It's been 2 weeks!

It's time to celebrate - devil dog has been mess-free for 2 weeks! You have to understand that lately, Chase being good for more than 1 day, is nothing short of miraculous.

It all started back in January when I left to Kingston for a 3-day conference. When I got back, Rob told me how sad Chase was while I was away(she SO loves me more). So being the good mother that I am, I cuddled her as much as I could just to show her that I missed her too. BIG mistake! Next thing I know, she made Emily Rose look like Mother Teresa.

When I came home from work that day I opened the front door to a stench I cannot even attempt to describe. She had shit soiled the floor in 4 places, eaten our front entrance mats, tore off chunks of drywall, and chewed off pieces of our wooden bench. You have to understand that she hadn't been destructive since the time we had barricaded her in the kitchen (I'll keep that one for some other time) 2 years ago.

So, in devil dog's best interest, I turned around, stepped on my front porch and lit a cigarette. While I was puffing away, many thoughts came through my mind, and thankfully, many passed. Finally, I said to myself, its a one-time thing, it will pass. WRONG! For weeks I arrived home to the sweet smell of shit and piss (screw being politically correct), wood chips, chewed carpet, and drywall. How silly of me to think that this was 'just a phase'.

After weeks of cleaning up messes we finally went to the vet. Diagnosis: Chase had separation anxiety and a "mild" (could of fooled me) urinary infection. That's nice, but how do we fix it? So for 125$ the vet gave me a pamphlet on the disease and a prescription for her infection. What? No valium? So I read the 100$ pamphlet (the pills were 30$ so you do the math) and it was useless. Didn't learn anything new, said we had to retrain her from scratch. Ha Ha! Good one! So we desperately tried something else.

We noticed that she kept wanting to go into the entrance closet (the destruction proves this theory) that we blocked because she chewed our shoes. So we decided to put the shoes on the top shelf and leave the closet door open. To our amazement, it worked!!! I didn't see THAT in the 100$ pamphlet! The closet being closed seemed to be the source of the problem. Who knew?

What's important here is to emphasize, not the fact that my dog is part devil and part freak, but the fact that she has been mess-free for 2 weeks!! Looks like there will be no need to perform an exorcism afterall!

Keep it up Chase :-)

Double D - out