Please forgive the poor picture; I had literally 1 second to take it and surely can’t hold a camera steady at 1/8 second! But it was too cute not to post. We were standing outside the vet’s office talking with a Saudi man who fell in love with Sahraa and who has four dogs himself (!). A Saudi couple and their son walked by, and the son obviously wanted to meet Sahraa, which he did. Then his mother wanted to take a picture of him with her, so that’s what she was doing when I managed to dig my camera out of my purse and snap this in a flash.

However, the saga of sick Sahraa continues. They examined her and prescribed antibiotics to try to get her intestines back to normal. They said they’d administer her shots after she was over this. But then I asked what will this do for the pain she is in when she runs? Tim said she was almost screaming this morning when she tried to run around. So they took an X-ray, and none of us could believe what we saw, so they did another one from a different view, and there are three BULLETS lodged in her leg and waist, like pellets from an air gun. To say I was flabbergasted would be an understatement.

All we can figure out is that this happened when she was a puppy in Kuwait because for sure it didn’t happen in Washington, Budapest or Riyadh, and maybe one of them has shifted to cause the pain now. Tim said no wonder she’s afraid of men carrying things, and maybe cameras look like guns to her, too, which would explain this terror of having her picture taken. We knew something had to have happened, but have never known what.

The vet doesn’t sound too hopeful about trying to remove the bullets – she said they can be hard to find, and then greater damage is caused by trying to extract them. She was going to talk to the senior vet and then decide what to do. Sahraa doesn’t appear to be in pain from this until she tries to run, which she loves to do, so am not really sure how we’ll handle it. If we were back in the States with some of the excellent vets they have there, I wouldn’t mind trying to get them out. Here, I’m not so sure…