Willa Billa

When I adopted Willow in August, 2005, I had no idea what I was getting into. For three days she was the perfect dog - calm, easy going, affectionate. And then she ran out of the pain pills she was on after she got spayed.

The Willow I have known, loved and sometimes wanted to murder in the years since is nervous, edgy, neurotic and desperately wishes she were the only animal in the house. But she's also loving and affectionate, and just wants to be with me or Jim as much as possible. We both love the stuffing out of her. The fact that I do love the stuffing out of her, though, made it very hard to get through this morning.

You see, Willow's neurotic nature has sometimes shown itself in a rather unpleasant way - self-mutilation. She sometimes goes through periods where she chews on the tip of her tail whenever we're not home with her, or even when we're sleeping. She chews the hair off, she chews at the skin until she bleeds, and this last time she even tore the skin off so it was basically degloved. Prior to this, she's always stopped before any real damage has been done, then the tail has healed and the hair has come back. This time she didn't stop, and her tail was in horrible shape, so I took her to the vet.

Her first visit for this was two weeks ago. They gave her antibiotics, cleaned her tail and wrapped it up so that she couldn't go after it, and sent us home. Today was her recheck. I was very much hoping that her tail would be healed, and she would be fine, but it wasn't. They took the bandages off, and her tail was obviously very infected, despite the antibiotics. It looked and smelled horrible. They have to amputate the end of her tail. :(

So now she's at the vet, and I'm home, worrying about how she's doing, wondering how I'm going to get her adjusted to wearing an Elizabethan collar (new things make her very nervous, and she basically lost her mind when they put it on her at the vet's office), and of course wishing she could have just left her tail alone in the first place. Poor Willa Billa.

Keep her in your thoughts today, okay? She's a crazy, neurotic, spastic mess of a dog, but she's ours, and we love her.