“His name is Brandon. The owner, not the dog. The dog’s name is Churro.”
I took the sock, which I suspected I wouldn’t need, but which I appreciated having because Brandon had clearly put thought into this. Bagged sockin hand, I went straight to Room Two.
I quickly learned that Churro was a three-year-old chocolate lab with the body of an athlete and the decision-making skills of a concussed toddler. He was sitting on the exam table with his tongue lolling and his tail going at a speed that suggested he considered this visit a social event rather than a medical one. Brandon, a young man in gym shorts who looked like he hadn’t slept, was sitting in the chair beside the table with the hollow-eyed stare of a new parent who had just discovered that his child eats socks.
“Hey there, Churro,” I said, and Churro immediately tried to climb into my lap, which was a problem given that he weighed eighty-five pounds and I was standing up. I caught him with both arms and redirected him back onto the table. He sat, panted, and looked at me with an expression of pure, unfiltered love.
Dogs are easy.
Not medically, but emotionally.
They tell you everything with their faces and their bodies and their tails. They don’t lie, or perform. When they love you, it’s the simplest, most uncomplicated transaction in the world. Their whole beings say, “You are here, and that is enough.”
“So he ate a sock,” I said without looking away from my furry patient.
“I turned around for thirty seconds,” Brandon said with the defensive urgency of a man who needed me to understand that he was a good dog owner. “I was folding laundry, and he just grabbed it and swallowed it like a pelican, the whole thing. He didn’t even chew.”
“They rarely do.”
“Is this normal?”
“It’s more common than you’d think, with labs especially. I once removed a tennis ball, a hair tie, and half a rubber duck from the same dog in one surgery.” I was palpating Churro’s abdomen while I talked, feeling for the sock, which was sitting exactly where I expected it to be, lodged in the upper intestine like a cotton roadblock. Churro, who seemed to interpret the abdominal exam as a particularly intimate form of petting, leaned into my hands and groaned with pleasure.
“Can you get it out?”
“He shouldn’t need surgery. He ate it recently enough that we can probably retrieve it endoscopically, which is less invasive and a faster recovery. I’m going to take some X-rays to confirm the location, and then we’ll get him scheduled.”
Brandon’s face collapsed with relief. “Oh, thank God. My girlfriend said I had to call her the second I knew. She’s been texting me every five minutes. Shesaid if Churro needed surgery, she was going to make me eat a sock so I’d know how it felt.”
“Sounds like she’s handling it well,” I chuckled.
“Doc, she’s named the sock, the one he ate. She’s calling it Gerald.”
Churro was attempting to lick my stethoscope. “Well. Let’s get Gerald out of there, shall we?”
The sock extraction took forty minutes and went smoothly, if one can describe the process of threading a flexible scope down a sedated Labrador’s throat and fishing out a crew-length athletic sock as “smooth.” Carlos assisted, holding Churro’s head steady while I navigated the scope. We worked in the comfortable silence of two people who had done this enough times that words were unnecessary. The scope’s camera showed the sock lodged against the intestinal wall, pale and waterlogged and looking profoundly out of place, like a tourist who had wandered into the wrong country and couldn’t find the exit.
I caught the edge of it with the retrieval forceps and worked it loose with a kind of slow, patient maneuvering that can’t be rushed without risking atear. It came out in one piece, which Churro would never appreciate, but Brandon would never forget.
“Got it,” I said.
Carlos held up the specimen tray, where I deposited Gerald with a formality that the moment probably didn’t require but that Carlos found amusing, and that was good enough for me. We had an unofficial gallery on the break room wall containing Polaroids of everything we’d extracted. Each image was labeled with the animal’s name, the object, and the date. The collection included a Barbie shoe, a refrigerator magnet shaped like Florida, eleven pennies from the same dog on three separate occasions, a still-functioning AirPod, and a small ceramic angel that the owner swore was on a shelf the cat couldn’t reach.
“Wall worthy?” Carlos asked, holding up the Polaroid camera we kept in the surgical suite specifically for this purpose.
“Absolutely.”
He snapped the photo, and I wrote on the white strip at the bottom: Churro — Crew sock (Gerald) — [date].
“His girlfriend named the sock,” I told Carlos.
“Of course she did.”
I found Brandon in the recovery waiting area and told him Churro was fine and Gerald had beensuccessfully extracted. Brandon made a sound that was either laughing or crying—or both. He said he needed to call his girlfriend immediately. I heard her shrieking through the phone as I walked back to the surgical suite. The sound, weirdly, made me smile.
The morning moved the way clinic mornings always moved, in a rolling sequence of challenges that ranged from routine to urgent to heartbreaking, sometimes within the same hour.
After Churro, I consulted on a geriatric dachshund with a spinal issue. The dog’s owner, a retired schoolteacher named Gloria, brought him in wearing a hand-knitted sweater and carrying a laminated list of questions she’d prepared the night before. I went through each question carefully, because Gloria had driven forty minutes to be here, and her dog was her family, and her questions deserved the same attention I’d give a colleague’s. When we got to the part about long-term prognosis, her eyes filled and she said, “I just need to know how much time we have, so I can make it good.”
