Three years ago tonight, at about ten o'clock, Hank threw up on the living room floor. Then he did it again, walked to the back door and stood there with his head hanging low. I offered him a cube of cheese, which is the official test in our house, and he turned his face away from it. Hank has never turned down cheese, before or since. That was when I knew.
It was Thanksgiving 2022, our first holiday in this house. We'd lived in Cambridge for about three months. My parents had driven down from Mora, Caleb's had come over from Braham, and we roasted a 14-pound turkey with its legs tied together with butcher's twine, exactly the way the recipe said.
How it happened
Caleb carved. He snipped the twine off the drumsticks and dropped it into the roasting pan, which was still half full of drippings, and I made gravy out of most of what was left. The pan went to the back of the counter to cool. We ate, we had pie, we sat around groaning. At some point Hank, who was two and a half and a very tall dog with no shame about counters, got his front paws up and cleaned out that pan.
Nobody saw it. When I washed the pan around eight, one corner was strangely clean. I'd spent ten years at vet clinics by then and heard the string warning more times than I could count, and on my own counter, on my own holiday, it never crossed my mind.
The counter at midnight
By eleven we were in the Outback driving south to the emergency hospital in the north metro, Hank curled up in the back seat and Caleb driving exactly the speed limit, which is how he drives when he's scared. We walked in around 11:40.
The vet on duty asked the question I've heard my own coworkers ask a thousand times: "Any chance he got into something?" I said I didn't think so. Caleb said, "The string." We looked at each other. I hadn't seen it in the trash. I hadn't seen it anywhere.
The X-rays showed a pattern in his intestines she didn't like, the kind string can cause when it bunches everything up behind it. Then she slid an estimate across the counter. I had handed out hundreds of those. Standing on the other side of one near midnight, with Hank's leash wrapped around my hand, I could barely read the numbers. We paid the deposit, signed the forms and drove home without our dog.
The surgeon took the twine out Friday morning, the whole length of it, and called just after lunch to say it had gone about as well as it could. Hank stayed Friday night too. We picked him up Saturday afternoon: a cone, a shaved belly, a long row of staples and a dog who leaned his entire weight against my shins in the lobby.
The bill, and how we paid it
Two nights in the hospital, the exam, X-rays, bloodwork, anesthesia, surgery and take-home medications came to $3,912. We had no pet insurance. My staff discount only works at my own clinic, so it never came into it.
We put it on a credit card that happened to have a 0% intro rate, made a plan to clear it before the rate ran out, and paid roughly $435 a month until August 2023. Those were lean months. We ate a lot of hotdish and skipped a trip up north we'd been talking about all year. I still think about the people who don't have a card like that every time an estimate crosses my counter at work.
What we changed afterward
- Pet insurance, the next week. I enrolled Hank in an accident-and-illness policy the week after he came home. It started December 1, 2022, at $41.80 a month. Anything related to the twine surgery is excluded for good, which is fair. You can't buy fire insurance while the garage is burning.
- String and bones go to the garage. Twine, bones and drippings-soaked paper towels go straight out to the garbage can in the garage, never the kitchen can.
- Greasy pans don't cool on the counter. They cool in the oven with the door shut.
- The dog is elsewhere during carving. Hank spends carving and cleanup behind the baby gate with a frozen Kong. He tolerates this.
- A savings account just for the pets. Later we opened the pet fund, the separate account I mention here a lot, so the next surprise wouldn't have to land on a credit card.
That's our kitchen now, not a rulebook for anyone else's. If your own dog gets into something stringy, your vet or the nearest emergency hospital is the call to make, and the earlier call is the better one.
On Thursday we're driving up to my parents' in Mora, and Hank is coming along. My dad, who was at our table in 2022, now cuts the twine off his own turkey, carries it out to the garage can in his bare hands and comes back in announcing "String's out!" like a man who has defused something. My mom rolls her eyes every single year. Hank, who has no idea any of this is about him, watches the garage door the whole time.
