It was a Wednesday evening. My wife and I had just returned from our church. Elliot, our Cocker Spaniel, usually greeted us at the door every time we came home, but tonight he didn’t. We found him lying on his bed, and we could tell immediately something was not right.
I checked the house to see if he had gotten sick, or for any clues about why he was not behaving normal. I found nothing.
We could tell Elliot did not feel well, but did not know why. He wasn’t injured. So we assumed, that he probably ate something that he should not have. We let him rest and kept our eye on him.
About midnight, he started having problems breathing. You could tell he was in pain. We didn’t think it warranted an emergency trip to the vet in the middle of the night, so we just tried to comfort him the best we could. Eventually, he went to sleep, and so did we.
The next morning my wife left for work, and I was left with Elliot. He seemed to be getting better, but was still moving very slow.
Day by day he improved and after a couple of days we thought he had recovered. Then he had a relapse. Then after a few more days he recovered again. Then another relapse.
We finally decided to take him to see a doctor. They kept him for several hours, and ran multiple tests and x-rays. They found a slight injury to his back, and prescribed pain killers, and rest.
Let me tell you, it it hard to get a dog to rest. Yes, dogs rest all the time. Their energy comes in blasts. It was difficult to keep him quiet, when he was ready to play.
It took a few more weeks, but eventually Elliot fully recovered. We will never know what caused his injury. We think he must have fell from the sofa when he was sleeping.
Before he went to the doctor, the weeks we spent trying to let him heal himself were ineffective. Every time he started to feel better, he would become active and aggravate his injury.
There are many situations in life that I find the same. When we are not succeeding, and we keep trying to solve the problem the same way, we end up making the situation worse.
For Elliot there was a simple solution. For most of us, sometimes the change we need is not so obvious. But we know if we keep doing the same thing, we are not going to solve our the problem. Many times we need to get outside help, just like Elliot did.