Being Thankful

Well, I hope you all had a great Thanksgiving and ate some good food with good friends and/or family. I had a really nice time eating myself stupid with some of my coworkers, it was cold and rainy here yesterday which made for a really nice day to stay inside near a fire chatting and eating and then going to bed early.

It was another good week overall at the Lodges, there were a few bumps and bruises along the way but I have come out the other end of the week still moving forward. The bumps and bruises came into play on Sunday with Tina Louise. She is an incredibly sweet pittie that has some issues with other dogs and can be very reactive on leash. She is walked with a chain leash for this reason, because she tends to jump around and bite the leash when she sees other dogs and can't get to them.

I was delivering food, when Jeanne, one of our regular volunteers, came into the lodge I was feeding and asked if I could please come help right away. Another volunteer had taken Tina out for a walk and missed the path back to Tina's run and ended up coming down in between a bunch of other dogs' runs and Tina was becoming too much for this volunteer to handle. I went out and took Tina from the volunteer and got her back up to her run, where I took her in through the side gate instead of taking her in through the building where she would be passing some other dogs and might get even more worked up. As we walked through the gate, she pulled hard and fast to the right heading for the building, however, I wasn't yet through the gate and she ended up whipping my right forearm into the gate post and latch. It was incredibly painful but fortunately I was wearing four layers of clothing on my arms and it didn't break skin, there was a little bit of what looked like a rub burn but that was it. There was, however, some concern that she may have broken my arm. It was very sore for the rest of the day and my manager offered to take me down for X-Rays but I told him I wanted to give it a day and see how it felt. Since the swelling was minimal, there were no deformities, and there was no numbness or tingling I didn't really think it was broken. It remained quite sore on Monday, the thing that concerned me most was what was painful and what wasn't - lugging a full water bucket didn't bother me at all but holding a can of dog food like you would hold an open can of soda was surprisingly uncomfortable. By the end of the day Monday, I still wasn't convinced that I needed to get X-Rays, so I told my manager that I would have a final decision for her on Tuesday. (Side note: For those of you keeping track, I have two managers, one him and one her.) When I got home Monday night and unwrapped it (I was keeping it wrapped with an ace bandage for the rest of the week to provide some extra support for my wrist at the suggestion of manager John, who is also an EMT), it began feeling much better and by Tuesday it was feeling almost entirely better. I kept it wrapped for the rest of my work week, but it is doing just fine now. Right after it happened, everybody was saying that I was going to have a big nasty bruise from it, but I have never been one to get big nasty bruises - got one in hurricane force winds on a volcano in Guatemala, but that has been about it. So, I have been watching my arm intently for any signs of a big nasty bruise, and it looks like I have skipped that step in the healing process again (I am, admittedly, a little tiny bit disappointed).

So in the spirit of this Thanksgiving tradition, among all the regular things for which I am thankful - a loving family, great friends, cool dogs, etc - I am also very thankful for having two functional arms and two functional legs, none of which are broken (knock on wood!). I am also thankful that I got to have a little IM chat today with my great buddy Clair, the rare and elusive, South Polar Bear!

Clair and Fernando: Thank you for the Thanksgiving wishes! More tales from the Lodges tomorrow! (Photo copyright Best Friends Animal Society.)