This hurts me more than it hurts you

Our six-month-old puppy got her lady parts fixed yesterday.  Fixed.  As in - removed.  So that we don't populate the planet with even more puppies, however cute they may be.  

I dropped her off at the clinic early in the morning and Aquaman picked her up late in the afternoon.  He said she walked out on a leash fine, but then just kind of stood there.  Then she laid right down in the waiting room.

When I came home, she still managed to haul herself up out of her bed and greet me and the twins at the door in her cone of shame.  Only now, I'm calling it the cone of pain.  Because it hurts real bad when she slams into your legs with it.  Which she does.  About twenty times a day.

She hasn't let the pain meds slow her down any, either.  She can't navigate the back steps to the yard very well, but she goes just as quickly, stumbling the entire way.  If she wants to go out, she still sits by the back door, and still tries to push open the storm door with her nose.  The same nose that is now about an inch lower than the white plastic cone of shame/pain.  So she just scrapes it up against the door and pushes.  It works.

I'll admit that I was kind of hoping that she'd be more, I don't know, down for the count for a few days.  But I'll be damned if she didn't jump up on one boy's bed this morning to snuggle up with him.  And she was up on the couch this afternoon.  She even attempted to jump up on one boy returning from school.  Damn it.

She'll be on pain meds for three days and in the cone of shame/pain for two weeks when we'll return to have her staples removed from the incision.  I think everyone in the house will have bruised shins by that time.  My favorite depiction of the cone of shame is in the Disney animated movie Up.  If you haven't seen it, you really should.