It’s been a week full of new learning experiences thanks to a one two punch of health issues for our adorable pup, Stella, and yours truly. I would never wish away our goofy, adorable Stella, but we did buy her from a somewhat shady online dealer. You don’t have to berate me, readers; I know the responsible thing would have been to adopt, but two years later, I just love our little fuzzball, no matter where she came from. She has had her share of health issues (not counting the accidental ingestion of that Aleve) – seemingly constant diarrhea as a puppy and, as of last week, the startlingly fast growth of a painful (but thankfully benign) tumor on the pad of one of her front paws.

We got the tumor removed, but our sly little pup convinced us that she was a model of self-restraint when it came to licking her injured foot. Not so. Apparently Stella is the puppy equivalent of a weeping angel* (except without the time travel and the fact that she’s made of gorgeous fur rather than stone). One blink and those stitches were out.

We’ve learned our lesson, and Stella is doomed to wear one of those collars that prevents her from licking her stitches until she’s healed up. My husband calls it the “cone of shame” in honor of the Pixar film Up, and the vet calls it an e-collar. I assumed the E stood for emergency, but my husband suggested the equally plausible extended. As I’ve recently learned, we were both wrong. Our vet is part of the VCA family of animal hospitals, and according to their website, it is called an Elizabethan collar.

I’m not sure why it struck me as funny that an accessory for pets would be named after exactly what it looks like, but how often does that happen, really? This morning I was trying to explain the shape of a butternut squash to a friend, and I said “It looks like a three-dimensional eight.” I didn’t say “It looks like a butternut.” (As far as I can tell, it really doesn’t look like a butternut.)

A bit of digging about the Elizabethan collar (the one for humans) led me to this website, which referred to them as ruffs rather than collars. Apparently they reached their apex in size in the 1590s. I think Stella would feel a lot better about her e-collar if it had more lace on it like this one.

 

Some Googling found the patent filed by F.L. Johnson in 1959 for a protective device for dogs “against self-inflicted injury by chewing or biting themselves.” The collar isn’t referred to as Elizabethan in the patent, so I’m having some trouble pinpointing when the name was first applied to the device. There do appear to be later patents specifically for Elizabethan collars, but they all look pretty much like the original design with additional straps or added bells and whistles. I like the idea of Stella being a slave to sixteenth century fashion rather than a prisoner in a cone of shame.

My own health issues did not involve any licking of stitches, just an MRI for my back. Previous to this learning experience, my only knowledge of MRIs came from reruns of House in which patients invariably do one of two things upon being slid into the MRI tube: freak out and start thrashing uncontrollably or explode. Neither alternative seemed particularly appealing to me, so I was more than a little nervous. To my relief, there was no tube involved. Truthfully, the worst thing about it was the Eagles Greatest Hits soundtrack that played for the entirety of my forty-minute scan.

*Just to go full nerd on you.