[NAGDU] The Pain of Loving Old Dogs (Cross Posted)

[David]

*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&region=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