as the pup waits for blast-off her front leg is secured with a Fentanyl patch, a narcotic 100 times more potent that morphine.
the vet insisted that we put a plastic cone on her, to make her look more like Laika, and to prevent her from chewing the patch. “if that happens,” the vet said, “then you’ll have a dead dog.”
he must have liked the big goofy stare i gave him, because he followed that up with “and of course people have tried to chew on them too, in which case you’d have a dead person.”