I Made My Family a Simple Chicken Dinner and It Only Cost $7,500*

A lot of things in this life are hard to swallow, but it turns out that a gigantic chicken bone is not one of them.

As this photo that popped on my phone thanks to Apple Memories reminded me, it’s the four-year anniversary of a treasured family moment, and I’d like to share it with you. 

Keep in mind that one man’s treasure is another man’s trash is another dog’s jackpot. 

So back when our mildly psychotic 4-year-old dog Clark was a fully psychotic six-month-old puppy, something happened that was nobody's and everybody’s fault all at once.

I was sitting on the couch, digesting a wonderfully prepared chicken and roasted vegetables dinner, getting ready for Jeopardy! to come on and make me feel extremely stupid.

“Dad!” Gus screamed from the kitchen. “He’s got something in his mouth!”

I ran in to find little puppy Clark looking like a squirrel with a year’s supply of acorns in his cheeks. By the looks of what was drooping out the sides of his mouth, he snagged a half-eaten chicken thigh that was in or near the garbage can. (Clean-up is not something anyone in my family excels in.)

“Drop it! Drop it!” we begged. Clark smiled at us through clenched teeth. Puppies are not capable of speaking, but the look in his eyes said: “Spit out this juicy piece of ass and go back to that bowl of liver-flavored pebbles? Suck my recently snipped-off balls.” And to put an exclamation point on that thought, he slurped it down into his gullet with a comically loud gulp. The half-eaten chicken thigh was now fully eaten.

I was a latchkey kid growing up, so I watched an unhealthy amount of Looney Tunes after school and I saw cartoon dogs happily eating bones all the time — no big deal, right?  

Let’s just say that Lisa, Henry, and Gus did think it was a big deal, and so twenty minutes later, I was standing in an animal emergency clinic. And I was annoyed. Clark was getting an X-ray, and I just knew what the inevitable report was going to be: “Yep, your dog ate some chicken. That’ll be $600 please.”

Oh, if only. 

After several hours of waiting, the vet stuck her head out of the X-ray room. “Mr. Bova?” Nothing good has ever followed someone referring to me as “Mr. Bova.”

She lit up the X-ray of Clark’s stomach, revealing what appeared to be a telephone pole jammed inside a change purse. She explained that there was no earthly way that bone was coming out the other end and that he would need surgery to extract it before it damaged his intestines.

“Surgery…hmm,” I said. The vet understood the question my hmm-ing implied.

She texted a link to the cost estimate: $7,500. I wondered if veterinarians were equipped to handle human heart attacks.

It was 2 o’clock in the morning at this point. I called Lisa to report the news. We immediately conferenced in my sister-in-law Cathy, a horse veterinarian who lives in, and was 100% asleep in, Virginia. “Does a dog really need surgery for eating a goddamn bone?” I asked.

I put her on the phone with the vet and after some science-y talk, the phone was handed back to me. “Yes,” reported Cathy.

The vet had to go off to deal with something else and I was left alone with Clark, who was starting to get that look on his face like the one I get after housing an entire box of Cheez-Its. It was do-or-die time. I didn’t know what to do. And then, quite literally, I was saved by the bell. My phone rang.

Let me pause to say that I fell in love with my wife the day I met her. And that love grew when she said “I do” on our wedding day and grew even more when she told me, “You’re going to be a dad.” But I don’t think I’ve loved her quite as much as when she said these words to me over the phone at 3 AM: “The pet insurance will cover 90% of the bill.” 

(This was the pet insurance, I should add, that she insisted that we get while I pronounced it a waste of 60 bucks a month.) 

I stood up from my seat. “Cut it out, doc!” I shouted selflessly. “Save my precious boy no matter what the cost!”

Clark’s surgery went well, and after an overnight stay, the vet handed him over to us with a cone of shame around his neck. Also? She handed me a baggy with the removed thigh bone in it. 

The lesson in all of this? Don’t learn from your mistakes, or never give up on your dreams. As soon as he spotted the chicken thigh in that baggy, Clark tried to jump out of my arms for a second go.