An Abundance of Fleas

When you discover your dog has fleas, the next most important step is to determine who in your house is to blame. This vital part in the eradication process should, ideally, occur late on a Saturday night when you and your wife are about to go to sleep, but instead discuss the issue in increasingly elevated tones while your daughter cowers upstairs.

Of course, you never get to pick the time and place for these sorts of things. I suppose I should be thankful it didn’t happen during a slightly less opportune moment, like my stepmother’s third wedding or maybe a colonoscopy.

My wife had mentioned the possibility a few times before but, at first, I wasn’t even sure our dogs had fleas. Tinkles is always scratching at her ears and Nibbles is usually such a flurry of motion that, at worst, I just thought he might be having a minor seizure. Even after my wife found a flea on Nibbles I still wanted to consider the possibility that our dogs might not have fleas.

Denial is typically my first response to any crisis and, it being late at night, I didn’t see the point in confirming something might make it hard for everyone to sleep. My eyesight being in swift decline, I also didn’t have a chance of seeing the flea that may or may not have been there.

The next morning I woke at 6:00 to take the dogs to a 24-hour vet that didn’t open until 7:00. A tech at the desk told me how much the visit would cost plus medication — presumably to give me some time to sell some land or other assets to pay for the visit while I waited.

After a few minutes, the vet confirmed my wife’s suspicions. Our dogs had fleas and, as I checked out, I did a quick cost-benefit analysis to assess the price of treatment versus the state of my relationship with my wife. In hindsight, a few hundred dollars to save my marriage and rid our dogs of fleas turned out to be a steal but, at the time, I wasn’t sure it was worth it.

To read more just click through to An Abundance of Fleas on Medium!

About the Author

derekbremer Prior to his life as a stay at home father Derek spent more than a decade performing public relations and marketing functions for financial consulting firms and found the job to be precisely as exciting as it sounds. When not tending to his wife or daughter Derek enjoys subjecting the public to his unique take on fatherhood, travel and animal husbandry. He has been published in Scary Mommy, Sammiches and Psych Meds, The Good Men Project, HowToBeADad, Red Tricycle, RAZED, HPP and the Anthology "It's Really Ten Months Special Delivery: A Collection of Stories from Girth to Birth.