“Okay. That’s his heart, and that’s his liver and kidneys. You can see his stomach with a little liquid in it still, and there’s the colon,” she said.

Lloyd, the dog in question, stood nearby - a little gingerly and groggily given the two “manual enemas” under anaesthetic he’d had over the previous two days - and with his head slightly cocked to one side.

If he’d been a talking dog I’m guessing his comment, at that point, would have been something like “What the f… just happened.”

Certainly I said something like that about the bill. Not that I’m blaming the vet who, lest we forget, was the person at the dismal end of the “manual enemas” scenario.

I can’t even blame Lloyd, a fluffy 13-year-old Jack Russell/terrier cross garbage guts.

He ended up at the vet two days in a row after disappearing for 20 minutes in the pre-dawn dark at Terrigal last week until I found him – or the back half of his body – eating the contents of a garbage bag at the back of a restaurant.

I have no idea what he ate in that wild, glorious 20 minutes of gorging, but it apparently included a lot of cooked bone. I have the x-rays of his colon to prove it, at about $170 a pop.

I’m writing this today as some kind of community service announcement for all dog owners. You, too, could end up forking out $900 for two days of emergency treatment if you let your dog run off and find a restaurant garbage bag full of God knows what.

You, too, could watch your dog going about his business, apparently fine, for the rest of the day – sleeping, eating, drinking, piddling, begging for food, barking at the cat, sleeping, eating, drinking etc – until waking some time through the night to his whimpery sounds of wanting to be taken outside.

I’m not at my best at those times, I think it probably goes without saying.

If you’re woken in the middle of the night because you hear a car crash outside, or the house is burning, or you get a phone call from a friend to say she’s in a police holding cell somewhere, can’t find her shoes, has lost her bag, has had too much to drink and can vaguely remember saying something rude to a guy in a uniform that seems to have led to her current situation… those things you can respond to with a burst of adrenalin and a sense of urgency.

If it’s your dog whimpering that he wants to get out and it’s cold and dark and you’re warm in bed… well, I’m less than optimal then.  

I’ll spare you the details of what happened once he hit the backyard but it was obvious he was quite keen to get out of his system whatever he’d eaten from the garbage bag the morning before, but it wasn’t keen to leave.

For the next few hours it continued to not happen, despite Lloyd’s best efforts. Which is when I started thinking about bits of plastic or foil or other solid, unnatural objects in a small dog’s digestive system, and I rang the vet.

Lloyd was a stray puppy with a piece of rope around his neck when he was found on a beach and came into our family 13 years ago. I’m not a dog person, which must radiate off me like a dog beacon because Lloyd took one look and decided I was the one he adored.

I’m still not a dog person, but over the years he has become the happy, fluffy, enthusiastic, untroubled antidote for times when writing about what people can do to each other becomes almost unbearable.

He’s the little companion for when I can’t stand humanity, who’s joined me on the middle-of-the-night walks and merrily piddled on every square centimetre of footpath and road verge from here to the next suburb.

(I’ve walked, he’s piddled, just to be clear.) 

Which is why on that first day I forked out $545 for x-rays to show he didn’t have a foreign object in his system, but was just chock full of digested bone that wasn’t budging, and the treatment to get things moving. And it’s why I paid more than $300 the next day when his condition deteriorated and he went through the process all over again.

“He’s a special little guy,” said the vet, and another vet in the treatment room nodded.

“Usually it’s the bigger dogs who need double treatments after eating too much cooked bone. I don’t think I’ve had to do a double treatment on a little dog.”

The other vet thought about it for a few seconds and decided she hadn’t either.

“Thanks,” I said. “That makes it so much better.”

It was so unusual, and Lloyd was such a special little guy, that the vet gave me a CD showing his two days of x-rays, as a memento of his stay.

Maybe I’ll get the x-rays printed off and framed, alongside a copy of the final bill, as a reminder and a warning of what can happen when a dog’s left to his own devices for too long.

A short time after bringing Lloyd home my middle son, a carpenter, rang to say he was going to be late picking up his yappy little dog from my house.

“The *&^%$#@ wheelbarrow went through the *&^$@#$ back !@^%$#@* window of my &$#%&*# ute,” he said, or words to that effect, with a likely bill of $300-$400.

“Well, I just paid nearly $900 because Lloyd was backed up,” I said.

That made him feel better.

I would have laughed and scoffed years ago at the suggestion of paying $900 for anything to do with a dog. And then you end up with one, and somewhere along the way you realise it is love you feel.