Dog, teen survive earring ordeals

I don’t know what the chances are for two co-workers to have weird earring stories in a week, but they did.

That’s weird stories that involved earrings, not stories about weird earrings.

A co-worker in advertising who is a jewelry maven and a dog lover had an unfortunate mix of the two. She went to call on a customer for the first time, and the couple had an 8-week-old golden retriever puppy.

This co-worker can’t keep her hands off a dog any more than a grandmother can keep her hands off a cute baby.

She picked up the puppy, named Harley, and it nibbled around her face. You see where I’m going here. She noticed that her earring, a special gift from her husband, was missing. The black diamond attached to the hoop was on the floor, but the diamond-encrusted hoop was nowhere to be found. She really didn’t think the dog ate it, but they looked everywhere.

Meanwhile, in that same week, another co-worker finally gave in and took her fashionable 13-yearold to get a second ear piercing.

Actually, the woman’s husband took their daughter, and my friend completely didn’t trust him to pick out the earrings.

When this co-worker showed up at the business, things were going fine until the cartridge in the gun malfunctioned. The gun shot the earring into the girl’s ear, as it was supposed to do. But, the post of the earring penetrated part of the cartridge, and the teenager had a piece of plastic hanging off her ear.

One option would have been to start a new trend.

Instead, after pulling and twisting as gently as possible, to no avail, the business owner called the manufacturer of the ear-piercing cartridge, who gave an astute assessment: Pull it out. Thank you, Captain Obvious.

Finally, after about 20 minutes of pulling and twisting, the part they’d been working on came out. The girl’s ear was red as a beet, but she was none the worse for wear.

The profusely apologetic store owner refused to let my friend pay for the earrings, or for a halfprice bracelet she’d found for her daughter while waiting through

the ordeal.

Meanwhile, sweet Harley went to the vet and got an X-ray. The customer texted a photo of it to the co-worker, and I saw it. Right there in the puppy’s intestine was the clear outline of a hoop earring. They just had to wait for it to, um, appear. It was supposed to take 24 hours.

This co-worker’s husband said, “If we can’t get the earring, can we get the dog?”

The couple who own the dog wouldn’t let the co-worker pay for the X-rays because the woman said it was just “a crazy mishap.”

The puppy ended up having three X-rays, and my co-worker was notified each time.

“Just an update, the earring has passed into her lower bowel,” the dog owner wrote in a text.

When it materialized, a cheer went out over the land. The co-worker got a text — but not a photo, thank goodness — from the dog owner that the earring had completed its journey.

She got the earring back in perfect shape, and she plans to wear it again — after giving it a bleach bath.

The other co-worker’s daughter is back at school in style.

Both puppy and teenager are doing well.