Yep. One week back, we took the dog in for a spayin’. We chose to do this during a week that the wife otherwise had off from work. (She had not requested a solid week off, but that’s what they gave her. Doesn’t matter to her, she gets paid the same either way, but it was a nice and unexpected vacation.) We did this because if anything were to go amiss with Maya’s recovery from the spayin’, the wife wanted to be home to monitor it.
Since the wife had so many days off, my mother-in-law decided to come up as well. This is always a welcome event. For one thing, I love my mother-in-law. For another, she’s a spectacular cook and I’m guaranteed biscuits and gravy for at least one of the days she’s around. (Which I then take pictures of and text them to my brother-in-law as proof that I’m her favorite.) The other advantage to having Ma around is that she helps keep the wife occupied allowing me to otherwise get work done. Since I work from home as a writer, I do have to actually spend some time doing that sort of thing. But when the wife is off, I feel obligated to spend a good amount of time with her, too, and sometimes my work life doesn’t get the attention it needs. So my deadlines were thankful Ma was in the house, too.
Maya’s surgery went well. I went with the wife to pick her up the following morning. We were waiting in the vet’s lobby when they brought her out. Maya went right to the wife first. After receiving a pet there, she turned, noticed me and I got to see her little doggy expression change from one of mere happiness to happiness double plus joy.
During her recovery, she was a good deal more subdued than her usual self–which is to be expected, since her belly still hurts. (“Mama paid money to have my belly cut open,” we frequently say, using our Maya voice. We’re such idiots.) Much of her initial recovery time was spent camped out on what we call the dog couch, which is to say our old couch that we never sit on and which the dogs get more use out of. And while she had pain meds to help, I think she was still in pain, because she became very sensitive to the presence of the other dogs. If Sadie, for instance, tried to hop up on the opposite end of the dog couch, Maya would sometimes yipe as if Sadie had jumped on her. But we all saw that Sadie hadn’t come close to even touching Maya. Perhaps Maya wanted to be in pain in private, because she soon retreated to our bedroom, or even our bedroom closet where she would bury herself behind the clothes hanging from the lower shelf. Sometimes she would hide under the bed in my office. Her appetite was also much lower than normal and she almost never finished her own food, let alone tried to steal the other dogs’ food.
Even now, a week later, Maya is still pretty subdued compared to her former boisterous puppy self. She’s begun to play again, and chases Moose around, as well as the cats, but she’s not as needy as she was before the surgery. Maybe it’s a hormone thing and this is the new default for Maya. Can’t say I really mind, but it is a difference.
The other thing that has changed since the surgery (fingers crossed) is that we’ve had no more accidents. Maya also seems far more willing to vocalize when we ask her if she needs to potty. She’s even gone to the back door, clawed it and gave off a whine to let us know her intent, a few times.
This. Is. Awesome.
So far so good. I’m not going to go so far as to say anything foolish, like, “Well, guess we finally got her potty trained,” cause if I did I’d probably find I’d been sitting in dog poo for the past two hours.