I love my dog, but there are times when she is so gross I don’t know what to do.

She licks the other dog’s eyeballs, reams out ear canals, and begs for clipped toenails, human and otherwise. She sniffs out dead skin – as from a cuticle or sunburn peel – from across the room. She would fight for a morsel of vomit. And she delights in feces of all kinds.

I didn’t believe the early reports that she was a poop sucker. I’d never even heard the phrase before when the handyman told me about her. I thought he was angling for more money, somehow. But no sooner did he tell me than I myself found her in the backyard, hypnotically munching poo – with a smack-smack-smack sound, the kind you might make when you swirl a delicious food in your mouth and roll your eyes. She was in an elevated state of the yummies – and she was eating a dog turd.

She’s barely bigger than a turd herself. And very cute. Everyone loves her.

I did my research and learned that it’s a fairly common thing for a dog to do. It’s a doggie idiosyncrasy, they say. (Needless to say we immediately banned doggie kisses in our household). But one day everything changed for me and her. She did something so gross that I have kept it a secret until today, almost three years later.

I came back from a vacation with total intestinal mayhem. You know, the sort of condition where the digestive system rejects everything from every source, spewing it out of every orofice in every direction at the highest possible velocity. I started out with nausea, then puking, then projectile puking, alternating with more nausea and then, surprise projectile diarrhea. I would run to the bathroom with cramps, shoot a gallon of something horrid out of my butt, and have just enough time to get the toilet flushed before a big barf welled up and erupted. Or, worse, I would be vomiting and the pressure would cause a fecal urgency that could barely be met in time.

At one such moment I stood up from a bout of barfing and found my panties chock full o’ diarrhea. Sick, gloppy poop of the acrid variety that makes your eyes water when you smell it.

I sprung into action, turning on the water in the shower. I pulled the trash can next to the tub to receive any emergency barf, and stripped off the offending panties. I showered, and then, feeling better, I filled the tub with hot water and settled in to a nice bath. I pulled the curtains closed and shut my eyes, trying to will myself into a relaxed, non-puke state.

It was sort of working. I felt woozy, in a nice sort of float-away, forget about everything kinda state. I might have been dozing when a rhythmic shush-shush sound slowly worked its way into my consciousness. I came to, pulled the shower curtain aside, and saw my little doggie with her face in my soiled panties, slurping with an urgent delight, like a kid with a bowl of stolen cake batter. Just like that, only with diarrhea.

I have never looked at her the same way again. I go through the motions, but it’s always there waiting to bubble to the surface, the picture of her scarfing it up. She’s as cute as a little stuffed animal, but I just can’t surrender to her cuteness because I know what she is stuffed with.