So, I flirted with the universe’s algorithm for disaster last week with full knowledge of two things. 

One, it’s November. And we all know how my last few Decembers have gone. 

Two, my dog, Pete, has a weird growth flopping from his mouth. 

A few weeks ago, I was making my bed when I noticed what looked like dried, bloody saliva on my comforter. 

Was it mine? Pete’s? 

I threw the comforter in the wash and put the old one from the linen closet on the bed because, hi. I have never left the house with an unmade bed in my life. 

You’re just inviting entropy into your life if your day doesn’t start with a made bed.  

Hospital corners and all. 

The next morning, another bloody spot greeted me.  

This time, I knew it was from Pete because only one of us, on occasion, sleeps at the bottom of the bed. 

I looked him over. He’s a lumpy dog, my Pete. Dog moles have sprouted up on his paws, his neck, his chest. 

I thought maybe he’d scratched open a mole. But his funky dog moles seemed intact.  

Pete also has, like, four teeth. I dropped $2,000 to have 10 of them removed last Thanksgiving because they were rotting in his little Petey head.  

Let me tell you something.  

You have not lived until you’ve walked into the house with a dog extremely high on dog anesthesia and explained to your husband that the tooth extraction, tooth cleaning, and three-day urine test to assess for high blood pressure cost nearly as much as your mortgage. 

Also, collecting urine from your elderly dog for three days is not how I pictured my life on the night my then-boyfriend, now-husband flashed that diamond engagement ring at me. 

Nor was driving my son and his buddy to school with three Tupperware containers of dog urine and one Tupperware container of dog poop in the trunk of the car. 

Perhaps fittingly, I lost the diamond from that engagement ring years ago.  

My husband offered to replace it. 

“Eh,” I said. “I’d rather have new carpets.” 

Or, you know, a dog with no teeth. 

So when the blood showed up on my comforter, and no dog moles were bleeding, I thought maybe Pete had something going on in his mouth, something his teeth normally would have barricaded. 

But my inspection yielded no dried blood around his mouth, no apparent injuries.  

A week went by like this, with bloody spots on the comforter. Each day, I had to wash the comforters, new and old, on rotation. My days became blurred cycles of wash, rinse, repeat.  

I couldn’t fathom the problem — Pete had just been to the vet for his well-dog visit. He was fine. Fine. 

So fine, I voiced to Pete’s vet my desire for him to live through my youngest child’s freshman year of college. 

“Two years?” she said. “I don’t think so. He’s healthy, but there aren’t too many 18-year-old beagles out there.” 

“He’ll be fine,” my husband said as I collapsed into his lap, crying after that appointment. “He’s so healthy. Doesn’t the vet always say he doesn’t look his age?” 

Then Pete jumped over a coffee table to get to where I perched on the sofa. 

So, yeah. Fine. 

A week into the bloody dribbles, my husband, son, Pete, and I were hanging in our rec room, watching TV. 

Pete sat up from his 11th nap of the day, shaking his head with that snappy shake dogs have. 

That was when the cyst flopped from his mouth. 

It wasn’t that big, maybe half the size of an olive. When he shook his head again, it flopped back into his mouth. 

Then out again. 

We took a picture of it. “We should name it Humphrey,” my husband said. 

We agreed Humphrey was the likely source of the bleeding. Humphrey, we decided, should be evaluated by the vet. 

In the two long days it took to get an appointment, Humphrey grew. He vaguely resembled a thick piece of pancetta perpetually hanging from Pete’s right jaw.  

“Yeah,” the vet said, “that needs to come out. Sooner rather than later.” 

In the space between the vet visit and Pete’s surgery, Humphrey has continued to grow. He reminds me of the Red Hag, an evil entity from a book I once read. She abducts and restrains an immortal being, then perpetually pulls out his guts, knitting them into a dress. 

As she removes the entrails, they of course regenerate.  

Immortal being, remember? 

Humphrey is like the Red Hag. Each day, sometimes each moment, he is longer. He bleeds on the comforter, the blankets Pete cuddles with on each of the sofas. The throw pillows on those same sofas. 

Humphrey bleeds on the carpet I regret replacing before I adopted a dog, on the pandemic-battered sofas I refuse to replace until everyone goes to college.  

Humphrey collects dust and hairs. The germophobe in me almost — almost — can’t have Pete in my bed. 

In fact, one morning, I woke up to a hunk of Humphrey noticeably missing.  

I couldn’t even look in the bed. I just scooped up all the linens and burned them. 

OK, OK. I put them in the wash. 

We’ve come to call the surgery a Humphrectomy. The Humphrectomy cannot come fast enough. 

“You pay,” my husband said, “whatever it costs. Get Humphrey removed.” 

I guess it’s a good thing I never replaced that diamond.