Blind Baby Daddy Blog: A Dog That Eats Diapers
I know its been way too long for a Blind Baby Daddy Blog and I apologize to all of you that love these funny but real, life adventures. Being a dad of three little ones that is blind requires the use of a lot of your other senses as well as many educated assumptions.
There have been so many moments and scenarios that have warranted a Blind Baby Daddy blog of late but to be honest I just haven't had any time. I did however think that this story just had to be told.
Those that have 3 kids under 5 know that you are constantly living in chaos and overstimulation. This means that you often misplace things or can't even remember what you just did 30 seconds ago. Well, in our situation, we have two lovely diaper genies where all of those stinky diapers go. With Blind Baby Daddy being the one with the very intense odor detector, I am normally the one that discovers the presents that are awaiting in the Huggies. Unfortunately, we have one other member of our family that actually enjoys the diapers more than I do. Gunther, our Vizsla dog seems to like eating the soiled diapers. This is obviously completely disgusting but it is not totally uncommon for dogs to do such a thing.
With the above information, you can probably guess what happened. One day, while frantically getting the kids ready to head out for day care, a diaper must have gotten left behind. Later that evening as we were heading upstairs my wife encountered tons of tattered diaper remains scattered on the floor. Gunther had gotten into the diaper at some point and consumed much of it.
The horrible thing about eating a diaper, other than the fact that it is eating poop, is that diapers expand when they get wet and thus they are not what you want in your digestive tract. This is exactly what happened to Gunther. We didn't discover what he had done until many hours post consumption so it was too late to try early interventions. Later in the evening, Gunther began to vomit very frequently and we rushed to find a place that would take him.
After Xrays and other tests, they found a bunch of material obstructing his intestinal tract. In this case, the only real option was surgery to remove the blockage. This also meant that Gunther would be at the animal hospital for nearly 4 days and luckily we had pet insurance because the bill was over $12,000. Although our portion was much less after insurance paid their part, it was still a hefty lump sum.
Gunther is now back running around and jumping on visitors once again but we are being paranoid about getting the diapers in the proper locked place because if there is a next time for this then insurance won't cover it. Somehow, with pet insurance, if the animal does something twice, it becomes a pre-existing condition and they won't cover it. How on God's green Earth digesting something is a pre-existing condition I will never know. I am just hoping that Gunther doesn't run around and get his leg cut on a fence twice because then he will have the pre-existing condition of getting a cut. They should really just be honest and say, the second time we just don't want to pay for it because it's hurting our bottom line.
Well, this has been another edition of the BlindBaby Daddy blog, a look into the life of a dad that can't see (with vision) most of what is going on around him. I hope you enjoyed and I will try to make the next edition more frequent than this one.