Doggie Drama at 2am

The boyfriend and I have a wonderful, loving, playful, goofy, and fun American Bull Dog Pit Bull mix with a little bit of Boxer in him too...we think. You may have already seen him in an earlier obedience school graduation post. His name is Chance. We think he is about a year or so old. We adopted him in February of this year and we instantly fell in love. He has been a delight to have around and he very quickly adapted to our home and our other dog, Cody. Needless to say, Chance is now a member of our family - he fits right in.

Cody is my dog. I got him when I was 11 years old. He is now 14. He has chronic pancreatitis (Grandpa fed him too many hot dogs) and he often will become sick due to a table scrap he licked up here or a crumb he nibbled there. We're always on the look out to see if we need to make a trip back to the doggie hospital for him, but so far so good since our last (huge) incident - when we actually found out he had pancreatitis. It's still scary, but not so uncommon, to wake up in the middle of the night to the sound of Cody throwing up or see him get sick and take him to the bathroom so he can (yes, he does) throw up into our toilet. He rarely has pain attacks anymore and we don't even have a bottle of his medication around simply because he never needs it these days.

This is a random picture my boyfriend drew of our dogs.

So last night we really weren't expecting what happened with Chance. Adam and I were in bed by around 11pm and didn't get to sleep until around midnight. Cody sleeps in the bed with us and Chance sleeps on his doggie bed on the floor by Adam's side. Cody was sprawled out at the bottom of our bed and it took a while to find a good fit between the three of us up there. I moved Cody up by me so we could move our legs, he walked back down and sat right in the middle. I moved Cody to the middle of me and Adam, he moves back to my side and spreads out. Anyway, it was about midnight when we finally settled in and drifted off. At 2am, Adam and I wake up from a gagging sound and a lot of licking. My immediate thought was that Cody had jumped down from the bed and was throwing up. But it was coming from Chance's side... We looked down at Chance. He was literally eating Adam's shirt. He had it about halfway down his throat, actually. And was making gagging and licking sounds from it. Adam quickly pulled the shirt out of Chance's throat and mouth, but he kept licking. He tried to grab the shirt again to eat it, so we pulled it away from him. We were so weirded out... I have never seen a dog do this before. It was actually quite scary to watch.

After seeing that he couldn't get the shirt, Chance started to chomp away at his bed. Adam went down next to him and tried to stop and soothe him. But Chance kept licking and acting anxious. Adam took him to the door and then started walking him downstairs. Worried, I got out of bed too and followed them. I could hear the licking from all the way upstairs and when I went down, I saw Chance trying to pull up the carpet - like he was trying to rip it up and eat it. It was almost like a cow with grass. We told Chance "no", and he went running under the table where he found Adam's shoes. He then started trying to eat the shoelaces. It was so weird! I thought we needed to take him to the emergency vet hospital. He may have eaten something and we probably needed to get an x-ray to see what was going on. Adam wanted to wait it out since he thought it could be resolved on its own. Adam tried to get Chance to go out back through his doggie door, but he wouldn't go. We thought maybe he had to go to the bathroom or something. He wouldn't drink his water either, but he did eat a treat I gave him. I figured if he was well enough to devour a treat, it couldn't be that bad, right?

This could possibly be one of the stuffing suspects

Adam thought it would be a good idea to take him outside. He had seen something similar to this with his old dog and she ended up needing to eat grass to settle her stomach. So I clipped a leash on Chance (to which he seized the opportunity to try and chomp away my dangling hair off my head) and took him out front. He seemed really excited, with all the attention around him at 2:15 in the morning. He also got to go outside in the middle of the night and Cody had to stay in bed! It was a special treat for him. He wagged his tail, urinated on a bush and a tree and then started sniffing grass. A few seconds later, he was pulling it up and eating it. About a minute after that, he was gagging and then threw up. Out came some of his dog food from dinner and a material that we concluded resembled cotton. We assumed it was from one of his toys that he pulled the stuffing out - he must have swallowed some. After this lovely field trip Chance took us on, we took him back inside the house. Adam grabbed a baggie to put the throw up in, just in case we needed to show a vet later to see what was wrong. We climbed back upstairs to our bedroom and tried to get Chance back to sleep. Cody was awaken by our sudden presence and seemed to believe that it was already morning and time for his breakfast. So now we had our terrier jumping off our bed and ready to be fed and our bull dog filled with energy and not ready to go back to sleep. What a great adventure for pushing 3 in the morning.

After forcing the dogs into their proper night time spots, we finally were able to get back into bed. Just as I was able to ease back into the comfort of our soft bed and the peacefulness of the low background hum of our cool fan and gentle breeze on my hair, I heard the disgusting slap of a tongue again. A sound we knew well by now... Sure enough, Chance was licking again. Adam had to keep his hand stretched over the bed to keep Chance calm. Thankfully, it was enough this time but the occasional disturbance broke the rest of the night up for us. And at 6am, the dogs of course had to use the
bathroom. I don't know how he had the energy, but at 7am when my alarm for work went off, Chance was sitting by my bedside, wagging his tail and waiting for me to get up. I felt like death. And probably looked it too. You know that feeling when you know you haven't had nearly enough sleep? When your face feels overheated and flushed and your throat feels dry and like no amount of water could quench your dehydrated thirst? Where your lips feel chapped and swollen and you feel disgusting even though you've showered and brushed your teeth? And your stomach feels nauseated whether you go hungry or put food in it? That's pretty much how I felt.

I have no clue if this is even close to what it's like to have children, but it sure feels like it right now!

Thank you, Chance. For maybe showing me a taste of what it's like to have children and providing me with such fun packed into one long night. 

P.S. Chance has been fine since this morning and is back to his normal, non weird object eating dog, self.