Our dog, Rusalka is 13, roughly (she was a rescue, so we don’t know her exact age). Like pretty much all dogs, she’s figured out what a few English words mean. For example, ‘treat’, which a few years ago, we started to spell out, since we couldn’t talk about a grocery list with dog treats in it without her hearing the word and getting in our face, ready for the aforementioned treat.

Eventually though she figured out that ‘tee are ee ay tee’ meant the same thing. So, now we have all sorts of euphimisms for ‘treat’ – which aren’t the point of this post so I’m not going to list here.

Now, Rusalka has problems with bladder stones occasionally. Sometimes we can give her some prescription dog food and that will get rid of them. This time, however, that didn’t work. So she has to have them surgically removed.

Now, to the actual point. Yesterday morning we were sitting around, with Ru, and Rachel brought up the surgery. Naturally, we are concerned for Ru. She’s old, and although it’s a fairly simple surgery, there’s still risk involved. Apparently, Rachel was feeling very sensitive about this, because rather than say ‘surgery’, she spelled it out – as if the dog, which has had surgery a grand total of twice before (and once when she was very young to get spayed), knows what the word means.

Needless to say, I sort of felt compelled to point out that the dog hasn’t had surgery enough to recognize the word. Hell, if she had, we’d probably be broke – even this simple surgery is going to cost us about $1000. Good thing we’re getting a big tax return this year.

Anyhow, we got quite a chuckle out of it, and I promised to blog this, so … ta da. ;-)