Rejoice! He is r̶i̶s̶e̶n̶ not dead yet!

April 21, 2019 8:27 AM

The vet told my dad on the phone (??) that his dog had to be put down and he’d come to his house and do it. My dad dug the dog’s grave AND LET THE DOG WATCH. Then the vet came and checked the dog and said it was a false alarm. Oops! Dog’s fine! Everything about this is insane. Twitter | Threadreader
posted by Johnny Wallflower (11 comments total)

Vet lucky to escape alive, what with a spare grave at hand.
posted by thelonius at 8:38 AM on April 21, 2019 [31 favorites]

reminds me of my dad's story about bringing one of his old dogs to the vet due to a problem with its foot. The vet lifted said dog onto the examination table, gave her a looking over and concluded that the best course of action would be to take her into town for an x-ray etc. Which annoyed my dad as that meant he'd lose half a day.

My dad sighed, looked at the dog on the table and said, "Well, can we put her down?"

The vet was shocked. "That's drastic. It's just a possible broken foot."

"No," said my dad, "I meant, down off the table, she doesn't like heights."
posted by philip-random at 8:40 AM on April 21, 2019 [100 favorites]

>My dad dug the dog’s grave AND LET THE DOG WATCH.

I'm pretty sure this is what mobsters do to find out how much you know. If I was that dog, I'd be singing like a bird.
posted by Sing Or Swim at 9:09 AM on April 21, 2019 [12 favorites]

The dog must've thought that's one huuuuge bone he has buried there.
posted by Pyrogenesis at 9:48 AM on April 21, 2019 [16 favorites]

Yeah, that heartbreaking line from Updike's “Another Dog’s Death”: "I carved her a safe place while she protected me."

So glad Dad's doggo is doing better!
posted by MonkeyToes at 10:08 AM on April 21, 2019 [5 favorites]

When my cat had a difficult case of urinary crystals / inflammation, I was calling around for a third opinion and trying to figure out who could actually help. One vet on the phone told me that if the cat was not treatable then we could talk about end of life options. On the phone! I noped right out of there.
posted by St. Peepsburg at 1:39 PM on April 21, 2019 [2 favorites]

Summer before last, a good friend of mine learned that his father had pancreatic cancer, and that the doctors were giving him a very short time frame to live. Even though everyone told her it was a terrible idea, my friend’s mother planned the funeral, including inviting relatives from all over, before my friend’s father had died.

As the funeral date approached, and my friend’s dad was hanging in there, they decided to just go ahead with it. Everybody came, and my friend’s dad got to see a lot of relatives and old friends, and he died a couple of months later. It was ridiculous to plan the funeral before the dad was dead, but in the end it worked out OK.
posted by Orlop at 2:31 PM on April 21, 2019 [27 favorites]

From the article:

Dog:
TODAY WAS SO AWESOME WE DUG A BIG HOLE I DIDNT EVEN KNOW WE WERE BOTH INTO DIGGING HOLES WE HAVE SO MUCH IN COMMON

<3
posted by mumimor at 4:55 PM on April 21, 2019 [34 favorites]

When I was little, I also started digging a dog grave where the dogs could watch. The dog in question was perfectly healthy and young. But I was an archaeology kid, so I wanted to spend years excavating a room-sized tomb for him and painting the walls. How I proposed to do this in gumbo clay, I didn't figure; I wasn’t real familiar with the concept of engineering. As it was, I noticed that the shoebox-sized hole kept filling up, and this was around the time that the science teacher explained the concept of a water table. I abandoned it, but I never explained it. My mother always thought we had moles.
posted by Countess Elena at 6:20 PM on April 21, 2019 [12 favorites]

I wasn’t real familiar with the concept of engineering.

If digging weren't such hard work, I'd probably be dead from a backyard tunnel collapse.
posted by thelonius at 6:57 PM on April 21, 2019 [11 favorites]

back in the suburban Toronto of my pre-teen years, our sandbox had a wood bottom, so our attempts to get to China were always quick failures. But around the corner and across the street, the Domski brothers's dad had dug them a proper pit to work with, which allowed for all manner of fabulous possibilities. All of which came to a sudden halt after they tried (and almost succeeded) to bury another kid alive. At which point, it became their mom's flower garden.

Ah, the good ole days.
posted by philip-random at 12:57 PM on April 22, 2019 [6 favorites]