When your beloved puppy eats glass...

Yes it was that kind of weekend.  The AKC show was good.  I had more fun showing Fable on Friday night at the ASCA show, and I am thankful to Michelle and Courtney for keeping Fable to show in ASCA while I drove Willow and Lindsey to the AKC show.

I am learning more about dog shows as we go and participate.  UKC is my favorite then ASCA with AKC following way in the rear.  I have to admit as a newbie AKC is not nearly as much fun as the other shows.  I am learning that in any show you can have a perfectly beautiful dog and still not win, it all depends on what the judge thinks is a perfectly beautiful dog.  I do really enjoy seeing all the other aussie's and deciding what I might like in a future companion/show/performance aussie.

It's nice to meet other dog people and realize my dog habit is much smaller than some :).  I do love my dogs though, and training them is so much fun.  I am looking forward to performance showing with Isa in Rally and watching Willow and Lancelot in agility.  Not sure where Fable will go yet, but Willow wants to train her for agility as well.  Next training session Keeper will go in the training rotation as well and he will get some novice obedience refreshers and maybe head into Rally as well.

Now for the headline news and the title of this post.  After a long weekend of showing and dogs we come home to relax and Lancelot decides it is a good time to knock his soaking bowl of dog food off the counter and eat it  - glass and all.  So last night at 11:00pm, one drive to the emergency vet and one set of abdominal x-rays later we discover he needs surgery to remove a big chunk of glass that he was miraculously able to swallow that is too large to pass back out in any way shape or form.

As I write this he is at the vet recovering from major stomach surgery, he will come home tonight or tomorrow morning, and then begin the process of recovery.  We will have to keep him quiet for a while (which means he will be living in a kennel because with all that puppy energy he is impossible to keep quiet).  On top of that his show career is sidelined until all the hair they shaved off grows back and that could be 2-3 months.  He was just starting to get better at it too, Lindsey has done wonders with him as his favorite handler.  We will have to keep practicing with him and take him to conformation classes once he is healed up enough.

As a consequence I am feeling a bit traumatized but this crisis also helps me to see that I am on the road to recovery from the Lyme - I was able to handle it all without crashing.  Granted, I am upset and stressed by the cost, the trauma to our poor baby and the fact that it happened at all.  But I am not a crumpled mess on the bed wishing I could just fall asleep and never wake up either.  So for that I am thankful.  Now its time to get our puppy healed and make sure nothing like that can ever happen again.