I thought the z might make the clever word play better. I don’t think it worked.

To update the previous post: The surgery on the dog’s paw was going to be €600 (I don’t like to think what it would have been had it been a remotely tricky or in-depth operation). We took her back to the vet and told them to do an x-ray. They couldn’t do the x-ray the first time, because the machine was playing up, but the vet was very confident it was two fractures (I think I was wrong when I said metac…whatever I said).

It was very lucky we did, because it turns out, there’s no fracture at all – certainly not plural. There’s apparently a vague line which could be a nearly healed sprain (which she didn’t actually show us on the x-ray, and I couldn’t see), and she may have pulled a tendon, which apparently feels a lot like a fracture…or something.

So the dog is now not limping, and we didn’t have to borrow and waste €600.

Because she gets so over excited around other dogs, the vet said they’d make sure no other dogs were put in the kennels with her while she was in for her x-ray. When we went to pick her up, however, we were told she had been very good with her neighbour. When we went in to the kennels, in the cage beside her was a little calf, no bigger than the dog. It was cute. It was also on a drip, and under one of those incubation bulbs.

So all is well with the world. Or at least the dog-in-my-kitchen world. And now someone wants to set me up with the vet.