Worms, Of the Ear and the Heart

Do you ever completely fall in love with a song? Like you want to live in the song? And then you put it on an iTunes loop for like four hours and sing along every time?

Weird, because me neither.

(It's 'I Do' and it's old but you can listen to it there for free and not pay for it like a sucker, not that I know any of those.)

Ahhh, Maggie.

Maggie has heartworms. Yikes. Worms in her heart! We thought she was calming down because she was getting older, but it turns out that she was really being eaten from the inside out, heart first. Neat.

Since her diagnosis (about a month ago), everything that used to piss us off is suddenly really cute-tinged-with-sad. But she's also been really, really good. Shockingly good considering she's suddenly all alone all day again. Aside from an incident with a loaf of focaccia, there hasn't been anything since the 3-lbs of coffee mishap. Did I tell you about that one?

(What you can't really see in that picture is how *much* goddamn coffee is in one of those big cans. Piles on the floor, piles on the furniture. Nor can you understand the pretty patterns formed when a dog noses a can of coffee all around a living room. Nor did I have any interest in capturing the part where Maggie ate our living room carpet while on a bad caffeine trip.)

Today she went in for the first part of the three-part treatment. The scary thing about heartworms (I bet you thought it was the part where there are long, white worms in my dog's heart--you are wrong) is that the treatment can be fatal.

First, the poison they inject to kill the worms is also lethal to dogs. Second, it kills the worms and that's it. It doesn't get rid of the worms. Soon the Maggot will have a heart full of dead worms. Any exertion could cause her to throw a clot and die. Again, neat.

The remedy is to keep her calm-no running, jumping, or playing-until her body can reabsorb the worms.

And how long will that take?

A FREAKING MONTH.

If you need your memory refreshed, browse through this blog and read about some of Maggie's adventures. Read about how she freaks out regularly. Read about how putting her into a crate (the vet's suggestion for keeping her calm) throws her into superfreak mode (think: David Banner becoming The Hulk). And I've never told you how sometimes she does what my mom calls "wild woman" where for no reason, with no provocation, she just starts running laps full-fucking-tilt around the house, yard, living room, kitchen table with this crazed look in her eye and her tongue hanging out the side of her mouth.

Then, please, help me figure out how we are going to keep her alive for the next month.