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Neville vs car
Friday, September 16 2016
Some weeks ago, Gretchen ordered us a Whistle pet tracker. It's a device you attach to something that moves (it doesn't have to be a live animal; it could be a car or an ærial drone) and, using the cellphone network and GPS, it sends updates of its location. It also listens for a radio beacon broadcast by its charging station and the web/phone app can be set to send an alert when it no longer detects that beacon. The Wistle is a product aimed at the dog parent who has everything, particularly the dog parent given to worrying. For us, the main reason for getting a Whistle is the tendency of our dogs to vanish into the woods for hours at a time. Sometimes when they're out there, they're needed elsewhere (at a party or the Woodstock bookstore). We've also had cats go missing from our house and there was that time Neville disappeared into Woodstock's suburban street grid and it took awhile to find him. Thus, for now at least, the natural creature to be tracking with a Whistle is Neville. Last night I'd finally gotten around to setting up a Whistle account, which, in addition to the $80 for the Whistle itself, costs $7/month for access to the cellphone network (that's with a two-year signup discount).
I'd wanted to put the Whistle on Neville this morning, but he and Ramona disappeared into the forest before I had a good opportunity. I was left to test it around the yard, where it didn't do anything too interesting, as it was apparently within the range of the radio beacon from the base station.
Gretchen had a doctor's appointment this morning in Woodstock that would, among other things, open a new source of prescription ambien into our household. Just before Gretchen got back from that appointment, I was sitting at my computer up in the laboratory (as I usually am early in my workday) when suddenly Ramona ran up to me with what seemed like unusual excitement. Normally when she gets back from the woods, she just flops down on the floor between the front door and dining room and takes some time to cool down and relax. Still, I didn't think much of it, and went back to work. But then Gretchen came home and called my name in a way that didn't sound too good. I ran out to learn what the matter was, and she said she'd been driving home and encountered a young woman parked in Dug Hill Road about a quarter mile north of the house (near the house of our neighbor Tommy, the guy who mountain bikes in the forest). The woman said she had just hit a dog with her car, and that the dog had fled west into the forest and she was trying to find him. Gretchen told the young woman that it could've been one of Tommy's dogs, though it could've also been one of ours. "What did it look like?" Gretchen asked. The young woman described the dog as being white with brown spots, and that the breed was a pit bull. Gretchen hadn't needed to hear anything else; she'd driven home and got me. Ramona and I jumped in the Prius and we started driving up the road, though we soon came upon the young woman in her car. She asked if there was anything she could do to help. I didn't think there was, and, indeed, I didn't really think she had any responsibility in the matter; we let our dogs run loose in full awareness of the risks. Apparently Neville had jumed out in front of the young woman and she hadn't had time to brake. There are other people who (such as the sons of Donald J. Trump) who might delight in hitting dogs with their cars, but that clearly wasn't the case with this driver. The experience had deeply traumatized her. But Gretchen seemed to be treating this as an auto accident, and she wanted to get the young woman's information. She got out of the car to do that, and I raced up to where that accident had occurred. I parked on the side of Dug Hill Road and tried to get Ramona to come with me into the woods, but she refused to get out of the car. (Perhaps this was a welcome sign of Ramona having learned something from seeing Neville get hit; maybe now she had come to regard this stretch of road as having "bad mojo.").
I set off on foot into the forest, following Tommy's main bike trail and then heading southward (around the backside of our uphill neighbors' place), which would be the route an injured Neville would probably take if fleeing homeward. What a cruel irony it was that I'd almost (but not quite) put the Whistle tracker on Neville this very morning! I saw a light-colored Neville-sized rock (either bluestone or a granitic glacial erratic) and was momentarily stunned by its stillness, but when I saw it wasn't a dog, I kept moving. I continued all the way home, by now thinking it a strong possibility that he was somewhere in the house. I found him in the upstair bedroom bed. I didn't look him over in detail, but he wasn't gushing blood and I only saw a few superficial injuries. He actually got out of bed and followed me to the top of the stairs, and I saw that he also seemed to be walking normally. At this point it seemed more important to call off the search than to look him over in detail, so I ran out and found Gretchen and told her that I'd found Neville, that he didn't look too bad, and that she should look him over in more detail. Gretchen told me that the young woman (with whom she'd ridden up and down the Farm Road) was now up towards Reichel Road. I climbed on a bicycle and rode in that direction.
The young woman (whose name is Meghan, we now knew) was near the site of the accident, seemingly almost in a fugue state. I told her Neville had been found and that he didn't look too bad. This came as a huge relief to Meghan, though the look of panic on her face never really faded. She started rambling about how much she loves dogs and that she actually works as a dog sitter. But Neville had just run out in front of her and she hadn't had time to brake. That all made sense to me. "How fast do you think you were going?" I asked. "About 30," she said, adding "I don't drive fast on this road at all."
I put my bike partly in the back of the Prius (a good bit of it was hanging out) and drove back home. Ramona had never left the car.
Gretchen met me in the driveway, saying we had to take Neville to the vet. He apparently had a bad cut on his ankle that was going to need proper stitches, and his lower abdomen was crimson, though there didn't appear to be any serious injury there or much (or any) bleeding.
Though he could probably walk okay, I carried Neville into to the Hurley vet. He didn't look terrible, but the others in the waiting room seemed shock to learn he'd just been hit by a car. We were quickly whisked into an examination room, and Neville's vitals were taken. He weighed 49 pounds and all his other stats seemed normal. There didn't seem to be signs of internal bleeding or trouble with the chest cavity. The angry redness around his penis was apparently "road rash," though it's hard to reconstruct the accident in a way that would cause abrasions there and almost nowhere else (like his paws). It's as if he had been trapped momentarily under the bumper after he was hit and dragged froggy-style against the road's surface.
Gretchen didn't want any vet except Mark (the main guy there) to look at Neville (she'd heard bad stories about the other vet on duty), though it looked like it would take awhile for him to get back from whatever he was doing. Meanwhile, paperwork had just come back from the credit union regarding the mortgage we've been trying to get on our main house so as to pay back Gretchen's parents for the bridge loan they'd extended us for the brick mansion. All it needed was signatures, and there we were stuck at the vet. (And 'd already missed my daily meeting with my remote colleagues.) So while Gretchen stayed with Neville, I drove back home to handle that paperwork and check in with my co-workers, who were freaking out about my reason for missing the meeting. I wasn't there long before Gretchen called to say the vet would be holding Neville until 4:00pm for observation. They would also be giving him a chest x-ray.
I was able to return to work fairly quickly, resuming work on adding multilingual support to a workflow system that I'd begun a couple months ago. I took a 50 milligram dose of Vyvanse to help with that, but the work was engaging enough without it.
Gretchen retrieved Neville at 4:00pm, and brought him home with a cone of shame, a course of antibiotics, tramadol for the pain, an anti-inflamatory called carprofen (for when you've been hit by a car!), and silver sulfadiazine cream for the road rash. The cost for veterinary services this time had come to a little over $400, which was considerably less than Ramona's most recent porcupine quilling, which she (naturally) did during hours when we had to resort to an a pricier emergency vet.
Neville as he gets back from the vet, being greeted by Celeste the Cat (aka "the Baby").
Neville on the bed with his favorite siblings: Clarence the Cat and Ramona the Dog. You can see a new injury on Neville's right muzzle and the road rash near his penis.
At some point Gretchen called Meghan to give her an update. By then Gretchen was in agreement with me that Neville's accident had been entirely our fault, and that it was immoral to try to get Meghan to help pay for Neville's veterinary expenses given that she is, as I put it, "young and poor." We let our dogs run around freely understanding that there are risks attached to such liberty. Our other friends place much more value on safety than they do on liberty, and usually we can have a chuckle at their overprotective impulses. In this case, though, had Neville been in their households instead of ours, he would've never been hit by a car. But he would've also missed out on many unsupervised (and completely accident-free) adventures with Ramona. Roads are inherently dangerous when it comes to dogs and cats, and we've tried to train our dogs never to cross the road or to go into it unsupervised. And so they generally do avoid it, except when some varmint tempts them. But even then, there's a sharp curve in the road near our house, so vehicles are rarely moving very quickly here. The one other time one of our dogs was hit by a car, the injuries didn't rise to the level of requiring professional medical attention. But the place where Neville was hit (41.932712N, 74.110655W) is a different story; it's a relatively-straight stretch of Dug Hill Road we never walk along; Neville and Ramona must've reached it by following trails in the forest. It's likely that Neville barged out into the road in pursuit of some prey animal, though he might've just done it for no particular reason at all. Hopefully, the trauma of being hit by a car will leave a lasting memory about the danger of roads, the danger or cars, the dangers of both, or (at a minimum) the danger of that stretch of road.
Gretchen had existing plans to see the Electric Light Orchestra at Radio City Music Hall with a friend tonight. The Neville incident delayed her trip into the City, but she nevertheless managed to catch the 6:00pm bus. By this point Neville was whimpering almost continuously from his many sources of pain, and the only thing that seemed to make him happy was to be stroked on the head. I had to move the laboratory ottoman beside my workstation to be able to do this, but whenever I felt the need to write a few lines of code, the whimpering would start up again.
Later, though, Neville went into the bedroom and climbed up on the bed with Ramona and Clarence. Evidently he valued their attention much more than mine, because there was no whimpering after he did that.
For linking purposes this article's URL is:
http://asecular.com/blog.php?160916 feedback
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