Instincts

Tuesday night was a little scary for this puppy mama. Parker was gone for the evening for his strike top-off flights so Jenny and I were having a typical girls night in (aka snuggling on the couch and watching reality television). She started chewing on a long, slender bone she has been working on for a while, and all of a sudden she went completely nuts. She started running across the house and violently pawing at her face. She tried to dig her nose into the floor in between scratching at her face, and then she would sprint off a few feet and do the same thing. She was acting so strange it looked like she had rabies, and I had no idea what to do.

After about 5 minutes of this, she sat calmly on the floor and just stared at me. For a second I thought whatever had been hurting her was over because she was so still, but she wouldn't leave my gaze. I don't have human babies, but anyone who knows me knows Jenny is my baby.  You always hear about "motherly instincts", and I think those kicked in when Jenny was hurting. To anyone else, she now seemed fine. She was sitting on the floor and wagged her tail every time I came to sit next to her, but when I started petting her, the tail-wagging stopped every time. It was as if she was trying to tell me "I don't need to be pet. There's something wrong and I need you to fix it". I opened her mouth and didn't see anything abnormal, but her face was different. I realized that she wasn't able to touch her bottom and top teeth together. Her mouth was partially open and she couldn't close it. Naturally, I was panicking at this point.

She kept her gaze locked on me and followed me anywhere I went. I finally decided to open her mouth again and get a better look, and that's when I saw it. She had broken off about a 3 inch piece of that bone, and it was firmly lodged in the roof of her mouth towards the back of her throat. Poor thing! My first inclination was to dig into her mouth and grab it right away, but I didn't want to accidentally force it farther into her throat and cause her to choke. I figured out a way to maneuver my hands in her mouth to make sure I had a good grip on the bone and wouldn't drop it. After several hard tugs, I pulled it out. You would think she would have been fighting me the whole time I had my fingers practically down her throat, but she sat completely still. I think she knew I was her only hope of fixing whatever was wrong, so she put all her little pupper trust in me and let me help her. As soon as I yanked it out, she wagged her tail, grabbed the bone, and ran off as if to say "Thank goodness! I wasn't done with that!". Good grief. I watched her carefully as she finished the bone and the night went on. For as much as this scared me, Parker thought it was really funny when he got home. Granted he just heard the story and didn't have to see her while this was happening, but it's been two days and I still don't think it was funny. Men these days.

It was definitely a scary moment, and I am so thankful I was home. Had I not been home and seen Jenny acting so strangely, we wouldn't have known the bone was lodged in her mouth. She's a smart dog and realized pretty quickly that clawing at her face and running around wasn't going to solve anything, and I would have never known she was in pain had I not seen her do that. God was looking out for that little trouble-maker, and I am so thankful!!