The Naughtiest Puppy In The World

Meet Gracie Lee Webb.

Looks like a little angel, doesn’t she?

Don’t you believe it.

She is a Pagan Baby. (1)

Saturday night, I was minding my own business. Watching I Love Lucy. I realized, Gracie had been quiet for quite some time.

I found her, reclining on my bed, chewing on an open prescription medicine bottle. Half of the pills were gone.

Gracie!

She ran. When she thinks she has something we really, really want, it is much more fun to run laps around the house than simply give over the whatever.

Can’t catch me, I’m the Gingerbread Dog.

I traded her a cookie for the bottle.

Called the Vet. The answering service operator took the information:

"My puppy just ate four 100 mg capsules of Macrobid. She weighs about 18 pounds and will be six months old next Friday."

What kind of puppy is this?

This is the Naughtiest Puppy In The World.

The Vet called. This is too much medicine load for a little girl. You have to make her vomit.

Yippee.

Give her a cup of Hydrogen Peroxide with a turkey baster, followed by a cup of warm water. If she doesn’t vomit in ten minutes, repeat.

I pause, making sure I have correctly calculated how many pills are missing. (2)

The vet yells at me, The longer we’re on the phone the more medicine she will absorb!

All right, Ms. Vet. I appreciate the information, but you’ll live longer if you take a breath once in a while. (3)

Of course, when Gracie realizes I want her to do something, this is the signal to begin another game of Catch Me If You Can.

I trick her into a dead-end room with the squeaky ball, because she is not my first terrier.

I plop her into the bathtub and proceed to baster two cups of liquid down her throat.

Then I call my doctor. My puppy ate most of the prescription you gave me yesterday.

I try to find the chewed bottle to read the drug name off it, and I can not find the bottle.

I had it in my hand while I was talking to the Vet.

When I step out of the bathroom to continue the search, Gracie slips by me, just in time to unload the medicine and everything else she ate that day in four piles in my bedroom. Two piles in the hall, one in the living room, and to show me how nice it would have been if my original plan had worked, two in the bathroom.

I find the bottle in the kitchen. Tell the doctor the name of the medicine about the time he finds me in his computer. He starts laughing.

Usually, he says, when the puppy eats the medicine, it’s a narcotic.

Oh, says I.

It never occurred to me, my story might be suspect. (4) I just talked to the vet, I can give you her number.

I believe you, he says. (5) What kind of puppy is this?

The Naughtiest Puppy In The World.

Did that turkey baster thing work?

Barfarama.

I’ll keep that in mind.

Hung up from the doctor in time to see Gracie ask to go outside. (6)

Not wanting to play Catch Me If You Can in an acre of yard, in the dark, I tell her she can stay inside.

To show me, I’m not as smart as I think I am, she poops by the front door.

While I’m cleaning up barf, she steals the paper towel I’m using. Twice.

Once everything is cleaned up, put up, secured from further attack, I collapse in my recliner and think, this dog is going to hate me.

Gracie jumps in the chair, gives me a puppy smooch through peroxided, barfy whiskers, and falls asleep on my lap.

There is an old Irish curse that goes like this:

May the Seven Terriers of Hell
sit on the spool of your breast
and bark in at your soul case.

I’ve got a better one.

Spend one evening, home alone, with The Naughtiest Puppy In The World.






1 No offense intended to actual Pagan Babies.
2 Never claimed to be a math genius.
3. Actually, my EMT training kicked in. The emergency will end with better results, if we proceed in an orderly fashion. And, by the way, absorption through the gut is the slowest route.
4. Who would make this shit up?
5. What kind of stupid dope fiend wants extra antibiotics?
6. Miracle #2783a, Vatican Archives, Drawer D.