by Cassandra
It’s an average work night someday in April 2017 and we’re having ham steaks for dinner. I give two very excited, wiggle-butt puppers the leftover circular bone with yummy marrow on the inside. The dogs had had them before and loved them until they were ground down to nothing. Each dog brings theirs up to the bedroom and settles into their beds to noisily chew on them.
I wake up sometime in the night and I can hear a dog on Jeremy’s side of the bed still munching away on their bone. I continue to drift in and out of sleep and I keep hearing more rhythmic clacking. As it finally starts to grate on my nerves, the dog switches to my side of the bed. Sweet, here’s my chance to take it away! I lean over in the near pitch darkness and fumble my hand over the floor searching for the noisy culprit, but the dog is not laying on the floor with the bone. Weird. Instead the dog is sitting up and I can hear the clacking almost next to my head. I reach up to touch the dog’s head. It’s Luna, our dumb, but sweet border collie mix. As my hand travels down her snout, I encounter something that is not supposed to be there. I’m thinking what the hell as I sit up in bed and scoot closer. I grope around on her face and ah ha, she has the bone around her lower jaw behind her canines. I reassure her as I figure that I’m just going to slip it back off, right? Nope, doesn’t budge even a centimeter as I try to maneuver it. I try for several more blind minutes until I realize, well shit, now I have to wake Jeremy up.
So I get out of bed and flick on the light. Jeremy grumbles awake and wants to know why the hell I’m turning the light on at 3 am. I point to Luna, who is still on my side of the bed. She is clicking her teeth together around the bone while staring at me wildly with her eyes bugged out as far as they will go. Awww, poor girl has been terrified for who knows how long.
I pick Luna up and set her on the bed. I demonstrate to Jeremy that somehow Luna has managed to slip the bone perfectly over her teeth so that now it cannot just slip back off. How in the hell did she generate the force for that?! Jeremy sits up and tugs on it for a few minutes with no success. When he puts pressure on it, Luna’s lip gets pinched and she jerks her head away.
Alright, plan B. I run downstairs and get the Dremel. Surly we can hold her still enough to zip it off and go back to bed. Nope. I almost slice her face off as she jerks around because the buzzing is too loud. I never even manage to touch the bone. So, back to plan A.
Jeremy gets into a kneeling position on the bed, flips Luna onto her back and traps her between his legs. He then works to pull her lip back away from her teeth while also putting pressure on the ham bone. Luna freaks. She thrashes against Jeremy as I stand next to bed dreading the emergency veterinarian bill that getting that bone off is going to cost. Then Luna makes a noise that isn’t dog or human. It’s a despairing wail of terror from deep in her chest. Jeremy is struggling to hold her. She does it a second time and I proceed to burst into uncontrollable tears. I beg him to stop; I yell at him to stop. He gives one final wrench and two things happen at once. The bone finally slips off her jaw and Luna projectile pisses. Jeremy gets ammonia-heavy pee all over his butt, I get sprayed in the face and chest and the bed gets a good soaking. She even managed to hit the wall that was at least 5 feet away from her. Fabulous.
Jeremy lets her loose and Luna jumps happily off the bed as if she hadn’t just screamed like a banshee and golden showered both of us. She even has the gall to look at the bone as if she’s going to get it back! Oh hell no. No more circular ham bones.. ever!
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