Pupdate

I walked into the kitchen this morning, approximately 5 minutes after my alarm went off.

And I was faced with a sea of puppy excrement.

It wasn't in neat, copeable piles either. Oh no. Not only had they decided to relieve themselves right by the door, they had also clearly decided to dance through the resulting mess in gay abandon, making it oh-so-much-more difficult to clean up.

They are unimpressed with the general affairs of their lives at the moment. Both puppies are currently carrying around cumbersome plastic bonnets, in an effort to prevent them trying to attack their stitches which has worked to varying degrees, however they have already managed on several occasions to remove them and he has even found out that the chord that attaches the cone to her can be used as a useful strangling method during fighting and has begun to exploit this weakness deftly.

Their walks have been dramatically slashed and when they are allowed out it is on lead restriction only. Their playtime hindered through the unfriendly plastic headgear. They have to sleep in separate rooms to prevent them from aggravating each other's wounds. And, to really put the boot in, they've both lost their bits.

You can understand their frustration. Her wound is more severe, she has more stitches and hers was a more serious operation. But on the other side of the coin, he now has no balls. Neither are very impressed with the situation. Luckily he is hopefully young enough not to notice their absence and the impact of that on his randiness which I had witnessed the inklings of at training last week.

We have had some strange looks in the park. It is fairly unusual to see two such miserable, sorry looking puppies crashing into each other and various objects that they will go out of their way to put in their way (they seem to have not yet understood the correlation from their plastic cones to their poor spacial awareness and become frustrated and confused when they bang into things, much like my own terrible parallel and reverse parking where the reflections in the mirrors do not connect to any understanding within my own brain and I sit there in a flap or will reverse over curbs, apologising to my car profusely, in order to get out of the situation). They did, however, have the upper hand the other day when the heavens opened and left their hapless walkers drenched whilst they were protected with a handy portable umbrella (look, no paws!).

As a result of their restrictions, they are kept in relative confinement to protect themselves (although you try telling them its for their own good. He has developed an excruciating whine in which he is clearly attempting to communicate with the neighbours how much he is suffering (forgetting he is well fed and well loved, obviously, but then again, he has no testicles). She, the Devil Child, has quietened, rarely whimpering, an imploring look in her eyes, but take a look again, there, buried deep beneath the pools of unhappiness there it is: she's out for revenge once she's got the damn thing off. And most likely it will continue through her every waking moment until the end of her days.

So that's something to look forward to.

For the time being they utilise to great effect the only thing that they are armed with: the ability to piss and shit. Everywhere.

So this morning, bleary eyed and empty stomached (which was probably a good thing considering the circumstances) my SP and I set about cleaning up the mess and, as normal, she desposited what she could down the toilet.

Yesterday in the pub my SP and her mum were discussing basic bodily functions that they enjoy expressing with one another, and how my SP's sister goes even further in such displays.

I am incredibly prudish when faced with such topics and it is an openness that I have never been able to even contemplate, let alone grasp. Until recently, I didn't even know how to burp on demand (I was taught these particular expertise by my boyfriend's 7 year old cousin). I have never been able to talk about matters of expulsion and am easily embarrassed when discussing anything related to me.

However, I have the unsettling ability to deal with excrement on a really rather worrying level.

As a university student in Cornwall for the summer and faced with lengthy summers working in Ginsters, I opted for a route that would have left many running for the safety of those mass produced cheese and onion pasties. I decided that I would instead opt for working with one of the West Country's other successful industry (yep, that's the lot. That and garden centres, and I did my fair share of that pre-uni anyway).

Old people.

After two years' holiday work in nursing and residential care homes, I was prepared for everything that could be thrown at me. And that most certainly involves, luckily, puppy-poo. I don't enjoy it, and there are times that it flips the contents of my stomach like a pancake, leaving its insides straddled upside-down and clinging desperately to my stomach's unstable ceiling, waiting for the inevitable drop. But I can deal with an awful lot (apart from phlegm, that's just taking the piss).

The indignity and the terrible fragility, the loss of ability and the enforced reliance and dependence of aging was something that greatly shocked me on working in a home. There were those who accepted their lot, or who opted for madness and blissful ignorance (my personal favourite, if we get an option later in life). But there were those who hated every moment of their physical demise and their self-control over their collapsing bodies.

When I entered a care home, I was shocked at the black humour that came from the care assistants I worked alongside. The seeming disregard of the residents, talking about their bowel movements as if they really were conversational masterpieces. But, I learnt quickly, the majority of these assistants cared deeply for the residents and it was just how they dealt with the situation, the decay, the ending of life. And I became like that myself (my friends really rather loathed my post-work pub chat, and people rarely asked 'how was your day?' more than once).

We saw these residents at the end of their lives, whether that was a year or 20 years, and never had the difficulty of the association of who they were with who they had been, and who they still were inside. But it was incredibly difficult to see their children with them, not knowing where to look or what do to or how to think or feel when we came in to care for them.

Up until that point, I had no idea how or why people dealt with babies, those tiny little creatures that expelled fluids and solids from every available orifice, and didn't mind. But I learnt to understand. One memorable occasion when I was shat on from a great height on Christmas Eve when maneuvering someone into a bath with a hoist proved such patience and understanding (even though it was down a glowing white uniform).

It still, however, tries your temper a little bit, even for the most virtuous or cast iron stomached, when you step in it, as my poor SP did the other day.

After my SP had gone to work, things in the toilet began to go horribly wrong.

inadvertently those puppies had caused more of a disaster with their morning's antics than we could have possibly imagined. An almighty blockage. My SP's poor partner is currently trying to negotiate the mess that looks somewhat like a miniature Glastonbury sewage pit. On the 4th day. And the poor bloke isn't blessed with the cast iron stomach that my SP and I have developed through experience.

I should go and help him. My justification for not was that I had a post to write.