2 minute read
Iceni Columnist Mark King
The Diary of a Norfolk Family By Mark King
Things come in threes. I don't know who ever came up with that sentence, but it has been true for our family recently.
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It's horrible seeing your children in pain and after my daughter had an operation on her knee, the first week was very upsetting for us all. She was in a lot of pain, Above: Mark King the likes of which she had never experienced before, and the whole affair was upsetting for everyone in the family. It can be just as worse when a beloved pet is in distress and this happened to our dog Percy while out for a walk on Marriott's Way the very day our daughter was strong enough to join in for a family walk. Once there, we took a detour through a meadow to the river, and along the way a whole host of very prickly seed pods got stuck to Percy’s furry paws. Being a dog, he pulled then off and then decided to eat them. Then they got stuck in his throat and he started to panic as he failed desperately to cough them up. He gnawed at grass trying to make himself sick, and then collapsed to the floor with his tongue hanging out, and struggling to breathe. In that moment, I bent down, picked him up by the scruff of the neck and stuck two fingers into his mouth to try and clear the obstructions. It didn't work and, with the panic in his eyes begging for air, I had no other choice than to try a second attempt, but this time I went down his whole throat until it made him sick. It started to work, but I had to do it twice more to make him empty his bowels and thus clear his airway in the process before finally his throat was free, and he could breathe once again. And this is when the rule of three came into play because, during the panic, I pulled something in my back! I say something because I don’t know if it was a muscle or skeletal, but boy does it hurt.
Over the last five weeks, the pain has got so bad I’ve ended up in the accident and emergency department at the Norfolk and Norwich Hospital.
I'm now on very strong prescription painkillers, and waiting for an MRI scan to find out what's wrong, and I just hope my dopey but lovable dog doesn't decide to eat anything else out of the blue in the mean time!
