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I’ve always been a sucker for males with brown eyes. From
the moment I laid eyes on him, this one really got my heart a pounding! His name
is Fast Eddie and this is his story.
In December of 2006, Eddie came to us from Ohio, already named, at the young age of nine weeks. He was so adorable as all baby Puggles are. A Puggle is considered a “Designer Dog.” This is when you take two purebred dogs of different breeds, in this case a male Pug and a female Beagle, and the final result was an Eddie! Back when I was a kid, the result of this type of doggie bonding was called a “mutt.” My, how times have changed!
Two days after we picked up Eddie at Bradley Airport in Connecticut, a friend came over for dinner. After just a few minutes of watching him, she announced that he shall be called “Fast Eddie” and the name stuck.
Wherever we took Fast Eddie, especially when he was a puppy, grown men would go crazy over him. They smiled while petting him, and they would wave at Eddie as we went driving around town with his head hanging out the window. Mary suggested that we hire him out to women who were looking for gentle-kind men. He's definitely a guy magnet. The bottom line is wherever Fast Eddie went, people would smile and especially at our local veterinary clinic!
Our vets could easily have afforded major renovtions to their clinic after nine emergency visits in a 23-month period. Yes folks, you heard it here first, nine emergency visits! Whenever we called, the first thing they would say is “how soon can you get him here?” The rare times it wasn't an emergency, they ended up being so relieved because they too had fallen under his spell.
Near where we live is an area called “The Old Hospital Grounds” which was a former state mental hospital. On the trails that wind through the property, depending on the season, one can find joggers, riders on horses, cross-country skiers and folks walking their dogs, mostly off leash. That’s where Chloe, our diva dog, and Eddie run loose to their heart’s content.
The first major emergency visit happened in April of 2007, when he was a little over seven months old. I was in the habit of walking both dogs at the park before I headed to work. It was 6:30 a.m. and I had Fast Eddie off leash (mistake #1 of the morning), when he ran under a bush and immediately started chewing on something. It looked to me like a round circle of branches, but it was too pliable. Then I looked again. Oh no, it was a snake! I couldn’t get near him without him going further into the brush. I was yelling at him to drop it and he just looked at me with those adorable brown eyes. At that point, he folded the circle of snake in half and swallowed it whole! There he sat, so proud of himself with a little tip of the snake’s tail hanging out of his mouth. He then swallowed the tail and promptly did a belch that would have made any man proud!
I panicked. I called the Deerfield Emergency Veterinarian Hospital and explained what was going on. They told me I had a 20-minute window in which to give him a tablespoon of hydrogen peroxide so that he would regurgitate the snake. They also mentioned that I should run him around so that it would shake up the peroxide in his tummy. Personally, I wanted to grip him by his little shoulders and shake him silly. I drove home in record time and poured a tablespoon of peroxide down him. I then let him out back in our yet to be fenced backyard (mistake #2 of the morning), where he ran amuck while I chased him all over the place. During this chase, he ate Chloe’s poop and some day lily stems (which I later found out are extremely poisonous to dogs).
At this point, I was ready to strangle him, but I hauled him in and put him in his dog crate. Within minutes his eyes got really huge and he threw up the snake and the day lilies which were all covered in Chloe's poop! Thank goodness for gallon size zip-lock baggies and paper plates. I used two paper plates and scooped up the entire mess and sealed the paper plates within the baggie. By then, it was close enough to 8 a.m. that I decided to take him to our local vets. When I called in route to warn them of our unexpected visit, the staff could not believe that Fast Eddie had eaten a snake. Remember, this was only the first emergency visit and after a while, nothing surprised them when it came to Fast Eddie and his exploits.
On examining the mess in the zip-lock baggie, (I could so hug the person who invented plastic bags), the vet determined that the snake was frozen. Even though it was April 25th, we had just had a cold snap. This is New England after all! The vet tech washed off the snake so they could identify whether it was poisonous or not. It wasn’t, thank goodness! Also, they wanted to see how long it was, and that required defrosting! I’d like to point out that at the time Eddie measured 17 inches from his neck to his tail. And, the snake measured 18 ½ inches and that was without a head! By the way, the head never showed up.
Well that was emergency visit number one from our brown-eyed clown. At the time, I didn’t know there would be eight more visits before he would settle down and stay away from things that slither, scurry, and oh yes, fly.
In December of 2006, Eddie came to us from Ohio, already named, at the young age of nine weeks. He was so adorable as all baby Puggles are. A Puggle is considered a “Designer Dog.” This is when you take two purebred dogs of different breeds, in this case a male Pug and a female Beagle, and the final result was an Eddie! Back when I was a kid, the result of this type of doggie bonding was called a “mutt.” My, how times have changed!
Two days after we picked up Eddie at Bradley Airport in Connecticut, a friend came over for dinner. After just a few minutes of watching him, she announced that he shall be called “Fast Eddie” and the name stuck.
Wherever we took Fast Eddie, especially when he was a puppy, grown men would go crazy over him. They smiled while petting him, and they would wave at Eddie as we went driving around town with his head hanging out the window. Mary suggested that we hire him out to women who were looking for gentle-kind men. He's definitely a guy magnet. The bottom line is wherever Fast Eddie went, people would smile and especially at our local veterinary clinic!
Our vets could easily have afforded major renovtions to their clinic after nine emergency visits in a 23-month period. Yes folks, you heard it here first, nine emergency visits! Whenever we called, the first thing they would say is “how soon can you get him here?” The rare times it wasn't an emergency, they ended up being so relieved because they too had fallen under his spell.
Near where we live is an area called “The Old Hospital Grounds” which was a former state mental hospital. On the trails that wind through the property, depending on the season, one can find joggers, riders on horses, cross-country skiers and folks walking their dogs, mostly off leash. That’s where Chloe, our diva dog, and Eddie run loose to their heart’s content.
The first major emergency visit happened in April of 2007, when he was a little over seven months old. I was in the habit of walking both dogs at the park before I headed to work. It was 6:30 a.m. and I had Fast Eddie off leash (mistake #1 of the morning), when he ran under a bush and immediately started chewing on something. It looked to me like a round circle of branches, but it was too pliable. Then I looked again. Oh no, it was a snake! I couldn’t get near him without him going further into the brush. I was yelling at him to drop it and he just looked at me with those adorable brown eyes. At that point, he folded the circle of snake in half and swallowed it whole! There he sat, so proud of himself with a little tip of the snake’s tail hanging out of his mouth. He then swallowed the tail and promptly did a belch that would have made any man proud!
I panicked. I called the Deerfield Emergency Veterinarian Hospital and explained what was going on. They told me I had a 20-minute window in which to give him a tablespoon of hydrogen peroxide so that he would regurgitate the snake. They also mentioned that I should run him around so that it would shake up the peroxide in his tummy. Personally, I wanted to grip him by his little shoulders and shake him silly. I drove home in record time and poured a tablespoon of peroxide down him. I then let him out back in our yet to be fenced backyard (mistake #2 of the morning), where he ran amuck while I chased him all over the place. During this chase, he ate Chloe’s poop and some day lily stems (which I later found out are extremely poisonous to dogs).
At this point, I was ready to strangle him, but I hauled him in and put him in his dog crate. Within minutes his eyes got really huge and he threw up the snake and the day lilies which were all covered in Chloe's poop! Thank goodness for gallon size zip-lock baggies and paper plates. I used two paper plates and scooped up the entire mess and sealed the paper plates within the baggie. By then, it was close enough to 8 a.m. that I decided to take him to our local vets. When I called in route to warn them of our unexpected visit, the staff could not believe that Fast Eddie had eaten a snake. Remember, this was only the first emergency visit and after a while, nothing surprised them when it came to Fast Eddie and his exploits.
On examining the mess in the zip-lock baggie, (I could so hug the person who invented plastic bags), the vet determined that the snake was frozen. Even though it was April 25th, we had just had a cold snap. This is New England after all! The vet tech washed off the snake so they could identify whether it was poisonous or not. It wasn’t, thank goodness! Also, they wanted to see how long it was, and that required defrosting! I’d like to point out that at the time Eddie measured 17 inches from his neck to his tail. And, the snake measured 18 ½ inches and that was without a head! By the way, the head never showed up.
Well that was emergency visit number one from our brown-eyed clown. At the time, I didn’t know there would be eight more visits before he would settle down and stay away from things that slither, scurry, and oh yes, fly.
That does sound like a nightmare, but at the same time, I must admit that it did make me chuckle, too. You make the absolute worst experiences sound like quite the adventure! I have been around puggles before so I know how hyperactive they all are, but Eddie is really in a category of his own!
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