Our Medcon Adventure, Part 7

The MedCon adventure culminated with a massive banquet on Saturday night, complete with a fabulous meal and the obligatory convention banquet banter from the podium filled with inside jokes I didn't get. I didn't care, though, because I was full of good food and decent wine and an assortment of tasty desserts.

On Sunday, the wife and I lit out around noon and headed up to Georgetown so I could introduce her to Five Guys Burgers. She agreed it was a tasty burger, but I suspect she didn't find the journey nor the crowds nor the near obscene lack of parking to be worth the trip. We didn't stick around very long after lunch, preferring to get the long journey back to Borderland underway.

The whole trip home, we kept talking about how we really wished we could go pick up Sadie from the vet that evening. I knew this was a futile wish, as the vet was closed, but despite knowing she was well taken care-of, our parental guilt at having left her with strangers for six days was overwhelming. I told the wife that I'd promised Sadie I would be on site at 8:30 when they opened to pick her up. Unfortunately, the vet told me that pickup time for the kennel didn't start until 10 a. Add to that the fact that this was also daylight savings time weekend, which added another hour and then add that I neglected to set all the clocks ahead and it was nearly 10 a by the time I realized it, and Sadie had a bit longer of a wait than promised.

I brought the new video camera with me to document her release.



The staff said she had been kind of freaked out for the first day of her stay, but settled down after that. One of the vet techs who worked there had even befriended her, for she went right over to him and licked his hand when he came out to say good bye. He mentioned that he thought she was too smart for her own good, as it had taken him 20 minutes to corral her back into the kennel after one of her five or six daily yard-sessions.

After leaving the vet's we headed for the wife's office for a reunion visit. After that, we had a good long walk in the park, which is where I noticed that Sadie was attempting to take a whiz about once every two minutes. I knew this wasn't normal behavior for her, but didn't know if the exposure to the no doubt stratified layers of dog urine in the vet's exercise yard had blown a territorial fuse in her, causing her to pee on everything, or if she was suffering from what I suspected was a urinary tract infection. Turns out the latter, which I learned after returning her to the vet's office that afternoon. The vet said that such infections were common in stressful situations, such as a first time away from home and owners, and a couple weeks of antibiotics would knock it out. They did.