Wednesdays are groom days. So in addition to the usual chaos of surgeries, drop offs and appointments, we have grooming clients to deal with as well. In the midst of the noise and phone calls this morning, we get a call from an RV dealer in Houston. The man on the phone tells the technician that they have a client there with a dog whose head is stuck in a vent in his RV; can we get the dog out? In my head I’m picturing a small Jack Russell-type dog with his head stuck through the AC floor vent and I tell the tech, sure, no problem. We can get the dog out. Tell him to head this way.
A half hour later, a truck and older model camper pull into the parking lot. The owner comes in to fill out paperwork, I head outside to assess the situation and this is what I see:The man tells me he drove for 60 miles wondering why people were honking and pointing at him…
If the head through the vent on the outside of the camper weren’t strange enough, inside was worse. This 80-pound dog had wedged himself in the space between the rear wall and the slide out, opened the cabinet door, crawled into the cabinet and forced his head out the vent on the outside wall of the camper. We sedated the dog, taped up the edge of the vent with duct tape so the dog wouldn’t lacerate his neck, lubed him up with some mineral oil, pushed from one end, pulled from the other and the dog came right out (all those years of fancy education and it boils down to duct tape…).
While we were waiting for the dog’s sedative to kick in, the owner begins telling my technician who is out there monitoring the dog that the injection we gave his dog was given just like the injections of testosterone he gets twice weekly. But his wife wants him to stop getting the injections because he is getting too “spunky”. His stories got more…um…interesting from there. Needless to say, the technician is now scarred for life but the man liked our staff so much that he plans on using us as his regular veterinarian.
