That’s pretty weak dude…

So Carson has a bad hip right now. He’s going to a specialist this Thursday (*crosses fingers) but until then, he is pretty much a three-legged dog. Something happened to him last Friday and ever since, he has been limping around the house and generally not moving from his sprawled out position unless motivated by a bone.

I also live on the third floor of a condo building so this proves to be a tricky situation when Carson has to give back to nature. He’s great with going downstairs on three legs and personally, it’s really funny to watch, but by the end of his walk, he is completely spent and totally unable to make it up the three flights of stairs. At first I tried walking up and encouraging to “walk it off” and climb the stairs like a champion but right now, my dog is clearly a bench warmer and isn’t up to the task.

So it finally came down to me physically picking him up and scaling the stairs myself. I have literally picked Carson up three times in his entire life of ten years. Once when I found him in an abandoned trailer, once when I picked him up to put him in the car for the first time and once when I picked him up when we were wrestling to assert my wrestling dominance. Suffice it to say, he isn’t used to being handled in such a manner. Let me try to illustrate what it’s like to pick up Carson. Imagine a 90 pound dead body on the ground where both it’s legs and it’s arms are sticking up in the air, stiff as a board. Now imagine trying to pick it up and maneuver it up three flights of narrow stairs.

Ok, so here’s the reason of why I started writing this post in the first place. Today was a hard day at work. I got home, grabbed a beer from the fridge and took the dog out for a walk. All was going well, dog did his thing, he limped home, everything was as normal as it could have been. We get to the stairs and I walk up a flight. I encouraged Carson to give it another try but he just looked at me with the same doe eyes he’s been looking at me with for the past few days so I walked downstairs to give him a little aid. I put my beer down on the first step, tried out a new carrying method (see figure 1a) and we were on our way.

Figure 1a

We get to the top of the mountain, I put the dog down and prepare to make my descent to retrieve my beer. What happens next? Yup, the dog follows me all the way down to the bottom. Fuck my life. So I sit there with beer in hand, take a sip and then look at the dog and motion him back up the stairs. What does he do? He runs up the stairs on three legs wagging his tail the entire way.

I’ve been conned for four fucking days into carrying my 90 pound dog up three flights of stairs.

*sigh