An unfortunate incident with a stick.

Well, it wasn't the way I envisioned spending my evening, but an unexpected turn of events just landed us at the emergency vet for the past few hours and reunited Sawyer with his old friend the e-collar.

I'll spare you all the gory details, but basically a game of fetch with a large stick ended very poorly. Sawyer was in his usual hurry to catch and drop the stick, which bounced up and struck him underneath his belly, leaving him with a nasty puncture wound in the leg/groin area.

All in all, we are coming away from this very lucky. As the vet put it, the puncture wound was "alarmingly close" to his femoral artery and femoral nerve. After some inspection and cleanup  (there was a small amount of trauma and wood to deal with inside the wound) Sawyer was able to walk away with just some antibiotics, pain medicine, and the devil collar.

He's got a bit of a limp and you can tell he's in some pain, but I think the collar is upsetting him more then the actual wound. (He's been standing behind me panting for the last fifteen minutes or so as I write this. He's very leery of laying down. Could be the sore, but he's had some pain meds, so I suspect it's the collar.)

See how he's standing there with his back hips bent. He wants to lay down so bad, but he just can't bring himself to do it. Poor guy!

Sawyer has always loved sticks and I've honestly been worried something like this might happen for a while now. Suffice it to say, if you come to my house, games of fetch with sticks or other potentially hazards items are going to be strictly forbidden. We'll be sticking to more flesh friendly items like balls and frisbees from here on out.