I’ve always been a sucker for males with brown eyes. From the moment I laid eyes on him, this one really got my heart pounding! His name is Fast Eddie and this is his story.
In December of 2006, Eddie came to us from Ohio, already named, at the age of nine weeks. He was so adorable as all baby Puggles are. A Puggle is considered a “Designer Dog.” This is when you take two purebred dogs of different breeds, in this case a male Pug and a female Beagle, and the final result is a “Puggle.” Back when I was a kid, the result of this type of doggie bonding was called a “mutt.” My, how times have changed!
Two days after we picked up Eddie at Bradley Airport in Connecticut, a friend came over for dinner. After just a few minutes of watching him, she announced that he shall be called “Fast Eddie” and the name stuck.
Whenever we take Fast Eddie out, especially when he was a puppy, but even now, grown men go crazy over him. They coo at him, they giggle, they rub his head, and they wave at him as we go driving around town, his head hanging out the window. My partner suggested that we hire him out to women looking for men. He is a guy magnet. The bottom line is wherever Fast Eddie goes, people smile…especially at our local veterinary clinic!
Our vets should name a wing after him what with nine emergency visits in a 23-month period. Yes folks, you heard it here first: nine emergency visits! Whenever we call, the first thing they say is “how soon can you get him here?” The rare times it hasn’t been an emergency, they end up being so relieved because they too have fallen under his spell.
Near where we live is an area called “The Old Hospital Grounds” which was a former state mental hospital. On the trails that wind through the property, depending on the season, one can find joggers, riders on horses, cross-country skiers and folks walking their dogs, mostly off leash. That’s where Chloe, our diva dog, and Eddie run loose to their heart’s content.
The first major emergency visit happened in April of 2007 when he was a little over seven months old. I am in the habit of walking them at the park before I goto work. So it was about 6:30 in the morning and I had Fast Eddie off leash (mistake #1 of the morning), when he ran under a bush and immediately started chewing on something. It looked to me like a round circle of branches, but it was too pliable. Then I looked again. Oh my gosh, it was a snake! I couldn’t get near him without him running further into the brush. I was yelling at him to drop it and he just looked at me with those adorable brown eyes. At that point, he folded the circle of snake in half and swallowed it whole! There he sat, so proud of himself with a little tip of the snake’s tail hanging out of his mouth. He then swallowed the tail and promptly did a belch that would make any man proud!
I panicked. I called the emergency veterinarian hospital. They told me I had a 20-minute window in which to give him a tablespoon of hydrogen peroxide so that he would regurgitate the snake. They also mentioned that I should run him around in the backyard so that it would shake up the peroxide in his tummy. Personally, I wanted to grip him by his little shoulders and shake him silly. I drove home in record time and poured a tablespoon of peroxide down him. I then let him out back in our un-fenced yard (mistake #2 of the morning), where he ran wild while I chased him all over the place. During this chase, he ate dog poop and some day lily stems (which are extremely poisonous to dogs).
At this point, I was ready to strangle him, but I hauled him inside and put him in his dog crate. Within minutes his eyes got really huge and he threw up both the snake and day lilies all covered in poop! Thank goodness for gallon size zip-lock baggies and paper plates. I used two paper plates and scooped up the mess and sealed the paper plates inside the baggie. By then, it was close enough to 8 a.m. that I decided to take him to our local vets. When I called en route to tell Devon of our unexpected visit, she just couldn’t believe that Fast Eddie had eaten a snake. Remember, this was only the first emergency visit and after awhile, nothing surprised them when it came to Fast Eddie and his exploits.
On examining the mess in the zip-lock baggie, (I could so hug the person who invented plastic bags), the vet determined that the snake was frozen. Even though it was April 25th, we had just had a cold snap. This is New England after all! The vet tech washed off the snake so they could identify whether it was poisonous or not. It wasn’t, thank goodness! Also, they wanted to see how long it was, and that required defrosting! I’d like to point out that at the time of this incident, Eddie measured 17 inches from his neck to his tail. And, the snake measured 18 ½ inches with a missing head! By the way, the snake’s head never did show up.
That’s emergency visit number one from our brown-eyed clown. Watch this space for more of the adventures of Fast Eddie.
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