Last Sunday morning I woke to find my dog, Lola, with half her face swollen as if she’d had gotten into a bar fight Saturday night and had a lot of explaining to do.

For those that may not know, I worked in the Veterinary field a bit in high school and all through college and my entire life before that I grew up in a Veterinary clinic as my mother’s business was in the same building as the clinic. This lead to a life of not only loving and caring for animals but also getting to know Veterinary medicine about as closely as a person with no formal education can know it. I am a walking encyclopedia of animal knowledge, which is occasionally useful but generally just annoying. The good thing, I suppose, is that when it comes to common animal ailments, I can identify them most of the time. And when I saw my dog’s face Sunday morning I knew it wasn’t her raucous lifestyle that caused her to look like Rocky after a match, but rather just an abscessed tooth.

That is the extent to which I’ll go with the description, however, because I will admit that a tooth that has abscessed to the point of swelling a dog’s face is one of the more gross, non-emergency things  a pet owner might have to face. Even I, the person who learned to eat lunch in between routine surgeries, do not like to think about it.

A little further investigation confirmed my amateur diagnosis and even though all my background tells me that this sort of thing happens and most people do not examine their dogs’ mouths on a daily basis, I still felt like the worst person in the world.  I knew it had to be painful and, once again, although experience tells me that animals generally handle mouth pain so much better than humans, I felt like I’d kicked her in the tooth myself. Awful.  The following day Lola was in the vet’s office, having blood drawn, and started on heavy antibiotics. This is not the usual for this dog.  When she first came to me at ten weeks old, she was a rescued, mangy mess. I spent the next 13 weeks treating her and nursing her back to health.  Other than those first few months of her life, she has been a very low-maintenance pet, even if she thinks she’s too good to sleep on the floor.

She had surgery yesterday, Thursday, and was home last night recovering like normal. This morning she went outside when she woke up and tried to chase a cat, so essentially she’s back to her old self again, short one tooth and up a whole lot of sympathy and spoiling from family and friends. I didn’t realize how popular she was until this week, and it was such an unexpected reminder of what she means to me.

Over the last eight years she has been through everything with me; houses, jobs, friends, boyfriends, deaths, births, everything. She is a trooper, that’s for sure.

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