Sir Lance-or-not?
We currently live in a small two-story townhouse which obviously has a set of stairs. We also have a small foo-foo dog (Schooner) who has decided that he can no longer go up of down these stairs on his own and he has to be carried. He is 10 years old, or 70 years old in dog life, so I’ll cut him some slack but still, he can jump up on the sofa but I still have to carry his furry butt up and down the stairs all day long. My mother in law is over 80 and I don’t have to carry her up and down the stairs when she visits. With all of this in mind I carry him daily.
Recently, when I was getting ready to leave the house, I knew I had to take Schooner down stairs and put him up to keep him from having the run of the downstairs. As usual I grabbed a dog biscuit for him and, not having the time to have lunch, I grabbed me a Ritz Cracker to hold me over. With dog in one hand and biscuit and cracker in the other I walked down the stairs. About 5 steps from the bottom my feet slipped on the wooden steps, flew out from under me, and I found myself horizontal probably 3 feet above the ground headed down to the nice soft wooden stairs and tile floor below me. Luckily my whole life didn’t pass before my eyes but time did seem to just creep by as Mean Mr. Gravity took over. My first thought was to hang on to the dog and take the force of the landing with my body which I did with a forceful blow. I ended up with my feet on the first floor hall but my body sprawled head high up the stairs. It took a few milliseconds for the pain to hit but it seemed like hours. The wait for the pain was filled with a dreaded anticipation (kind of like when you are driving around in a car with your mother listening to a country music song you have never heard of before and the previous chorus ended with the word “truck”). You know the feeling and when it did hit it hit with a vengeance. All breath left my body and I could do nothing but just lay there hurting. When you land like that it seems like everything from foot to head hurts and every part is trying to outdo all of the other parts for attention. Somehow through all this the dog safely crawled down my body and ended up on the first floor surface unharmed. As I laid there waiting for the pretty stars to diminish and the pain to fade I couldn’t help but think of how many times I had made fun of the “I’ve fallen and I can’t get up” commercial and now I was a prime candidate for the next commercial but then it struck me. I remembered the Lassie episode when grandma somehow fell into the well and couldn’t get out (I believe it started when she was taking Pepto Bismol and she read “Shake well before using” and while she was doing that she did she slipped and fell in but that’s just a theory). Anyway Lassie went over to draw out some water, heard grandma screaming, went to the phone to dial 911, saw that it was a rotary dial and knew that would work (lack of fingers issue), ran 15 miles to Ranger Rick’s house and wrote “Grand Ma stuck in well” on an etch-a-sketch lying on Ranger Rick’s living room floor and, of course, Grandma was saved. Well I had one of those knights in shining armor right there at my feet. Schooner could be the hero. Schooner could go for help. It would be a lot easier now since I had a cell phone in my pocket and it had buttons you push. Schooner could pull the cell phone out of my pocket, dial 911 (I don’t know if I ever told him the phone number for 911 but hopefully he could figure that out) and he could call for help. Next week we could be on the Good Morning America Show with him in my laps and me explaining how he had saved my life. I called his name out a couple of times and then I felt Schooner’s cold nose nudging my hand. He had climbed up a couple of stairs and was making sure I was alright kind of like Lassie would have done to Timmy in the same situation but wait, Schooner wasn’t just nudging my hand, he was actually lifting my hand. Was he checking my pulse? Even Lassie could do that. I was dazed but impressed none the less but then I figured out the staggering truth. He wasn’t checking to see if I was alive. He was pulling the food out of my hand. This is the same dog that wouldn’t climb the stairs on his own. He was now up 3 stairs pulling food out of my dying hand. What makes it worse was he wasn’t taking his biscuit, he was going for my Ritz Cracker. As I laid there I remembered another episode where Lassie went and got a 3/8” box end wrench so Timmy could take the gate apart to save the family horse from the barn fire and my dog, man’s best friend, was using this occasion to steal my Ritz Cracker. I don’t know what hurt the most, the pain from the fall or the truth that my well-being fell second in Schooner’s eyes to a Ritz Cracker. After a few minutes I got to where I could move and I was up and going but damaged in many ways beyond the pain from the fall.
As you can imagine I survived the whole ordeal. A sore back, damaged pride, and a considerable loss of respect for this whole “Man’s Best Friend” thing. I’m thinking about getting Schooner a collar stitched with “WWLD”. It probably wouldn’t help.
