Something a Lot like Love
Almost as soon as I saw him, I knew something was wrong. My black Labrador puppy, Jack, was standing on the deck, licking the residue of vinegar and baking soda from the homemade rocket my son Christopher had set off the day before.
“Jack! No!” I shouted.
The dog looked up and blinked. It was then I noticed that he looked like his head had shrunk or that his body had bloated. I staggered back. That is what they call a visceral reaction.
My first thought was, “I cannot call the vet!” Then I had something like a near death experience, but it was Jack’s short life that flashed before my eyes.
He was twelve weeks old when we brought him home on Good Friday, April 6. April 16 was his first visit to the vet, where I learned that—through a complete misunderstanding—I had been feeding him twice as much as necessary and he was on the brink of obesity. The owner of two Labs herself, the doctor recommended I replace his food bowl with something called a food cube, a plastic box that would require him to push and turn it over to dispense the food three or four kibbles at a time. She thought it would cost about $25.
I mentally put this at the bottom of my “to-buy” list. That month’s budget was strained from the hundreds of dollars I had already spent on a dog crate, two pet gates, brushes, shampoos, a collar and tags, toys, a leash, examinations and vaccinations, pounds and pounds of food, the now deficient bowls, not to mention the dog himself.
April 27 we were back for more shots. Jack loved going to the vet. As soon as I opened the van door he was straining and pulling to get inside the office. From the very beginning I tried to teach him manners, so I made him wait while I entered first. This took time, energy, and strength. Jack is an English Lab, so he is stockier (even without overfeeding) and lower to the ground than the American line of the breed. It was like having a very small and demented bull on a leash. Since my kids loved to come along too, it was always a circus—monitoring them, controlling Jack, and answering any questions the staff had. I usually left the office with a headache and in a sweat. And this was a routine visit.
The morning of May 11 I called the vet because Jack had kept me up most of the night choking and gagging. Between his jags of coughing that should have brought up major organs, he was quite chipper. But the vet’s office told me to bring him in immediately for examination. Jack didn’t have any blockage, and after a thorough examination, the doctor suspected that he had literally inhaled a kibble. It worked its way out, but his trachea was irritated, causing him to cough.
For the examination, the sedation, and medication for his inflamed throat, the damage was $113.26 ($88.26 of which I recognized was stupid tax for not buying the food cube immediately after the vet recommended it). But I was happy to pay, having spent the night imagining what Jack might have swallowed (a stuffed animal, a large block, a long wool sock, an underwire bra, to name his favorite chews) and worrying that he needed extensive and expensive surgery . . . if he lived. I wasn’t looking forward to dealing with my children’s grief when Jack died someday, but five weeks after we got him was unthinkable.
“What are we going to do with you, Jackie Boy?” I said when we were home and resting on the lawn outside. He just stared at me and then quietly bit off a pansy from a nearby flowerpot. I didn’t think it was toxic, but I swept it out of his mouth with my finger just to be safe.
On May 15, four days after his discharge, Jack was still coughing. I called the office. “Hi, this is Alison Hodgson—”
“How’s Jack?” the receptionist asked. In eleven years with the same pediatrician, his receptionist still couldn’t match me with my kids. I wasn’t sure it was such a good thing that my vet’s office knew my dog and me by name in less than a month.
May 18 we were back in for his last round of shots, and I scheduled Jack to be neutered on June 22. After that he and my checkbook would be free for a year.
May 29 I called to ask about a cut on his mouth that had stopped bleeding, but I wondered if I needed to or if it was even safe to apply Neosporin. They told me it was safe but that he would only lick it off. Since the bleeding had stopped he was probably okay, but I was to keep an eye on his eating and drinking.
June 9, a Saturday, Jack began limping for no apparent reason. There was no way I was going to call the office on the weekend. I decided to keep an eye on him and hoped he would get better.
The following Monday, June 11, he was still limping, so I reluctantly called. Since there was no known trauma, they told me to continue monitoring him and to try to limit his activity. I needed to call if it got any worse or if it hadn’t improved any by the end of the week.
The next morning when I walked outside and was startled by the sight of my ludicrously swollen dog licking the deck, I didn’t think I could take it anymore. Another call to the vet—however kind and understanding everyone there had always been—was unbearable. I took another look at Jack. He blinked at me placidly. He was fine, I decided.
Despite this staunch declaration and my firm resistance to calling the vet, I kept an uneasy eye on him throughout the day. At one point I even did a kind of examination, pressing his sides, feeling for his ribs.
My sister Torey called, and I told her the latest installment in the saga of Jack. “I’m sure he’s fine,” I told her. “I couldn’t call the vet again. They probably think I have Munchausen’s syndrome by proxy . . . with a dog.”
“What?”
“You know, that syndrome where parents pretend their kids are sick to get attention—Munchausen’s by proxy—except they’re going to think I have it with Jack. I wonder if there is such a thing with pets.”
The kids and I were outside most of the day, and Jack was always right with us. I did notice that he seemed to be panting a bit more than normal, and he was certainly drinking a lot of water, but I attributed that to the warmth of the day. That is what they call denial.
When my husband, Paul, came home, it was the normal mayhem of kids running to greet him and the dog barking on the periphery. “Paul, take a look at Jackie Boy, would you?” I asked.
We both turned to look at the dog who was standing in the kitchen doorway. I gasped. His body looked twice its normal size and his large blockish head appeared tiny in comparison. His expression was strained.
“That ain’t right,” Paul said.
“Do you think I should call the vet?”
“Um, yeah.”
I ran to get the phone. A recording answered saying that the office was closed, but I waited to leave a message. “This is Alison Hodgson—”
The receptionist picked up the phone. “How’s Jack?” she asked.
I told her.
She asked me a few questions and then put me on hold to check in with one of the doctors. A minute later she was back.
“The doctor is very concerned and recommends you take him to the emergency clinic.” She gave me the number. “I hope he’s okay,” she said with genuine concern. My sister rushed over to stay with the kids, and Paul and I left with Jack.
At the clinic they admitted Jack right away. One of the doctors met with us privately. She recommended starting with X-rays. A little while later she came back, pictures in hand, and attached one to the light box. Jack’s spine was immediately recognizable flowing across the top of the X-ray. I could see it was a profile shot of his hindquarters, but that was about it. The doctor pointed to a large, oblong, cottony mass. Had Jack scarfed down a bag of cotton balls? I didn’t think we owned that many.
“What is that?” I asked.
“It appears to be kibble.”
It looked like there were hundreds and hundreds.
I looked at Paul. “I don’t know when he could have eaten all that.” Paul shook his head. Neither of us knew. We’d been asked here and by our doctor if Jack could have gotten into his food, but I didn’t think he had. The food was stored in the laundry room, which was down a hall off the kitchen, and the door was always shut. Since Jack was always underfoot—my feet in particular—I couldn’t think of a time that he had been in the laundry room. But clearly he had.
The doctor laid out her plan. The first step was to induce vomiting. Hopefully that would be successful. If not, the next step would be a gastric lavage in which Jack, under sedation, would have a tube slid down his esophagus into his stomach and they would pump the food out.
“He’s going to have his stomach pumped?” I asked. It was such a melodramatic phrase. I never expected it to be associated with my puppy.
“Hopefully not, but yes, that’s what gastric lavage is,” the doctor replied.
Hopefully not indeed! Every step of Jack’s care we were given an estimate of the cost of each proposed treatment. We knew that just getting him in the door to be examined and X-rayed, we were already up around $250. The less they did now, the cheaper it was.
We went out to the grim waiting room where the only reading material was a couple of ancient Pet Fancy magazines and a large photo album featuring the clinic’s staff. After we had read the magazines cover to cover and were practically part of the Animal Emergency Hospital family, we were called back to the private room.
The doctor got right to it: they were not able to induce vomiting. Our options were to go ahead with the gastric lavage or take Jack home and hope the food would pass normally. The risk in taking him home was that the food would harden and rupture the stomach, necessitating emergency surgery.
I leaned forward. “How much is the gastric lavage?” I asked.
The doctor repeated the financial range of the procedure.
“And what are we up to now with the induction?”
The doctor gave me a ballpark number on our tab and then left us alone to talk.
I added the two and shook my head. “I have never been in an emergency where I have asked the price of medical care. What do you think?” I asked Paul.
“I think we should do it,” he replied. “We’re already in this far, and I want it to be resolved tonight. When we take Jack home, I want to know that he’s okay.”
I agreed and we told the doctor.
Although I had been the one to first suggest getting a puppy, it was only because I thought it would be good for the children. It never occurred to me that a dog could be good for me too. Paul had resisted initially and only agreed after we had thought and prayed about it for a very long time. Paul became the one to immediately fall in love with Jack. For me, Jack was worry and constant work. He was also adorable and sweet, but the former far outweighed the latter.
Since he had been admitted, we could hear him barking almost nonstop in the back of the clinic, and I felt a new and strange pull of tenderness for that silly and troublesome dog. When his barking quieted, we knew the sedation had taken effect and that the gastric lavage was underway.
Time passed so slowly in that dismal waiting room. Finally, almost five hours after he had been admitted, Jack was ready to go home. He staggered out, but his tail was wagging. We winced when he was close enough to smell. Rancid, fetid, malodorous, putrid, noxious, rank, foul—I need all these words to describe the height, the width, and the breadth of that odor. And vile, definitely vile.
In the car I sat with him in the backseat. He lounged across my lap and stuck his nose out the window I had rolled down as far as it would go, and he sniffed the air. Paul looked back at us and smiled. “Jackie Boooooooy!” he crooned. Jack pulled his head back in and his tail thumped against the seat.
I wish I could say that this was the last of Jack’s mishaps and emergencies. The most dramatic and expensive, but alas, not the last.
Who could know that he would have a strange reaction to the anesthesia when he was neutered (June 22), making him hyper and frantic instead of sleepy as expected, and that he would bash his large cone into everything, particularly my shins, for the better part of a week; that he would leap onto the counter and eat an unknown amount of chocolate chips (June 26); that he would fall off our deck (July 16) and develop another limp requiring X-rays and medication; that he would make another dash for the laundry room (August 9) and scarf down a day’s worth of food before I dragged him away; that his limp would return again (August 22) and again (December 27); that he would swallow a rubber yo-yo (April 9 the following spring) necessitating another induction of vomiting.
And who could know that Paul and I would begin to get up together early every morning to walk Jack for his good and find that in so many ways it was for our good too; that all of us would laugh and play as a family even more; and that somewhere in the midst of those visits and calls, month after month in the day-to-day keeping of that dog, I would begin to deeply care for him, rather than simply take care of him.
My pastor says to know a person’s priorities, you only have to look in her checkbook register. The Bible says where your heart is your treasure will be. Well, Jackie Boy was in my checkbook, depleting my treasure, long before he was in my heart. And driving home from the emergency clinic that warm spring night, as he slouched against me, I could feel his heart beating and his tail wagging and the beginning of something a lot like love.
