Dance Night at the Vet
Fifteen months, seventy-five pounds each, and a memory of the last vet visit that apparently did not survive the six-month growth spurt.
Captain and Morgan’s first checkup was a formality. Two puppies who fit in your lap, who flinched at the stethoscope and forgot to flinch at the needle, who let the vet tech do her job while you stood there feeling like a proud but unnecessary bystander. This one was a negotiation.
The exam table at our vet is elevated, hydraulic, built to bring a dog up to a comfortable working height. It is sized for one dog. Nobody explained this to Captain and Morgan, who arrived at the conclusion that if one dog belonged up there, two clearly belonged up there, and set about making the case with their whole bodies. The vet tech looked at seventy-five pounds of golden retriever occupying roughly a hundred and ten percent of the available surface, looked at the second seventy-five pounds attempting to join it, and made a business decision. She stepped back and let them sort it out.
The vet worked around whichever dog had claimed the table at a given moment, and I became the one keeping the other occupied, upright, and off the exam in progress. There was no plan to this. There was just a rotation, unspoken and constantly renegotiated, the kind of thing we’d call a Dosey-doe down here, and I was the only participant in the room who hadn’t signed the dance card.
Fecal float. Blood work. Vaccinations. Ears washed out. Somewhere in there the vet checked positioning; the kind of exam that requires a hand where a dog has opinions. Morgan gave me a look over his shoulder I hadn’t seen since puppy vaccinations. Captain, watching his brother go through it, took his time considering the situation and decided the moment called for a thorough grooming session of his own undercarriage. Whether that was preparation or a goodbye, I couldn’t tell you.
Every step required a fresh round of diplomacy after that, the kind where you’re not so much handling the dog as absorbing him, redirecting seventy-five pounds of enthusiasm one joint at a time. Somewhere between brother’s grope and documenting, Captain worked out that the trash can in the corner was worth investigating and was three steps into a plan about it. Morgan skipped the planning stage entirely and left the elevated table to defend the trash can. It was at this moment that my L4 vertebrae announced its retirement from active duty with a pop I felt in my back teeth.
I did not stop. There wasn’t really an option. I kept moving through both of them like a man who had this handled, which was its own kind of lie, and decided, mid-spasm, that the floor was not a place I wanted to end up in a room with two dogs who outweighed the furniture.
We finished. Everyone got their shots, their exam, their clean bill of toddler-strength health. The vet tech handed me a printout of results I would read later, once I could stand up straight enough to hold paper at reading distance. Captain and Morgan trotted out to the parking lot looking exactly as they had going in, unbothered, unburdened, like the whole thing had been the point.
I got them loaded into the car, worked my way around to the driver’s seat one careful inch at a time, and before I put the key in the ignition I turned around and asked them which one of them wanted to drive.
Neither answered. Well, that was fun.
