Our most recent canine addition to our family - Kaiya - suffers from happy tail. If you've never heard of it, it's what happens when you have a dog who's so emphatically waggy that they injure themselves whacking their tail into things. The first time we came home to a blood-covered wall, the vet advised us to get her tail docked.
She's a lab/pitbull mix and loves to go swimming. She loves to play fetch in the local river with her floaty toys. We were reticent to get the procedure done during river season, so we kept her tail wrapped to protect it.
Unfortunately, Kaiya developed a tendency to pull the wrapping off - exposing her to re-injury. We had been addressing this with a comfy-cone. Unfortunately, because she's still quite young, she's also quite flexible. Sometime Friday night, she'd managed to pull the protective bandage off - in spite of the cone - and had chewed the end of her tail. Sometime between Saturday night and Sunday afternoon, where she'd chewed got infected and painful. Took her to visit the vet for an emergency visit. The wound was irrigated and she was given pain meds and antibiotics ...and put on today's schedule for tail-docking.
Just got back from dropping her off at the vet for surgery sometime, today. I know she needs the procedure done - especially since it got infected. But it still feels like I'm penalizing her for being a very happy dog. Of course, the fact that it's now an urgent procedure and she was in pain from the infection compounds the "I'm a bad dog-parent" feeling because I wasn't able to protect her from herself well enough.
Yeah... I would have been a mess each time my kid hurt themselves had we actually been able to have kids.
