Maddie's Bad Day

 I thought I'd taking a break from watching the Turkey/Croatia match (you didn't think I'd be studying for the bar, did you?) to tell a short story about last Wednesday afternoon. As some of you know, my girlfriend and I have a 7-month old shepherd-mix puppy named Maddie, a humane society adoptee who is, quite simply, the greatest dog alive. Greatest, however, is not synonymous with smartest.

We've been giving Maddie sections of bones filled with marrow to eat and chew on. She absolutely loves them. Goes nuts for them. We've given her two or three of them in the past without incident, so we didn't think much about it when we gave her one late Wednesday morning. Maddie carefully manaically ate out all of the marrow and began to chew on the bone. In chewing, however, she somehow managed to fit the ring of bone around her mandible, over and behind her canine teeth, in such a way that we could not remove it without hurting her. Maddie remained calm, but was clearly nervous. We decided that this situation would require professional assistance to reach any kind of happy resolution, so off we went to the vet. Here's Maddie en route:

As you can see, she was in quite a state. Fortunately, we were able to be seen almost immediately after arriving. The vet who saw Maddie, Dr. Bob, said that, while rare, Maddie's situation wasn't unheard of; every two to three years he sees a dog in a similar predicament. He determined that the best course of action was to sedate Maddie and to then remove the bone with various bone cutting devices.This is, in fact, what happened.

After passing out, Dr. Bob used a large scissor-like tool to weaken the bone, cutting the part that was actually inside her mouth. Then, as you will see in the following video, he used a hacksaw to cut a deep groove into the side of the bone, and the scissor tool once again to finally remove the bone from her face.

Afterwards, Dr. Bob administered an anti-sedative and in a few minutes Maddie was up and about. She gave us dirty looks and stumbled around for the rest of the night, but by the next morning she was back to her old happy self.  Needless to say, Maddie doesn't get marrow bones as chew toys anymore.