The State of the Seamus

My beloved puppy will be 16 this year. After scaring the crap out of me in August with his massive seizure and his infection, he seemed to have mostly settled back into being a happy, healthy hound. Until the other day, when he was sitting on the couch, moved the wrong way and started yelping in pain. We still don't know what exactly the problem was, but the vet thinks he either pulled a muscle or pinched a nerve. It took us a little while to figure out that something was wrong, because at first it didn't happen all that regularly. Then we noticed he'd stopped shaking his ears (he loves to flip his ears. In fact, he just did it right now while I was typing this) and was opening his mouth very gingerly. That combined with an incident where he hurt himself in his sleep and woke up yelping (hello confused humans and dog at 4 am) convinced us it was time for a trip to the vet.

The vet agreed that something was wrong, and gave him a shot of painkillers and an anti-inflammatory. Seamus is on physical restriction for a while and has to have more anti-inflammatory drugs each morning for ten days. Well, he started feeling better almost immediately. Ok, first he felt stoned. On the drive back to the house he was sitting in the back seat smiling and kind of nodding with his eyes half-closed. Then when we got home, he took to wandering around, staring at stuff. He'd walk over to his water dish and just stand there, like, dude, why did I come over here? Or he'd suddenly have to sit down. It was funny, although he looked a little scared a couple of times. But then, the next day he was not drugged and he felt much better. So much better that he resented the baby gates on the staircases and our attempts to keep him calm. When I explained to the vet that Seamus can open the baby gates on the stairs, he laughed and said that is typical beagle behavior. They are stubborn little guys. So we have two gates on the front stairs, and on the back stairs we have one with a chair in front of it. By the third day, Seamus had had quite enough of that, so he jumped on to the chair, over the baby gate and ran up the stairs. He was totally pleased with himself too. So we took that chair away and put a folding chair in its place. Yeah, today he figured out how to get around that too.

We've also had to switch to using a harness instead of a leash. I don't know what it is about this thing, but you practically need to have a PhD to get it on him properly. Every time I have to sit there and think it through, and I've put it on him wrong and had to start over more than once. That plus the whole baby gate thing is making me wonder if he's actually smarter than I am. I guess as long as I have thumbs I'll manage to retain the upper hand.

Seamus says: Who me? I would never do such a thing! I'm just sitting here with my bears.