Oliver is so neutral, we’re thinking of renaming him Switzerland.

Yesterday, we took Oliver to the vet to get him, as Helena put it, “de-manized.”

He was scheduled to be de-manized last month but the procedure was delayed thirty days because he still had too many baby teeth and apparently, when you have too many baby teeth, you can’t get your balls whacked off.

But only if you’re  a dog.

I bet if you’re a man, you’re crossing your legs and thanking God right now that you’re a homosapien, am I right?

Do dogs know about this? Because I’m thinking if they did, they’d be brushing their teeth with Gorilla Glue and gargling with cement. Wouldn’t you?

At first, I was surprised that there was any correlation at all between teeth and testicles other than the typical FOR GOD’S SAKE, BE CAREFUL! THAT ISN’T A CORN ON THE COB, YOU KNOW correlation which isn’t so much a correlation as it is a deep seeded phobia for men everywhere. But then I remembered I wasn’t supposed to be thinking like a human male, I was supposed to be thinking like a canine male and as a canine male, I realized that I could not have cared less about deep seeded phobias with corn-on-the-cob scenarios because I eat my own poop and lick my business 24/7 to the shrieking soundtrack of FOR GOD’S SAKE, WHY DOES HE KEEP DOING THAT? AND WHY IS A LIPSTICK GROWING OUT OF HIS GROIN? COULD THIS BE ANY MORE GROSS? in surround sound.

The vet technician explained to me that some dogs, especially smaller ones because of their smaller mouths, have baby teeth that need to be extracted to allow sufficient room for emerging adult teeth, thus avoiding potential dental problems in the future. In these instances, vets prefer to do the extraction during the castration so as to minimize the number of times a dog is put under anesthesia to have various body parts cut off and sent up to that great big ball factory in the sky.

Having never before de-manized anything in my life, despite what you may have heard from my ex-husband or the Frigidaire repairman, this made sense to me. Then again, so did getting a perm seven years ago so what the hell do I know?

I wound up taking Oliver and all the body parts God gave him home that day and told the kids to watch for tiny teeth falling out of his mouth and perhaps they had better strap a Dixie cup to his muzzle to catch any such deciduousness lest one fall out onto the floor because if I stepped on it and was forced to rip off my feet at the ankles and drag my bloody leg stumps to the laundry room to soak my infected piggies in bleach, I was not going to be a happy camper.

Thirty days passed in which we discovered that Oliver’s mouth was very much like his bowels in that they refused to drop their precious cargo on anybody’s schedule but their own, which schedule comes with a handy dandy ETA of NOT IN THIS LIFETIME SO STOP STARING AT ME o’clock.

So yesterday I brought Oliver, with all of his original teeth and testicles into the vet’s office for de-manning and was told that he needed six of them pulled. And before the rumors of Oliver being some blessedly deformed, five pound manly stud muffin go flying all over cyberspace, I meant six teeth, not six testicles. He only has two of those.

Had. May they rest in peace.

Six extractions. To the tune of $areyououtofyourfreakingmind. Keep in mind, this was in addition to the basic de-manning fee which had already exceeded $holyshitballsbatman since I had opted for the better anesthesia and better pain medicine because while I might have your cajones hacked off, I’ll insist that you get the best happy buzz possible out of the deal because I’m nice like that.

Long story short … oh, who am I kidding? We passed that seven paragraphs ago. I’ll just say that I think the vet must have had a change of heart and took pity on us or maybe she took a few puffs off the old anesthesia pump because when we went to collect Oliver, we paid only a fraction of the extraction quoted and I was so happy that I wrote a song called “Extraction Fraction, What’s the Attraction?” and emailed it to Schoolhouse Rock with a proposal that they use it as the “B” side of  “Conjunction Junction, What’s Your Function?” and they emailed me back with Dear Andrea, You’re sweet and odd. No one knows what a “B” side is anymore. Please take your medicine and enjoy the seventies. Love, Schoolhouse Rock which is probably for the best anyway because the last thing we want is our kids on the playground chanting a song about yanking teeth and testicles off a dog. Am I right?

So bottom line, I’m out $holyshitballsbatman plus change and Oliver is out tooth fairy money. Oh, and his manhood.

I totally got the better part of that deal.

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