Tracy Davidson

Who knew Charlie was going to be “Charlie Meatball” when we got him from a shelter in New Jersey? After weeks of what we thought was throwing up, doctors at Penn told us our new golden-doodle had a birth defect called mega-esophagus and there was nothing that could be done about it. Translation: if he eats on all fours or drinks on all fours, nothing would ever get into his stomach. So he has to be fed, standing on his hind legs. Try to teach a dog to do that.

Try teaching a dog to stand on his hind legs. Try teaching him to do that and eat. Try teaching him to do that, and eat, and pass the time while he digests it. Try teaching yourself to be patient while he stands, and eats, and digests. It all takes about 15 minutes per meal. What’s that in dog years? I don’t even know. We built him a special chair and had to train him to shimmy his back-end into the seat, then tell him “paws up”, drop the pvc bar down and then he eats… meatballs.

Yep. Food goes down the best when it’s in meatball form. So we make him meatballs, hundreds every week, stored in plastic bags in the freezer. 300 meatballs per week! It’s like cooking for the church spaghetti dinner every week. We make a special recipe for the meatballs, specifically for weight gain. It includes ground beef, wheat germ, cornflakes, eggs and honey. I wouldn’t eat them, but Charlie seems to think they’re the best things ever made. He gets about 10 meatballs, about 4-5 times a day. And he has to take fluids the same way. Because he can’t drink on all fours when he’s thirsty, we have to get him to drink when he’s in “the chair”, so we have to make the water a little more appealing. He has discerning tastes. We add milk, honey or something else to make plain old water, yummy.

Oh, and then, we set the timer for 15 minutes. He has to stay there to make sure everything gets into his stomach. We used to have to sit near him, entertain him with every toy he had or give him loving’. In the beginning, he was stressed and we were stressed because he was stressed. Now he’s so used to it, he’ll fall asleep or look out the window at the squirrels. So let’s see: making meatballs, warming them 4 or 5 times a day, 15 minutes every time he’s in the chair,, and the occasional clean up when some of it still “spills” back out… Our friends joke he’s more work than baby. But we love our dog so much that I don’t mind that he’s a part time job.

The thing is, Charlie has shown us how tough he is, and how much he loves us and what we do for him. We stressed together early on, now we love life together, in the chair and out of the chair.

When people see what we go through, they can’t believe it. We don’t think anything of it anymore. We just say, “Charlie… meatball.. get in the chair.” And he knows what to do.