When a Chihuahua Sleeps on Your Pillow

There is a story making the rounds about a woman who went to the emergency room after a regrettable nighttime incident with her chihuahua. The dog was on the pillow. The dog had eaten dinner several hours earlier. The dog had no comment when later asked. The woman was, eventually, fine. The eye, on the other hand, took a course of antibiotics.

I am going to handle this the way I handle most things in my house, which is to start at the punchline and work backward.

The incident, as reported

The woman, whose dignity does not require me to use her name, had been sleeping the way many of us sleep with a small dog: on a pillow, dog also on a pillow, two faces a polite four inches apart. She woke up at three a.m. to a sensation she would later describe to a triage nurse as "warm and not what I expected." She turned on the light. She processed the information. She drove to the emergency room.

The discharge note (which she shared, because she is braver than I am) listed bacterial conjunctivitis, a course of erythromycin, and a recommendation to revisit her sleeping arrangements with the dog. The chihuahua, by my reading, declined to comment.

I want to be clear that the woman is fine. The dog is fine. The pillowcase, I am told, was a casualty. Everyone has moved on except, slightly, me.

The veterinary perspective, briefly

I called a veterinarian I know, who has met my own chihuahua and has been patient with my questions in the past, and asked her whether sleeping with a small dog on the pillow was, as a matter of policy, a bad idea.

She paused. She is a thoughtful person. She said, "It depends."

She walked me through the actual answer, which is that the CDC’s healthy-pets guidance notes a small but real risk of zoonotic infection from very close contact with pets, especially through the eyes and mouth, particularly for very young, elderly, pregnant, or immunocompromised people. For most healthy adults, sleeping with a dog is fine. For people in those higher-risk categories, the bed and the pillow are different propositions.

She added, with the air of someone who has had this conversation before, that the specific incident in question was an outlier, and that millions of people sleep with chihuahuas every night without going to the emergency room. I appreciated her professionalism. I had, however, already decided to move my pillow.

My own arrangement, audited

I sleep with a six-pound chihuahua named Doris approximately two inches from my face every single night. I have considered this, until this week, a charming quirk of chihuahua ownership rather than a health hazard. I am now reconsidering. The reconsideration has been informed less by the medical literature than by a quiet count of how many times Doris has rolled over in her sleep and put a paw directly into my mouth. (The answer is more than once.)

I have, after considerable thought, made the following changes to our bedtime arrangement:

1. Doris now sleeps on a small bed at the foot of the larger bed. This is not a punishment; it is a renegotiation. She has accepted the new terms with surprising dignity.
2. I have replaced the second pillow, which she used to claim, with a folded blanket she likes more. She is, on a per-square-inch basis, getting the better of this deal.
3. I have begun brushing my own teeth before bed, which my dentist has been recommending for thirty-two years.
4. I have moved Doris’s most recent meal of the day from 9:30 p.m. to 7:00 p.m., which gives her digestive system a window of, at minimum, eight hours to do whatever it is going to do somewhere other than the pillow.

To be clear, none of this is going to make me a more responsible adult; it is going to make me, at most, a slightly less reckless one. The dog is unchanged. The dog has, in fact, claimed the new bed at the foot of the larger bed and has begun sleeping in it as if it had been her idea.

What this actually asks of you

I am not going to tell you to stop sleeping with your chihuahua. There are good reasons people bond with small dogs through co-sleeping; the literature on dog-owner attachment is not silent on this. What I will say, after this week’s research, is the following.

If you are immunocompromised, very young, very old, or pregnant, the pillow is a different conversation than the bed. Talk to your physician. If you are healthy and your dog is healthy and your hygiene is what your dentist would call "fine," sleeping with your chihuahua is unlikely to send you to the emergency room. Your odds of an outlier night, of the kind we are discussing, are small but non-zero.

I would also recommend, in the spirit of mutual respect, that you give your chihuahua a real outlet for the energy she would otherwise express in the bedroom in ways the literature has not anticipated.

The pillowcase

The woman in the story has, by all accounts, kept the dog. I respect this. The dog had no malicious intent. The dog had, mostly, eaten its dinner. The pillowcase has been retired with honors, and the woman has bought new sheets in a darker color, which is the kind of practical wisdom that comes from having lived through something the rest of us are merely reading about.

If you are currently sleeping with a chihuahua on the pillow next to your face, I am not going to tell you to stop. I am, however, going to suggest that you ask yourself, gently, whether you have a backup plan. The pillow is a soft target. Doris is, somewhere in this house, still asleep. We are all fine.