My dog Harper is a very good boi. He isn’t destructive, he doesn’t take my car without asking, and unlike my beloved, yet undeniably quirky dogs past, he neither retrieves used Q-tips from the trash nor barks at patterned wallpaper. He does, however, have a mile-wide stubborn streak regarding the issue of nail clipping. For the past nine years, his profound aversion to this grooming task has been the source of much hand wringing on my part and paw withholding on his. Not to mention, “bad behavior” surcharges routinely paid to groomers.
With the surcharges mounting, I decided to take another shot at tackling the job myself. I researched the latest nail trimmers on the internet and got suckered into purchasing more than a few, falsely reassured by photos of dogs just reveling in their home pedicures. They looked more relaxed than Madge’s manicure clients in those old Palmolive commercials. I swear if they’d had opposable thumbs, these dogs would have been holding glasses of wine.
Total propaganda, at least as far as Harper was concerned. I tried nearly every nail gadget on the market, but he wasn’t having it. Forget the wine; it seemed to me Harper would need a hit of propofol to be at ease with a pedicure. Case in point, the best nail trim Harper ever had was while he was anesthetized for surgery last month. After Harper’s second $1,200 surgery in a year, our vet threw in a nail clipping for free. So generous.
But since I can neither count on nor afford Harper being anesthetized on a regular basis, the other night I had to buckle down and attack his bird-of-prey talons as best I could. Though conscious, Harper was sleeping soundly on his side. His position, good ear flat against the floor, deaf ear facing up, allowed me to get the jump on him. Armed with clippers and a few treats, I had him by the paw before he heard me coming. Drowsiness and a liver treat kept him subdued enough for me to get in a few careful snips without the customary clapperclawing.
I finished one front paw and was halfway through the other with, amazingly, no resistance from Harper. My confidence was building when I suddenly spied a stream of blood spreading across the floor. Despite being oh so careful, I had apparently nicked the quick of the last nail. I was stunned that “Surcharge Harper” hadn’t even made a peep and actually seemed quite content to lie there and let me continue clipping, which, obviously, I did not do. Totally rattled, I immediately dropped the clippers and screamed, “Help, come quick, he’s bleeding everywhere!”
My husband came running with a wad of paper towels which I wrapped around Harper’s bleeding nail and held firmly in place. I went through several paper towels, but no matter how much pressure I applied, his nail just kept bleeding. I felt so guilty I would have given Harper a pint of my own blood on the spot if we had been a match. Instead, I started panic-Googling with my free hand and learned corn starch helps stem the bleeding from canine clip jobs.
“We need corn starch!” I exclaimed to my husband who had run back to the kitchen to fetch more paper towels. And this is where things got really interesting. You see, my husband’s first language is Spanish, and despite being a good cook, he is not all that conversant with English terms for thickening agents. Hard to believe, but in seventeen years of marriage, the subject of corn starch had never come up.
Still, I continued to shout at him from a room away, “Forget the paper towels. Get the corn starch!”
“The what?” he shouted back.
“The corn starch! Get the corn starch, quick!” I yelled.
“The what?” he shouted again.
“The Corn staaaaarrrrrch!” I shrieked.
“Okay,” he huffed in frustration, as he returned to our makeshift ER, keys and wallet in hand. “I’ll go to Walgreen’s right now and get corn starch, but one question. What is it?”
“Nooo, not from the drug store, from the pantry,” was my less than helpful explanation. “Just get it!”
My bewildered husband, thinking I must surely be confusing the terms “pantry” and “medicine cabinet,” nonetheless dashed to the pantry to search for the mystery clotting potion while I bellowed out instructions like, “It’s a box, maybe third or fourth shelf. With the baking stuff, below the pasta, just look!” He rooted wildly among boxes of dark brown sugar, light brown sugar, confectioner’s sugar, and granulated sugar—yes, I like my sugars—and finally found a box of corn starch way in the back. He rushed it to me and I unwrapped Harper’s foot, caked it with corn starch, and rewrapped it.
To no avail. Yes, despite having a humongous glob of bloody corn starch molded onto it, Harper’s nail continued to bleed. I didn’t know which was more shocking, that the nail was still bleeding or that Harper was completely unfazed by it. Clearly, it was time for bigger guns, so back I went to Google. This time I found a product called, appropriately enough, Bleed Stop which was available at the late-night Walgreen’s around the corner.
“Okay, I guess you need to go get the Bleed Stop,” I announced.
“From the pantry?” my husband asked, only half-joking, before heading to the drug store for real this time.
The Bleed Stop finally did the trick, so we fashioned a bandage of paper towels and medical tape and held the whole thing in place with a toddler sock left behind by a grandchild. I thought Harper looked quite dapper in the polka dot Minnie Mouse stocking, and apparently he did too because he didn’t so much as sniff at it, much less try to chew it off.
With the mess cleaned up, the cornstarch returned to the pantry, and Harper snoozing away as if nothing had even happened, I used my opposable thumbs to pour myself a glass a wine and to jot down this reminder: “Schedule appointment with groomer!”