Cleveland 2: Shasta 0 (and a beautiful wedding)

Well, she's OK now...

We went to Cleveland this weekend to attend our friend Ross's wedding to his fiancee Kristen. The wedding was beautiful and fun. The bride and groom looked amazingly happy and it was wonderful to see them both again and also to see Ross's family, who we hadn't seen for several years.

However.

Ross suggested that we visit North Park in Cleveland before the wedding, since it didn't begin till 4. He gave us directions and we hopped in the car and headed out there around noon. It's a pretty park with some small lakes and bridges and playgrounds and nice walking paths. After we were on the opposite side of the lake from the car, Jim looked down, and said, "Shasta, what do you have?"

There was a piece of fishing line hanging out of her mouth. She was trying to swallow, and so we grabbed her and tried to gently open her mouth and take it out, worried about fishhooks.

We couldn't get it out.

(The last time we were in Cleveland, Shasta ate rat poison left out in Ross's apartment. That resulted in a visit to the emergency vet in Cleveland. At least this time, we knew kind of where it was, and we were a lot closer to it than we had been....)
We spent the next two hours in the waiting room of the emergency vet clinic (the same one), waiting for Shasta to get x-rays so we could see what had happened to her. She wasn't whining but she was drooling like a fountain, and gagging and coughing. Finally, to our consternation, she swallowed the rest of the fishing line.

The vet finally got the xrays and we met with her - 45 minutes before we had to be at the church for the wedding. It turns out the line *did* have a fish hook attached to it and it had impaled itself in her mouth :-(
The vet then proposed sedating her and trying to see if she could cut the fishhook out. We explained about the wedding, and she replied that she'd give us a call when she had news.

Off we went to the wedding...There was a break between the reception and the ceremony. We anxiously stared at the phones, waiting for them to ring. We finally broke down and gave them a call instead. They got the hook out! We jumped in the car to go get our poor puppy (who's so afraid of vets). After another hour spent in the waiting room waiting for them to bring her out, she finally emerged from one of the rooms, with tears streaking her muzzle, her tail between her legs, and a huge lump on her side from subcutaneous fluids. She was so happy to see us.

$485 later (thank God that after our last visit to Cleveland, we bought pet insurance!), we made it back to the hotel. Shasta LOVES hotels. She's been sleeping (with occasional potty breaks) since then.

So in sum, no ill effects, except renewed conviction that Shasta is crazy (fishhooks = food??). We are never bringing her back to Cleveland again.

And we even made it on time to the reception! Yay!