infested

What’s worse than a Trump presidency? A second Trump presidency, clearly. But can there be anything worse than that?

A tough question, really.

Maybe a gang of racoons – a nursery of the ostensibly adorable rank-refuse bandits, if any of us is still being all woke up in here – drunk as a stench of skunks on summer trashcan-ferment hooch, and mistaking your head for an abandoned KFC bucket, clawing out your eyes to get at whatever prize might be inside? That seems plenty awful, all right. Though at least in that case, you’d soon enough no longer be able to see the horrors unfolding in front of you, in this country, on this planet.

Being boiled alive in molten lead, to my thinking, likewise clocks in as peak lousy – though here again, even if you somehow survived briefly afterward in soul-flaying pain, your skull, with whatever brains remained inside, surely would be blinkered into a mere bone bucket of overheated mush from all that toxic exposure. The result: Another reprieve of the senses.

As always, there’s also the devastating prospect of stumbling unawares upon Two Broke Girls reruns streaming in some outlying media slagheap of inexplicably greenlighted sitcom shite – though as long as you can still see through the blood puddling from your eye sockets, you could just, y’know, turn off your TV. Another horror abated.

But a flea infestation?

Let me repeat that: a flea infestation.

Oh, Lawdy. Oh, hell. Oh, no.

That, at least in the short term, could truly rise to rival a narcissistic, pumpkin-spackled sewer-sausage erasing all that’s good and true in the world, out of his own projectile inadequacies and atomic-bomb stupidity.

Fleas. I mean, fuck.

Which is all to say that I have just endured a nasty, unexpected infestation of the very same, on my dogs, in my home.

And do I blame Donald Trump even for that? Of course I blame Donald Trump for that.

But let us move on now past the obvious.

perspective

Those little fuckers started the plague, y’know. Fleas, I mean. And by plague, I mean the Black Death, the Middle Ages. Some 25-50 million human souls snuffed out, mostly through infected-flea bites.

Though, seriously, all bets are off right now on our continued survival as well. I mean, let’s give parasitic Trump worm-head JFK Jr. his due here. He seems seriously mis-wired to kill us all.

Now that I’ve introduced our own possible demise into the mix, let me back up a bit to explain:

About a month ago, our sweetheart pittie-mix Mal began chewing more than usual at her big-puppy paws, and then on up her legs a bit. I said, thinking myself an enlightened pet owner: yeast! It’s that damn yeast! We must give probiotics!

In my insufficient defense, the internet had told me I should maybe think that.

Two weeks of twice-daily probiotics later, and the chewing had progressed into not just more chewing, but also into some serious scratching, plus reddening skin along Mal’s belly. I gave this some worried thought, and realized that at about the same time all of this had begun, I had also introduced a new supplementary canned dog food, to mix up mealtime a bit.

Ding! Food allergy! It just made sense.

We stopped the new food immediately, and I even went further, eliminating all chicken products, since I’d read that additionally was thing, a chicken allergy. Not a hugely common thing, but still a thing. So we’d get Mal straight, and then reintroduce a hint of chicken to her diet, and confirm or eliminate it as the real culprit.

because, um

My brain wandered quickly to those would-be causes, as it certainly couldn’t be something like, y’know, fleas. See, we don’t do fleas. We’ve never done fleas.

My wife, Lisa, puts monthly reminders in her calendar for our dogs heartworm- and flea-prevention treatments, and unlike most of us, checks her calendar religiously, setting out the oral heartworm meds and topical flea killer the day before. With any organizational situation to which Lisa directs her focus, she is ruthlessly efficient. On her watch, such to-do items simply get done, which is exactly why those same things are not on my own watch. Because, um.

Thus the idea that our dogs might have fleas simply did not enter the picture, for either of us. I mean, why would it? Our pups are regularly treated, and in nearly 20 years of pet companionship, we’ve never had so much as an inkling of a problem.

Not to mention that our little Jack Russell girl, Marley, she of the peanut brain that’s lost its peanut, seemed completely fine.

So on we went, trusting that a few more days away from that offending new food would start to cut sweet Mal a break.

Meanwhile, the chewing was becoming constant, so a little more Googling, and I’m discovering that coconut oil is great for canine skin allergies. As I’m a personal fan of coconut oil, we always have some on hand. So I started spreading it on Mal’s red skin, only to discover …

Mal loves the taste of coconut oil. She would promptly lick every bit of it right back off. That is, if Marley hadn’t gotten to it first, a slightly unsettling thing to witness, as the little dog would stand directly under Mal, and then lick clean the length of Mal’s belly from beneath. Because Marley, too, was now a coconut-oil junkie.

We promptly stopped with the coconut oil, as it actually seemed to be encouraging more licking, and more ultimate skin irritation. And still things kept getting worse.

an aside

Which I’m sharing because I did not realize how amusing it might seem until I mentioned it, in somewhat abbreviated form, to staff members at our veterinarian’s office:

Often, when I’m getting out of the shower, I’ll find my darling diva-kitty-girl Boo waiting for me on the adjacent bath mat. Before I can ever get dry, she will invariably start screaming at me in her undeniable diva-kitty voice. I do not have a clue now how or when this all started, but I do know exactly what she’s demanding of me. And as we say at my house, what a Boo wants, a Boo gets.

Boo believes she requires, at those moments, coconut oil. She also expects it to be presented to her in a very specific way.

Thus I dab a small dollop on the top of one of my hobbit feet, then go stand directly in front of her, and willingly endure the sandpaper-tongue bonding moment to come.

Which is to say that I remain there, in the state one reasonably might when just out of the shower, feeling utterly ridiculous, as my beloved kitten-sized old darling, the undisputed queen of our house, slowly, deliberately licks the smear of oil from my foot.

If Lisa walks in on this, she will simply shake her head, really her only acknowledgment of the absurdity playing out in front of her; I mean, what is there to say, really, upon seeing something like that? Because, y’know, if you wanna try to actually picture it, go ahead. I wouldn’t recommend it.

This oil-on-foot routine has been going on for years, and it is clear that for as long as Boo is with us, which I fervently wish could be forever and forever, and then at least another day, she is my very heart, etc., that it will never be allowed to stop. Because what a Boo wants.

the histamine return

Back again in the now, I’m casting about for anything we can try to get Mal some relief. I see online that oatmeal baths are soothing to itchy puppy skin, and I order a brand of pet shampoo that can be delivered quickly.

Now, there’s no way that lanky, headstrong Mal is going in any tub for any bath, so when the washing goop arrives, I immediately con her into coming outside, where I can bathe her on our back deck, and for a few minutes after, she is indeed calmer than she’s been in days. Maybe it was just that she had survived her washing ordeal, as she is no fan of any such full-body cleaning transactions, and little I’ve found elicits such joy from a bath-skittish dog than the shaking-off/toweled-down moments just after that dreaded ordeal has clearly come to a close the garden hose.

I figure, what the hell, I’ll give Marley a quick scrub as well, because I’ve got everything out, and she’s forever getting into, y’know, everything. A quick distinction: Mal’s hair grows close to her skin, and is all black, except for small white splotches on her chest and feet. Marley, meanwhile, has wiry fur that sprouts crazily all over, like Christopher Lloyd’s mad-professor Back to the Future hair, and is primarily stark white peppered with light-brown patches.

As I’m washing away at the forlorn little dog, I notice something odd, a black speck moving on the skin along her back. I can’t at first make sense of what I’m seeing. Nonetheless I start searching all over her and, much to my shocked dismay, determine that, yes, she’s got ’em. Fleas. Actual fleas, which have somehow defied our routine overtures to defeat them, and have clearly failed to understand that we don’t do such things here.

Marley had never acted like anything itched her, even once. Peanut brain minus the peanut, etc. But again, fleas. The little wildass was simply crawling with fleas.

When I go to share this rotten news with Lisa, I see that Mal is already back to digging into her wounded hide. It’s now all too clear as to why.

I’m soon in the car to go buy flea shampoo, plus external flea treatment for our four indoor-only cats, before we have that nightmare as well, and even more pet misery. I also bought some peppermint-oil spray, which apparently works flea-death wonders on carpet and other porous surfaces, but which also gives me a blistering headache after just a few minutes around it.

It’s worth noting that our dogs stay downstairs in our two-story house, though Marley, at least, would gladly have it otherwise. (We still often catch her doing her stair-by-stair creep, she who has never given up on the dream of the presumed paradise upstairs. We shout no, and back down she goes, dejectedly.) It’s the only way to keep the cat food for the cats, and honestly, for me to get any hint of sleep at night, because our feline bed companions are night prowlers enough, and I’m an invariably light sleeper.

(Our puppy-perimeter vigilance did not, however, ultimately prevent a new theater of flea besiegement. When we had our mucho-hefty long-haired kitty-boy Bugsy shorn recently – a full-body booty-clip, as I call it – as we do about twice a year to keep him from becoming a total matted mess, the diligent vet tech first found flea dirt, and then one flea. An unexpected $300 for four doses of three-month treatment later, and we’re hopeful.)

So with the new shampoo in hand, I am quickly on our back deck with both dogs, washing them in a combination of flea soap and Dawn dishwashing liquid, an additional flea killer which also gets a good lather going. There is again no visible evidence on Mal, that black fur revealing nada, though it’s understood that she’s likewise covered in the rotten little biters herself. However, quite a few dead/dying fleas very clearly washed off of Marley.

I’m up then much of that same night, washing pet couch covers in hot water, extra rinses, in a flea-killing concoction of white vinegar, dog flea shampoo, Dawn dishwashing liquid and our regular detergent. Hot water likely would have been enough to do the trick, but I have issues, so …

when I was a kid

Maybe 11 or 12 years old, we lived in an older ranch-style that, for our first few years there, had that high shag carpet common to the 1970s. In my mind’s eye, I can still see it, a slightly lighter forest-green synthetic jungle of thick, floppy pile. Ours was also a house full of rescue pets, as Lisa’s and my own is now. We had, back then, a couple of medium-sized dogs, who wore flea collars, plus several more cats, who did as well. But …

…  somehow the fleas got in anyway, and they set up shop in that accommodating ugly carpet. I can only imagine the horror that my mother, a fiend for cleaning when she got going on it, must have felt, because the first thought that crossed my own mind when confronted with my own flea problem so many years later was: How nasty must I be that this has happened in my living space?

The degree of infestation in my childhood home was intense. I made this discovery for us upon plopping down once on that carpet, the tiny disease vectors literally springing up and over my body like it was some Evel Knievel obstacle positioned in the middle of a massive flea circus going full-tilt at all times.

As I’ve since learned the hard way for myself, by the time you’ve reached this point, with those creepy little crawlies all over your pets and in your home, you’ve had the problem for far longer than was ever apparent. Because once the fleas have somehow gotten in, the countless eggs are close behind, with one female flea depositing something like 20-50 a day. And when all those eggs come due in the next five-10 days, by just a couple of generations into it, you suddenly find yourself at the bottom of a very nasty food chain, with the little monsters seeming to be everywhere. Because by then, they are. Everywhere.

That meant flea dips for the dogs, about the only aggressive treatment available back then. Also, new flea collars for all pets, and multiple flea bombings of the house in toxic fog. And finally, that nasty little circus was shut down as all its nasty little workers finally died, sucked up into the vacuum cleaner along with all their remaining lifeless nasty little eggs.

And I can say that in the meantime, when so infested, every minor itch you’d only passingly noticed before becomes evidence of tiny vermin crawling all over you, all the time. Which they aren’t, of course, though not to say occasional human bites don’t happen when those tiny fuckers manage to get from your pets to your bed and find your naked feet, for instance. Nonetheless, you turn into your own personal David Cronenberg film, a rapidly decompensating host to your own imagined vast host of tiny, terrible parasites.

enough with the scratching

Back here in the present, on our second post-flea-discovery day, it was also time for a second, far more vigorous bath for both dogs, during which they resembled funny-looking sheep, the flea-soap/Dawn suds lathering up so thickly. I again found no fleas on Mal, though it was now abundantly clear how badly she had dug and chewed herself, with small sores worked all over her hind legs and backside. Still, I saw many additional fleas washing off of Marley, though all or most were likely dead already from the day before, as I had found corpses in the house in my next waves of cleaning.

A few days before my discovery of fleas, I had contacted our vet to move up our pending routine-physical visit for Mal and Marley, because we were starting to get really freaked about Mal’s worsening condition. Even after I was confident that I’d wiped out the populations living on our dogs, Mal remained utterly miserable. She’s neurotic and moody to begin with (“What are the odds,” I said to our vet during our rescheduled visit, “that such an animal would end up with me?” He laughed, and I mean really laughed; it was funny because, well, goddammit.). Except that now, Mal seemed downright depressed, head drooped, avoiding all attention except to allow being vigorously scratched. She didn’t care who brought the relief.

It was all hard to witness. She’s generally such a happy, goofy, loving soul.

The vet’s office set me up the day before our visit with some new oral treatments so I could get our dogs started on them immediately. These included a pill that wipes out live populations on an affected animal within 24 hours, and some new monthly meds rated as being vastly more effective than the topicals we’d been using (we’d switched all of our dogs from oral flea meds a while back, because our dearly departed old Maggie had been prone to seizures, which those treatments could possibly have triggered.)

A member of our vet’s staff noted that our same scenario of unexpected flea infestation had been playing out with a lot of other clients as well over the scorching summer, and that widely available topical meds, in a number of those cases, had similarly stopped being effective.

Our vet practice is phenomenal; we love the whole bunch of them. Dr. Pat gave both dogs a physical, and found no remaining fleas. He prescribed some short-term antibiotics for Mal, to stave off potential infection in any of those hotspots she’d worried into her skin, and also a course of that pet wonder drug, prednisone, for the ongoing itching, since the Benadryl I’d had on hand for calm-down emergencies didn’t do a blasted thing.

Increased heat itself does not necessarily mean more fleas, but warmer weather, I’ve learned, does speed up flea activity. The little bastards are just busier.

So what’s so different then about this year, besides the horrid heat-dome temps that settled in all across the country? That’s right: Donald Trump.

Stay with me here: A flea infestation cannot actually be worse than Donald Trump if it is somehow because of Donald Trump, an extension of the very foulness that is him. Ipso facto, Trump is likewise vermin. That’s just simple math.

Or at least I think it is. I’m terrible at math. Anyway, the guy’s a real prick, period.

Still, home we went from our vet’s, with me now hopeful. That night, after I gave Mal her first dose of newly prescribed meds, she was still, of course, scratching and licking and biting her skin, just visibly unhappy. Marley sat by her and whined pitifully for her sadly decommissioned play companion.

You don’t always notice as a behavior gradually disappears in someone, human or otherwise, until it suddenly reappears and it strikes you all at once how long it’s been absent. That’s especially true when you are fixated on new, unhappy behaviors that have you increasingly concerned.

That very next day, Mal became, for just a few minutes, grossly offended by the presence of a bunny daring to sit casually out on our front lawn, and it set Mal in on a brief round of barking at the window, a sound Lisa and I hadn’t even realized had been missing from our house. Then, next thing we knew, big Mal and little Marley were tumbling around my feet, with Marley, inevitably, repeatedly play-biting me, collateral damage, really, because when these two get going, their preference is to dog-wrestle directly on top of their people. They have the whole downstairs of our house, yet we are their chosen playground, especially when Lisa and I are both in a room together.

And I took it, protecting my protectables from the manic toothful assault, and grimacing at every single slam of puppy heads into my legs. Because let’s face it, a happy dog is just a glorious thing. There’s little better, honestly.

With so many things so less than glorious of late, give me all the joyful puppy time life will allow.

Mal would still take a while to fully overcome her allergic reaction, of course, and to stop with the scratching and obsessive licking, but it was clear then that things were finally improving.

Then, another two days later, and Mal came bounding up to me as I was walking into our house, the first time in I couldn’t remember when. She jumped up to meet me, and I grabbed her paws to my chest, the way we do. As I leaned down toward her, she promptly licked me on the nose. And this is a dog, I swear to you, that grins, a big, goofy-ass puppy grin. She grinned.

Screw you, Donald Trump, you filth, you scum, you vermin, and every bit of all the foulness that you bring. My sweet puppy girl is back.