Last night I was fixing supper when I noticed traffic backed up on the very busy street where we live. I went to call up to my husband who was in his office (I thought) to see if he could see what was happening. The front door was open. So I looked out and saw something being carried out of the street the next block down. I could not find my husband.

Turned out he had heard shouting and a thud and run outside to find a neighbor (who frankly we choose not to know and who we did not even know had a dog)QUITE drunk and his dog hit by a car in the street. The drunk said "oh well, I don't have any money for a vet so I'll just take the dog home and bury it." Well, since the dog was STILL ALIVE another neighbor "removed" the drunk from the scene and my husband and a passing stranger loaded the dog into the stranger's pickup. My husband then came running in and asked me where to take the dog (the first I knew what was going on.) Perhaps you can imagine the frantic searching through yellow pages (Chicago is a big city -- internet would have taken forever to get up) calling people I know, etc. This is at 6pm on Sunday.

They took the dog to an emergency clinic. My husband had to pay $420 for them to just accept the dog. (He had no idea of its gender, name, anything else -- but what else could he do?)

The vet called back and said $2000 - $5000 to maybe save the dog (three year old male black lab type -- probably intact.) By this time the parents of the drunk had returned home. We left the decision to them although we can guesss what it was. They also wrote my husband a check. (Hope it clears!)

This certainly drives home the importance of having a plan -- if something happened to Edwina in non-office hours -- but does anyone have any suggestions as to something else we could have done? I wasn't there but it didn't sound as if this emergency clinic was terrible sympathetic? (But then who knows how many of these they get??)

BTW the dog's tags weren't even current!!