Dobleve

Our dog Milo is not your average dog, and haircuts for him are no exception. He needs grooming every 2-3 months, and he doesn’t like it, so much so that the only safe way to groom him is to first anesthetize him. If you have dogs you know that this is not the way you normally groom them, so you can imagine trying to explain this in Spanish to our vet. Our vet is great, someone I’d like to know better when I have a better mastery of the language. He lives in a village outside of Granada called Monachil, and as the folks in town have told us, people in the villages have a different accent than we’re used to.

The first time we took him to be shaved it went pretty well – with some mumbling and hand guestures, we got the intent across. The vet really didn’t believe the anesthesia thing though so we went through a few iterations of trying to shave a progressively more sleepy dog until finally they gave up and put him out completely.

The next time we were full of confidence. We’d have several months to get better at Spanish and since the first visit went so well we felt good. We arrived for our appointment and the groomer was a little late, so we chatted with the vet. Milo’s legs are in pretty bad shape – one is fused straight and the others aren’t quite perfect either, but he gets around fine. We started to discuss getting some pain medication for Milo, and of course talk turned to his fused leg – what happened, does it hurt, etc. Then we began to talk about the haircut, or so I thought. Between some bad Spanish on our part and the accent of our vet, we thought we were discussing his pelo (hair), however the vet was talking about his pata (leg). We happily discussed cutting Milo’s pata off for several minutes, the fact that yes, he does need anesthesia for it and he does have trouble walking. The groomer arrived, and we handed off Milo to go wait at the bar across the street. It was about the time we were ready to enter the bar that Shannon and I both looked at each other and realized there might be some problem, that ah-hah moment when your brain catches up to your new language.

Milo is still our happy 4-legged dog and blissfully unaware of what he almost woke up to.