[NAGDU] The Pain of Loving Old Dogs (Cross Posted)
David
david at bakerinet.com
Mon Feb 26 13:08:17 UTC 2018
*The Pain of Loving Old Dogs*
URL:
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/25/opinion/loving-old-dogs.html?action=click&contentCollection=Politics&module=Trending&version=Full®ion=Marginalia&pgtype=article
Long article. Text below.
--
*David in Clearwater, FL*
*david at bakerinet.com
*
Nashville — It’s 2 in the morning, and it has just started to rain. It’s
a gentle rain, with no threat of high winds or lightning. I know this
without having to get up to peer into the dark night or put on my
glasses to check the weather app on my phone. I know the facts of this
meteorological reality without even opening my eyes because there is a
large dog with halitosis now standing beside my bed, panting.
I’m grateful it’s only a rain shower. If this were a thunderstorm, Clark
would be pacing the house, climbing into bathtubs and struggling to get
out again, hunching under desks and overturning the chairs pushed up to
them, knocking guitars from their stands — seeking shelter. He’s afraid
of the rain, but he’s driven mad by thunderstorms.
On stormy nights, my husband gets up to force a tablet of dog-strength
Xanax down Clark’s throat, and for an hour we will both lie in the dark,
sleepless, while the dog staggers around the house in a state of
now-drunken anxiety. Eventually the human tranquilizer will override the
canine despair, and we’ll all go back to sleep.
Thirty years ago my husband wanted to establish a ceiling for any
veterinary bills that might be incurred by the cat he had just acquired
by marriage. He said, “If the cat needs something that costs more than a
hundred dollars, I say we opt for the $40 shot and go get a new cat.”
It was my cat, so my vote counted more than his did, and the cat lived
to a ripe old age. But in my husband’s defense I should mention that his
formative years were spent in the small-town South, where humane people
went out in the yard and shot an animal if it was suffering. I should
also mention that, in 1988, we were paying student loans on the salaries
of first-year schoolteachers, and $100 was more money than we spent on
our own food or medicine.
My husband would have found it impossible to believe that 30 years later
he would be running around the house in his boxers, trying to tackle an
ancient 70-pound mutt in the dark and shove a pill down his throat.
Clark is also deaf, and he suffers from crippling arthritis. So far we
have been able to manage his pain with medication, but at his checkup
last year, when he turned 13, the vet had some sobering news. “With big
dogs, there’s often a huge difference between 12 and 13,” he said. “One
day Clark won’t be able to get up, and when that happens it’ll be time
to let him go.”
The very idea is unthinkable. Clark has been our family protector,
making political canvassers and religious zealots think twice about
knocking on our door. He was the dog of our sons’ childhood, the pillow
they sprawled on during Saturday-morning cartoons, the security blanket
they returned to after an impossible test or a classroom bully or,
later, a broken heart.
At 14, this big dog has now surpassed his life expectancy, but he is not
the oldest dog in our house. We are also the custodians of my late
mother’s ancient miniature dachshund, Emma, who is seven months older.
She obliterated any thought of vet-bill caps in her first three months
under our care. Emma has survived countless trips to the emergency
clinic because she is the most accomplished food thief her canny breed
has ever produced. She dragged an entire pound of dark chocolate bonbons
under the guest bed and ate them before anyone noticed a lone fluted
paper wrapper in the middle of the floor and wondered where it had come
from. Rummaging through visitors’ purses, she has consumed whole
packages of gum, pouches of dusty Tums and, once, a zip-lock bag full of
prescription medicine.
There’s no room here to tell the whole story of the time Emma ate a tray
of rat poison at a rented fishing cabin on Kentucky Lake, but it
involves a manic drive down a twisting highway as the whole family
peered through the trees for a sign of any kind of store that might sell
hydrogen peroxide. You don’t know the real value of the human community
if you’ve never poured hydrogen peroxide down an eight-pound dog’s
throat in the parking lot of a Family Dollar store with half a dozen
rural Kentuckians offering advice. Let me tell you, country people know
what to do when a dog eats rat poison.
That bottle of hydrogen peroxide cost 78 cents, but the three months of
professional treatment that followed made a trip to the emergency vet
look like a trip to the dollar store.
Other people make health care choices for their pets that we could not
afford for Clark and Emma, but we will always give them anything that’s
within our power to give. Clark, our children’s canine sibling, and
Emma, who gave my grieving mother a reason to get out of bed every
morning after my father died — these dogs are our family.
Clark is now under the care of a young hospice vet. On his first visit —
a terrible day two weeks ago when suddenly Clark could no longer stand
up — the vet worked a miracle. Now on a new combination of medications,
Clark is wagging his tail again and begging to be taken on walks. But
time is still time, and always unfolding. On the hospice vet’s next
visit, he will most likely be coming to help us say goodbye.Clark
understands that he is old and weak and vulnerable, and it’s hard now to
leave him alone with his fears. I watch sometimes from the next room
when my husband leaves the house and Clark thinks he has been abandoned.
Standing next to the door, he folds himself up, lowering his hind
quarters gradually, bit by bit, until his aching haunches touch the
floor. He slides his front feet forward, slowly, slowly, and he is down.
A moan begins in the back of his throat, lower pitched than a whine,
higher than a groan, and grows. His head tips back. His eyes close. The
moan escapes in a rush of vowels, louder and louder and louder, and now
he is howling. It’s the sound he made in his youth whenever he heard a
siren passing on the big road at the edge of the neighborhood, but he
can’t hear that far any more.-- Margaret RenklNYT
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