My wife and I have been in Kota Kinabalu for three months now, so I thought that it’s time for a quick update. Notably, the inclusion of Spidey, our dog, into our lives. We bought her at the Gaya Street Sunday market about two months ago. At that time, the seller told her that she was two months old and lied to us that she was actually a male puppy, presumably because most buyers would be more hesitant to buy a female puppy. Yeah, that means both my wife and I did a terrible job of checking up on the puppy’s actual gender. So much for being dog lovers huh?

After we got her home and got to know her a little, we couldn’t bear to give her back so we decided to keep her anyway. We’d actually picked the name “Spidey” for her when we thought she was a male puppy, but we decided to keep that name as well. As you can see from the above photograph taken just a day after we first bought her, she looked so tiny, with her body only slightly longer than the length of a hand. She was also very timid and somewhat lethargic on the first day. My wife said that she’d heard that some sellers keep their puppies tranquillized while selling them so they wouldn’t look too naughty or difficult to handle to potential buyers.

As it turned out, even after she got used to us, she was remarkably obedient and well behaved. It didn’t take much effort to toilet train her, for example, she instinctively knew to go to the patch of grass in the front porch to pee. After experimenting a bit with different living situations, my wife decided that we should keep her permanently in the room with us at night, while she would be kept outside in the front porch during most of the day. Currently, she also spends most of the weekend in the house, though I’m not sure how that rule came about. When it starts to rain, Spidey will whine at the door if she’s outside, and my wife will usually let her in as well.

What happens now is that we take her into the house after work, and she’s smart enough to nudge her with her nose if she wants to go pee. If we’re distracted with a movie or something and ignore her, she’ll scratch at the door with the paws, telling us that she really needs to go. Is that cute or what? Early in the morning, she likes to wake us up when the sun comes out by nudging at us.

Spidey actually fell seriously sick a couple of weeks after she joined us. We’d taken her out with us on our evening jogging session, which was the first time we’ve let her run around on her own outside the house. After that, she just seemed very tired and inactive. We took her to a nearby vet and discovered that her body temperature had soared to over 40 degrees Centigrade, which would probably kill a human. The vet said that stress might cause a puppy’s immune system to weaken and become susceptible to infection. She was sick for over a week and we had to take her to the vet every day for four days running because she wasn’t eating and was losing a lot of weight. The vet had to give her an I.V. infusion of glucose every day. The vet also advised us to apply ice to her head, so we wrapped some ice in a towel as you can see in the photo above. We were seriously worried that we would die. She was so weak that she couldn’t even stand up to pee properly and I had to support her with my hand. Every time she tried to stand up, her knees would buckle and she’d fall and whimper pitifully. The most amazing thing is through it all, she still insisted on waiting to be carried outside to pee and never once peed in the room.

We were very happy and relieved when she eventually got better. I daresay that my wife spoils her too much. Now we don’t actually dare to leave the house for too long because my wife gets worried if Spidey has to stay by herself for extended periods of time. This is a picture of us taking her with us out to a picnic at a nearby seaside spot. She doesn’t really like the beach though, and refuses to even go near the sea so we kept to the grass most of the time. We’re pleased to say that she’s now perfectly healthy, playful (her favorite game is “chase the towel”) and growing fast.

I might even get around to posting a video of her playing to YouTube to show off here one day.