Emergency Grapes - A Little Engines reading at AWP

This is the essay I read from at the Little Engines reading Thursday morning at AWP. Originally on TinyLetter, so thought I'd repost the whole thing now that I'm at Substack.

What I’ve come to understand about my first marriage is how everyone hurt everyone. He hurt me when I asked him if I was the prettiest girl he’d ever been with (Yes! It was a trick!) but he said no perhaps because he knew it was a trick but either way, after he realized what he’d done, he felt guilty and bought me potpourri from Pottery Barn. I didn’t end things in the best way. Six years into our marriage, I blew into the house one day after work, told him I was moving out because I didn’t want to try anymore.

            This past Thursday, I blew into my current house as my husband was setting the table and my daughter was already eating and announced my breakthrough. Family! Others cause pain to me, and I cause pain to Others because we are all human beings who love and hurt, and we get forgiveness or we don’t forever until the end, the end. Then I launched into a whole thing about this old fridge my ex-husband brought home. It was his ex-girlfriend’s that she’d kept in storage, and I had to clean it out and I hated it. And his ex-girlfriend had my name and so it was the Dirty Stephanie Fridge and meanwhile, in all that distraction, my daughter, the 8 year old picky eater, announced she’d finished her grapes. She’s to try new food a few times a week at each meal, but it’s an ordeal. She’s not willing or happy about any of it, and sometimes we sit at the table for an hour talking her through taking a bite of, say, a small carrot. But that night was grapes, and that night, she gleefully announced she’d finished.

You ate all your grapes? I said.

            YES, she said.

            The dog knows to perch under my daughter’s chair, because my daughter drops food all the time, and the dog was, indeed perched under her chair.

            My dog is a compulsive and destructive chewer and one thing that helps is semi-regular sanctioned bones. I get two each month as part of an autoship, and we happened to get the autoship that day. The box was open on the counter, so I called the dog away from the table and gave her the bone so we could all finish eating in peace.

            My husband asked again: Did you give your grapes to the dog?

            Grapes are bad for dogs, I said. (I don’t know exactly how but I know they’re not supposed to eat them.)

            No, the 8yo said looking into our eyes, I didn’t give grapes to the dog.

            If you gave her grapes, I need to know right now, I said.

            Silence.

            How many grapes are bad for dogs? she asked.

            Pinkie swear you didn’t give grapes to the dog! I said and that was the straw. She started crying. I offered the world a deep sigh. My dog is a trash compactor. She’s three and I’m at a point where I accept there’s a certain amount of garbage she consumes each week. Like, cleaning up the dog poop in the yard every few days is a what’s what of destruction. LOL body parts, paper, wrappers, and colored doll hair sticking up every which way. We’ve been through three accidental chocolate ingestions. Animal Poison Control (not free) advised me: a tiny (very tiny) mixture of hydrogen peroxide and water induces vomiting in dogs if you can do it within 20-30 minutes of them ingesting a food they shouldn’t have ingested. You can only do this with food not objects (which she has also swallowed, that we have to wait for to show up outside). By time she breaks down and admits everything, it was past the thirty minute point.  

            I googled grapes/dogs, which was tragic. Each story was the worse than the next.  

            My daughter was still crying, asking if the dog was going to die, then asking if she was in trouble. I told her *probably not* because this dog has a stomach of steel but she needs to throw up, and it’s too late for the hydrogen peroxide, but yes, you’re in trouble for lying, which I will have to deal with later.

            I called the after-hours number for our vet. If you have never called an emergency line to ask about grapes, then you have never, ever lived.

            This woman was like THROW DOWN YOUR PHONE and take her to the hospital. TAKE HER TO THE HOSPITAL.  

Grapes, even one or two, can shut down their kidneys and they’ll die. Or they won’t. Grapes have no effect on some dogs, but we don’t know which dogs. You must treat a single grape as the biggest emergency of your life.

            I put a leash on the dog and sighed HEAVILY and drove to the Emergency Vet and burst into the crowded waiting room. Everyone swiveled. Their attention all for me. I threw my hands up in the air as if to say I’ve spent my life with massive amounts of anxiety, and I have broken myself, can no longer distinguish an actual crisis and anyway, my dog is in the car, she ate some grapes, she needs to throw up, but she’s violently reactive to other dogs so I can’t bring her in here.  

            They told me to wait outside. A tech came out. She explained how they’d take my dog to the back, intravenously give her a medication to make her vomit and we’d be done with it. I said, no, no. No, no. This dog is lovely and sweet, sort of, but her own vet has to sedate her to even trim her nails. You’re not going to get a needle in her while she’s awake. The tech says to me, “I’ve been doing this a long time.” That’s when I knew we were in for it.  

You’re not going to get an IV in this dog, I told her. Her own vet’s office has to sedate her just to give her a shot. This dog is loving and sweet but she doesn’t like anyone to come near her with things in their hands and she’s super high strung.  

            We’re dog wranglers, the tech said again, we’ve got this.

Ten minutes later.

            We can’t get the muzzle on her, the tech said.

            It’s almost 9 p.m. at this point. Four hours since the grapes. I was tired. I was angry at the dog. None of this was her fault. It’s my fault. Four trainers. Thousands of dollars to get her to a tolerable behavior level, which isn’t even that tolerable.

            They sent in a new tech. A seasoned tech. We had a nice conversation about difficult dogs, and she commended me for keeping my dog in the first place and continuing to work with her and at that moment, some tears did spill over because acknowledgement is nice and then I said, “I put more effort into this dog than I put in my first marriage.”   

            Plan B: There’s these eyedrops they can use, and the eye drops induce vomiting. Which sounds fucking awful.

            Clock check-in: The grapes might be shutting her kidneys down at this very moment or they might be doing nothing.

            The tech said I was the one who had to do the eyedrops. So fun! Took twenty minutes but I finally got one drop in one eye and then. AND THEN.

My dog began to vomit uncontrollably.

            Uncontrollably.

            UNCONTROLLABLY.  

            Within five minutes, there were four large piles of yellow-chunky dog vomit. The tech put on a glove. Let’s move you to a new, fresh room, the tech said, and I’m gonna look for bits of grape.

            We settled in the new room. She vomited again. Lighter chunks but still chunks. No grapes that I could see. I cleaned it up. She vomited again. Bile. She vomited again. More bile. She trotted around the room looking for a clean place to vomit and in the process, dragged her lease through vomit and stepped in the vomit. I used all the paper towels. She vomited again. This is the vomit room. Now, we’re in the vomit room. I used Kleenex. Guess what is not a good tool to clean up DOG VOMIT? Yes, that’s right. Kleenex. Five more piles of dog vomit. The smell in the room was making me ill.

            The vet himself entered the room. He was tall, had an elfin haircut. He was young, younger than me, which is a thing I’ve noticed in the last few years. Doctors and what not are all young now.  Like, my gynecologist was probably in high school when I was in college, drunk on the floor devastated about how some terrible man didn’t like me.

The vet told me his tech found enough of the grapes that he felt all right, but anyway, we recommend keeping her overnight and taking her blood to check her kidneys and giving her IV fluids and all of this will have to be under sedation because she’s a hot mess and I was like, how much would that cost, and he said $3,000 and I stood up and said we’ll take our chances at home.    

The tech from earlier knocked on the door then and showed me part of a bone she found in the vomit. It was almost as big as her palm. I don’t want to alarm you, she said, but I found this in one of the piles of vomit and can’t believe she didn’t choke on it, and I said, I don’t want to alarm you, but that’s not even the biggest thing she’s swallowed.

We got home close to 11 p.m. The dog was exhausted. I was exhausted. I put the leash in the sink and scrubbed it. I used Lysol wipes to clean the bottom of my shoes. I took a warm wet cloth and wiped my dog’s mouth, where bits of bile had dried all crusty, and I wiped her feet, where she’d walked in the vomit and she curled up and went to sleep.

The dog is fine. While I’ve been writing this, she’s interrupted me six times because she’s gotten her ball under the couch and whines and cries until I stop what I’m doing to get it for her. I asked my daughter to write a paragraph about why she did what she did: lied to me when I asked her if she ate the grapes. She’s 8, so I didn’t think it would be a masterpiece, and what I wanted was for her to start to understand why she made the choice she made. I know why she did it, but I want her to know why she did it. Make your choices but understand where those choices come from inside of you.

Grapes are bad for dogs, my daughter wrote, and I didn’t know that but now I do.

(Thank you again

Adam Voith

for asking me to be a part of the coolest reading at AWP.)

The dog in question.