single drop leaving his bladder.

We finally arrived at Mum and Dads at 5.30pm and he finally wee'ed in their garden after being there for nearly half an hour, amazing!

Molly had been to visit Mum and Dad before and it wasn't long before she had settled right into everything but Henry had never been anywhere with me to visit before so after ten minutes he started to bounce, he bounced around the house, bounced around the garden and bounced on the walk we went on before dinner to try and tire him out. Luckily Mum and Dad are great dog people so they are very tolerant of mad dogs like Henry but somehow I don't think they expected quite so much bounce!