I wouldn't really consider myself brave. But I'm not exactly a coward either. I don't know, I guess it really depends on the situation. I did do something pretty brave last year though:
About one year ago next month, I was at home and as usual and our dogs were downstairs in locked-up in the kitchen as usual. Or so I thought. (We have our kitchen gated off so the puppies won't destroy the house. They're not puppies anymore, but with three of them, they're not exactly trustworthy). So anyway, as soon as I walked downstairs, I saw a ton of blood all over the carpet. It was about 4 x 2 square feet of it right in the middle of the great room. I saw my 8-month-old Pomeranian, Zack, laying on the couch with more blood dripping from his mouth. I was home alone, so there was no one there to help. I immediately called my mom, but it turned out she was in a board meeting and wouldn't be able to talk to me until that evening. So I called our local vet and explained everything I knew. The vet didn't really know what was going on with him, but told me to bring Zack in immediately and that it was an emergency. I called my grandpa to come pick me up and take Zack and I to the clinic. When we got there, three vets checked him out but they couldn't find anything wrong with him except that he was "droopy". But they decided to keep him for further observation in case there's anything they missed. He was at the vet's for two days until they finally figured out what was wrong with him. He has a really rare disease. Our vet (who's in his early fourties) had never seen it in his life and his father (also a vet and about seventy) had only seen it three times before. The disease is called Inflamatory Bowel Disease, which means basically his intestines implode on each other if he gets any protein at all into his system. And being a dog, it's not exactly easy to find non-protein food. He stayed at that vet for another week for an extensive list of surgeries. We then took him to a vet on the north side of town for him to be one of the first dogs to have performed a new type of surgery on. After about $10,000, everything was successful. Zack will be two this January, and he's a perfectly happy, healthy dog. And as it turned out, if we hadn't taken him into the vets that day, he would've died. I'm just glad I was homeschooled at that time. If I was still at the high school I hated in that town, things would've been much, much worse than they were. I was brave in that situation, but I was really scared, too. I was crying so much. That dog was one of my best friends at the time. When I had nobody else. This is a pretty scary situation, especially since I was only sixteen at the time.
17 Oct 2006, 3:52 pm
