Start from the beginning.

In the summer of 2011 I was working in a hair salon and just kind of.. dinking around, as it were. I thought I always wanted to do hair, and so I went to school and did hair. I adopted my first dog, Smalls, from a municipal shelter in November of 2006 and subsequently got more and more into dogs. Not like, living in a camper trailer with 50 Toy Poodles eating wet dog food to survive, but pretty into dogs, specially rescue dogs. My experience in adopting Smalls was really not a great one.  I found her on PetFinder.com as a wee baby and it was love at first. My then roommate and I drove a ~8 hour round trip to a tiny rural shelter after I had put my name on her a few days previous to spare her from euthanasia should space become limited. The shelter checked in to make sure I was still coming to get her a day before I did, and all was sound. Until it wasn’t. When I showed up we waited a long time before a woman informed me she had Parvovirus and would very likely die. I was a bit perplexed since she was reported fine the day before and after she reported it was determined that morning I asked to see my dog anyway, because at that point she was my dog.

A janitor (yes, a janitor) took us back to her kennel. In it was a very lively puppy, which is not synonymous with Parvo, but the surrounding kennel walls, blanket, and puppy herself was covered in blood. I picked her up to take a look and found what I later learned at the vet to be a severely prolapsed rectum. All I knew at the time that this wasn’t parvo. I don’t recall much of what the janitor said, but he remarked that he really liked that puppy and he hoped I would take her so she would have a chance. Of course I would. I already saw her face.

I paid a $15 adoption fee for her, the desk lady told me if she died over the weekend they’d refund my money, and we were off back home. My memories are a bit fuzzy, but I have a distinct memory of the smell and.. projectiles. I tried my best to hold her without causing further injury, but any pressure on her belly would release a liquid spray- directly onto my roommate’s jacket. It took me roughly a year or two to admit to him why I was laughing so hard that long car ride home.

She went to the vet and required an expensive surgery to correct a prolapsed rectum and ruptured small intestine. She was given basically zero chance of survival with those injuries at being estimated as merely 5 weeks old. I received this word while I was working in a local grocery store. I didn’t know how I’d pay for that surgery up front, but I did know zero chance and doing something is better than zero chance and doing nothing. Now this is where I remember the times I wish I treated my human counter parts better, but I remember my roommates offering to kick in money to get this little gal surgery. To make a long story a little bit shorter, she did in fact survive her surgery and we’ve been together nearly 7 years now. The vet filed some paperwork and we learned that this wasn’t something that happened in the morning, she had been like that likely long before I even put my name on her. There was gangrene present in her intestines, so she lost a fair amount of them during the surgery, and she was extremely emaciated. At no point did she receive medical care or was euthanized at the shelter, at no point was I informed of her condition, and I never claimed that $15.

That was my first experience in rescue. My next experiences adopting and volunteering were roughly on the same plain. Then I started working for the abomination that is the SPCA of Southwest Michigan in the summer of 2011, which is where this story and Elsa’s starts. So, as this blog goes along, you might be wondering..What the hell did you get into?

Well, I’ll get to that.