Dec 21, 2018 4 min read

We shall remember these holidays as “Sock Watch 2018.”

The saga spanned the normally festive days between Thanksgiving and Christmas, starting the day before the turkey, when the farmer walked into the room.

“Smoothie is sick,” he said. “I think he ate a sock.”

This was not as troubling a statement as you might expect; Smoothie, our uncharacteristically small, high-strung, emotionally shaky sheltie dog, has been known to ingest a sock or two – always a flimsy half-sock – and he always coughs them back up. We’ve joked that Smoothie’s habit is the answer to the mystery of where the other sock goes. All these years we’ve been blaming the dryer when, in fact, it’s been Smoothie.

Really, he’s not eaten very many. You find one coughed-up sock and you tend to stop leaving them lying around. But once in a while one will slip through, and when Smoothie got sick that day before Thanksgiving, the farmer said “Sock!”

We followed old Smoot around, waiting for the sock to reappear, but by mid-afternoon, there was no sign of it, and we started to worry. The dog couldn’t keep food or water down. Smoothie usually barks and twirls around when we make coffee, and this time he just sat and watched.

Of course, these things tend to happen around holidays, when veterinarians don’t have normal hours.The farmer took the dog to the emergency clinic. An X-ray and sonogram were inconclusive. Was that shadow a sock, or just normal anatomy? The doctors didn’t know, but they didn’t seem worried.

“The nine-hundred-dollar sock,” said the farmer when he got home.

If you google “my dog ate a sock,” you will learn that sock-eating is a nutty but not uncommon little corner of canine behavior. Small dogs eat small socks and Great Danes prefer the beefier ones, such as ski socks. Dogs usually cough them back up.

But Smoothie didn’t this time. For the next three weeks, nothing went into or out of that dog without our knowing about it. We began to wonder if there ever was a sock. Wouldn’t it have emerged by now? Maybe Smoothie just had an upset stomach.

And then things turned worse last week, when the dog became very ill, vomiting and trembling. He couldn’t walk. The farmer rushed him back to the ER, where he was admitted for observation. Poor Smoothie spent the night in the hospital, receiving IV antibiotics and fluids. The preliminary diagnosis was acute pancreatitis, and still no sign of a sock.

You don’t want to know what that hospital stay cost. It feels wrong to put a price tag on it, considering Smoothie’s place in this family, but the doctors said he might need a five-day stay, and I’ve bought cars that didn’t cost as much.

But Smoothie perked up and was home after two nights. He’s on prescription food for now – smelly, wet, canned stuff that he sometimes will eat only if we hand feed it to him. We knew he was feeling better a few days ago when he freaked out as I was making the morning coffee. His quirks are the best way to know if he’s feeling well, and all his quirks are back.

Except one – the sock eating. We do a sock safari every day now, to make sure he doesn’t eat them. We just can’t keep buying replacement socks. And we can’t afford to keep looking for them inside the dog.

Because of Sock Watch 2018, this Christmas got expensive before the gift-buying even began. The farmer and I decided not to buy each other anything – I mean, other than that veterinarian bill. We’re just glad Smoothie is home.

Beth Dolinar can be reached at cootiej@aol.com.