Thursday

Springtime is difficult in our house because it means it’s time for The Dog to have her annual vaccination booster. She hates visiting the vet and is wise to the preparations for the ordeal. It gets worse every year and it’s traumatic for all involved. Today was to be the culmination of weeks of training and planning. We had laid out our schedule for dummy runs to The Vet to get her used to going in the building, steeled ourselves for yet another round of muzzle training and then phoned to get a prescription for the sedatives The Dog would have to take before the injection could be carried out. Not that The Dog would agree to take them of course.

This year was very different. Debbie took our call.

“I’ve got an idea…” she said, “Come in and meet Bridget.”

Bridget’s first idea was to get out of the building.

“Let’s go for a quick walk in the park!”

She took The Dog’s lead and a pouch of treats and we headed off. No fussing or any attempt to do anything remotely medical, just a walk in the park to let The Dog get used to her.

On the next visit, The Dog was comfortable enough with Bridget to let her do a physical examination. That’s never happened before.

Bridget put her stethoscope on the ground and threw some treats round it.

“Get yourselves a stethoscope. A toy one will do. Just to get her used to one being put on her.”

We found a cheap one online and made sure the business end was metal so that the training was as real as possible. On the next visit, Bridget was able to listen to The Dog’s chest without any difficulty at all. No vet has been able to do that before.

The next step was to get The Dog ready for the injection itself. We had tried filling a syringe with cream cheese but it was difficult to get a steady flow and some shot up her nose which, understandably, put her off syringes. We needed a way of preventing the dog from seeing the syringe coming.

Bridget came up with a cunning plan.

“Do you think you would be able to feed her under a duvet?”

As The Dog sleeps under our duvet every night we didn’t think it would be a problem. It turned out that going under a duvet when it wasn’t on a bed and at a time that wasn’t bedtime wasn’t that straightforward but we got there.

We think that Bridget’s plan was to just have a trial run of feeding under the duvet with her present but it went so well that we decided to go ahead with the real thing. Bridget got the syringe she needed and I got back on the ground with a handful of high-value treats. The duvet got thrown back over me and The Dog and I held the harness in case things went sour.

“How are you doing out there? I’m running out of treats!” I said.

“It’s all done!” came the reply.

“What!? Really!?”

The Dog and I got back up off the floor and she went for a walk as if nothing had happened.

Quite what the other people in the park thought of a man and a dog lying on the ground with a duvet over their heads I neither knew nor cared. The booster was done.

No trauma. No stress. No sedatives. No muzzle. No risk of me getting the injection instead of a wriggly, fighty, bitey dog. No problem at all.

The way Bridget handled a dog that is very anxious and very reactive was nothing short of amazing!

Bloody hell!

“Do you think you could write something for our newsletter? And a photo of her looking cute would be nice too.”

“Me? Write? I’m sure I could manage something.”

Author’s Note

My Mum was in a nursing home in the Thames Valley for a year and a half until she passed away in December 2024. My Father-in-law went into the same home the following January. But Lesley’s sister didn’t approve and made the situation so awkward that he had to be moved. He passed away in March 2025. Names and locations have been changed or hidden to protect the identities of those involved.

Image Credit

Original Image by Nick Gilmore. May 2025.