The most uneventful vet visit EVER

Yep, this one was... normal? I'll have to get opinions on what normal is though, because it seems like for the first time in.. well, as long as I can remember, that the vet visit was pretty calm. We walked in, checked in, got the awesome waiting spot, waited uneventfully for an hour, got seen and medicated, and left. I'm still in shock!

The awesome waiting spot is this half wall boxed in area separate from other animals and can be locked if necessary. Most people use it for nervous cats not in a carrier or for a very sick animal or multiple pets. However, it was the ONLY spot left so I snagged it. It was soooo great. I let my puppy off her leash. (BTW, my puppy is 8 years old :D) I gave my toddler her leash to play with, and held the baby until we were seen. It sure beats what normally happens, which I will get into in a minute.

When we were finally called back, the tech held my puppy (while I stared on in amazement that she didn't protest), showed us into a room, and promptly took her to the back to persuade her to pee. However, my dog is NOT okay with peeing on anything but grass (and I whole-heartedly agree). So, she got a needle in the bladder. Poor baby. Afterwards, she got the ever elusive treat from my toddler which she nommed with relish. Prognosis, "We don't know" ended with an antibiotic shot good for 14 days and I am just fine with that because I was not looking forward to playing hide the pill for the next two weeks. We're just keeping our fingers crossed that her kidneys aren't spazzing out due to another hormonal imbalance again. So, $150 and one very pissed dog later, we're home again and life is once again good.... for now.

On to the "normal for us" vet visits. We've never been minimalists when it comes to animals. We don't have just one dog, we have 3 or 4. We don't have just one horse, we have 3-6. See a trend? Anyway, we usually keep everyone on the same schedule for shots so it gets a little insane when you try to wrangle them all in, although we don't try this with just one human. On a "normal for us" visit, we load all the dogs (or horses) up and wrestle them out of the car. Wrestling a golden retriever, a corgi/collie mix, a dachshund, and a rat terrier is not just the easiest thing in the world. But, it was much better than dealing with the biggest chicken dog this side of the equator.

He is gone now, but this lab/chow mix used to drag us under benches in an attempt to hide. He was always a strange dog from the beginning and only bonded with my husband, myself, and my mother. Every vet visit was an event which ended with him peeing and even pooping all over himself and completely stressed out to the point of passing out. The best visit EVER was when his nose started bleeding at home 20 minutes before the vets closed. This also coincided with us fixing to load him in the car to be taken to the boarding kennel because we were going to Florida for the week. The vet visit entailed driving at 90 miles an hour to get there before they closed, muzzling the chicken dog, sitting on him while they took his blood (ever tried to manhandle a 90 lb freak of nature in panic mode?), dragging him out from under the bench so they could medicate him, and ended with us signing boarding papers for the week so they could monitor him. He had erlichia. Yep, just another normal vet visit.

I could tell hundreds of stories about our adventures. I could talk about the trip I took for a routine gelding. It isn't easy to load a stallion while you have a broken leg, so I took my father along who hasn't been around a horse regularly in 25 years. This particular visit came with a phone call saying that he was crypt and they would have to drug and flip him to finish the procedure, which shot my bill up to $600 (and I did almost faint after that). Or the time my crazy TB almost killed herself and earned a mad dash to the vet's office to be sewn up. (I'll tell her story in another post because it really is a great one). Maybe the fatal visit after chicken dog attacked my elderly dog and we ended up putting her down.

Normal: nor-mal/Pronunciation [nawr-muhl]
–adjective
1.
conforming to the standard or the common type; usual; not abnormal; regular; natural.
2.
serving to establish a standard.

Well, I guess I have established my normal, so from now on, this vet visit goes down in my books as the most abnormal visit ever. Take that "normal" people!!