Dog Days: Chapter 1. Diagnosis
It was not what I expected.
That leg. That damned leg.
He is just a hound from the pound who landed on his paws when he found us.
Skinny. So skinny when we brought him home. At about the height and half the width of a Labrador, he was supposed to be full grown, according to the Council shelter that had picked him up. (Shelters notoriously get the blame for the “he wasn’t supposed to be this big” issue; to be fair to them, how do you guesstimate the size of a dog will grow to when you have to guess at their age and breed mix too, let alone of all the variables that have made dogs one of the species with the greatest variability in size on the planet?)
His body played catch-up once he got access to good food and plenty of it. The vet took a look, and said look at those legs, there’s still some growing to do there. He said he had been sceptical about all the new specialised mixes of dog kibble now available, but he felt that over time he had seen less orthopaedic issues. So, we dutifully went off and bought the biggest bag of “Large breed, Puppy” formulation we could find, and so he grew. And grew. And grew, until he could comfortably put his chin on the table. Often near a plate. Until someone noticed, that is. Thankfully, his growing stopped short of being able to rest his chin on the kitchen bench too, unlike his friend, Ruby, who is a Great Dane.
But maybe he grew too far too fast. His body weight increased by 50% in two months. From 20 to 30kg, finally topping out at around 40kg. He never seemed big to us. He was just, him. And I didn’t have to bend to pat him. His head, at my hip.
Glorious early years. Running, running until he was muscled like a high-level athlete. Deep chest, strong haunches, like a racehorse. And then another dog taught him about chasing a ball. He’d never been interested before. Then watching one utterly obsessed Labrador for 3 consecutive mornings gave him the clue. Back and forth, and back and forth, ad infinitum(him) and ad nauseum (human). From then on, a walk only required a tennis ball and an arm, or preferably one of those plastic flicker sticks that throw the tennis ball far, far into the distance. We went through a lot of tennis balls. He’d get wound up, and then a bit too manic and chew them. The air inside the ball and his saliva would combine until the froth of his excitement drooled and dripped and flicked when he shook his head. Ears pricking, body tensed for action just at the mere sight of a green tennis ball rolled into the gutter on the street and forgotten by children playing.
Then he pulled up lame. The first operation went well, travelling back home afterwards with his leg bandaged up like a lamb roast brought home from the butcher’s. Surgery is like butchering, all about anatomy, with surgery attempting to stitch back together what butchery seeks to rend apart. But the operation, as a single specific and time-bound event, does not in itself fix the thing. The operation is an active, defined procedure that is followed by the misnomer of rehabilitation. ‘Rehabilitation’ as a term suggests restoration to the former state, clean, unsevered bone, muscle, blood vessels, nerves. Instead, better to call it rehabituation, similar sounding yes, but crucially ‘re-habit-u-ation’ implies becoming used to something as it is now, not as it was. Because once skin and bone and muscle and blood and nerves are cut through and manipulated and pulled and cleaned and stapled and stitched, they can re-pair. A living body’s humble, everyday miracle that happens every time there is a bump and bruise, or scrape or cut. But this miracle is stretched thin by surgery; the skin might re-cover what the body re-pairs; it might re-gain the lost function that was the reason for the surgery, but it will be different. It will never be the same again; surgery always leaves a scar. Whether you call it rehabilitation or rehabituation, even the cumbersome ‘post-operative recovery’, whatever you call it, it is hard. Especially when you can’t explain why you took him to that weird smelling, weirdly lit place with all those strangers. Sure, he felt a bit of pain before you went, but he feels a whole lot more now than he did then. What was the point of that? Patience is needed, not just by the patient, but by the carer too.
It was winter, so we brought his bed closer to the wood burner, radiating out that heat that warms you all the way to your core, that feels as though it reaches through all the physical layers of a body right into the marrow inside the bone. The flame’s yellow-orange light flickering on the white plastic cone around his head, on the thickly swathed limb, the white of the bandages gradually becoming grubbier as each slow day passes. His mind emerging from the grog of anaesthesia, at first, he stood, swaying slightly as that intoxicant grog gradually left his body, his pupils returning from dilation to normal function, shifting with the light levels, leaving him with the dog equivalent of the mother of all hangovers. Keep him confined at first, they said. So, for weeks, he stayed by the fire, with humans keeping him company as they came and went, sitting beside him in the evenings, watching tv as he snoozed. Arguing in the early days about the best way to take him out to toilet because that inevitably involved going up and down steps. (Why don’t we just build more ramps instead of steps all the time?) Built to move, at first, he hopped around the room, resting his leg on just the tips of his claws when he paused. Then the occasional toe touch, slowly building to partial weight-bearing, a limp. Start him walking for a few minutes on the flat, they said. A quandary. We live at the bottom of a long and very steep driveway. It is 1:3 in places — honestly, I’ve seen the geological survey. So, to get the dog to walk on the flat would have to involve getting him to the flat at the top of the driveway. He can’t walk up the steep driveway; he is 40kg so both his weight and his pride mean we will forego attempting to carry him. He’d probably wriggle out of our grip and hurt himself on landing even if we tried. Ridiculous as it sounds, the next most obvious option is to drive him the short distance up the driveway to the roadside horizontal and gradient-free pavement at the top. No objection to doing that at all although it feels somewhat excessive (drive to a walk?), but how to get him into the car? He’s a big dog, long and tall so he doesn’t fit easily in the footwell. He has always jumped up into the boot of the car. I try and fail to coax him into the footwell. He flatly refuses to even consider walking the narrow gangplank of a ramp. By the time it would take to train him to use the ramp, he wouldn’t need it anyway, I think. Out of the corner of my eye, I catch him beginning to bunch the muscles of his haunches as he eyeballs the clear area by the side of the ramp. You clearly want me in the car, so I’ll just jump in the back, I always jump in, let’s stop mucking around, human. I pull him away, pull the ramp away, close the tailgate on the car, and sigh. What now? A question on his face as he looks at me, and he almost seems to sigh and shake his head too. Make your mind up. I give up on the car solution, and we potter around in the garden, gradually tiptoeing our way day by day, further and further up the steep incline of the driveway.
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As a patient, he does not display that ‘passive endurance of suffering’ that is the linguistic root of ‘patient’, and of ‘patience’. To be fair, it doesn’t come to me naturally either and I know what’s going on. Over a handful of months, we work his way back to full health and his leg functions well again. He’s still so young, full of vigour and energy that he needs, wants, to burn off. After a long walk, running hard with other dogs, chasing the balls he obsessively loves, he flops to the ground, limbs falling finally to a position of rest, waves of contentment rolling off him almost visibly as his muscles relax and cool, his tongue hanging out to one side. His joy in his physicality is mine too; we have come through this long period of frustration, and these are the rewards and joys on the other side. I loved him before, but the enforcement of consideration that caregiving brings, brings its own deeper dimension. No longer just fun and companionship, it now contains having to observe closely, thinking deeply about what will soothe and pacify the frustration through periods of inactivity, anticipating needs. With no veterinarian training, gauging and/or guessing at stages of recovery. Trying to remember what the vet last advised, trusting in your expert knowledge of this animal but with heart held as you ask yourself, is he ready, should he take that next step (not only metaphorically but actually in the real world as well)? The time that recuperation takes, is amorphous with the nitty-gritty details so specific not just to each individual but to each incident. There is nothing but rough guidelines from others’ experiences to help forecast each step of his progress from hopping to tiptoeing to stumbling to walking to …
Rehab was hard. Even after he was back on track, I told him to slow down, to take it easy. Not what he wanted to hear. We got one more year of glory, and then the other hind leg went. He’s a tripod again, one leg down. Or rather one leg held up, with only three lopsidedly anchoring him to the earth. Another operation. Different surgeon. Closer to home this time. Not so far to drive. Would it have made a difference if we had gone back to the first surgeon? But he was so far away. I’ll never know. With this dog, it was the first time I’d ever had pet insurance. A bit of a whim as my old dog, this one’s predecessor, had never seen the inside of a vet’s consulting rooms from one year to the next. I looked around, found one that was reasonably priced, and thought, I’ll give it a go. It seems sensible. And this proved to be a good call after all, financially, because there was another operation after that. Initially, after each operation he seemed to come right. But he still wasn’t quite right. So, another operation; dreading the date, nil by mouth this night before, the long drive to the clinic, waiting for the phone call, trying to keep busy, wondering. The relief and remorse at seeing my mighty lad, third eyelid lazily across, broken and bandaged again. The long drive home from the clinic and the long days of recovery. Each time, poring over x-rays and the like, trying to spot the problem. Thinking through the mechanics of quadrupedal movement, the engineering of the canine body, the mechanisms of surgical intervention and healing. We had done the rehab over and over. The scaffolding that was his bones had had to be bolted back together, but now they had knitted back together, meshed over the break so all that metalware, the titanium plates and screws could be removed. Just in case that was it, was that it? There was nothing left in there that could irritate or be infected. But that leg just never came right.
Then, the vet finally saying that there is nothing more we can do. Arthritis is setting in, so do we want to start the expensive monthly shots now? No, thank you. The pet insurance fell by the wayside. I cancelled the policy and started to put what I would have spent on the premiums into a little separate bank account for him. Once his age tipped him over into the Senior category, the premiums went up again and so did the excess — that prompted me to do a few calculations, and I reckoned they’d made back all their money from his multiple and admittedly expensive operations by that point. Over less than seven years, the monthly costs shifted from comfortably below half a hundred a month to early 3 figures, increasing at my guess by about 75%. Ads had begun to air on the radio, a little boy’s voice with a plaintive warning of how he’d lost his beloved friend because his parents couldn’t pay for the operation. Because they hadn’t been paying for health insurance for his dog. Guilt laid on in thick slabs, emotional blackmail sandwiched between the songs and the news at the top of the hour. My friend, a kind, modest man who had worked as a plumber throughout his working life, admits that he doesn’t think he can afford to get another dog when his old boy goes. The clinic of the surgeon we have been seeing gradually becomes one of the few independent vets left, their colleagues’ practices being bought up, rebranded into chains by venture capitalists. Pets became ‘fur babies’ (which if, by extension, that makes me a ‘fur’ or ‘pet parent’, then that also, technically, makes me a bitch). This story talks about money too, because money now seems to be the overarching metric. I grew up poor, I understood money as an enabler, but I missed how it was shifting from a subtle to strident and solo measure for how a life is lived. Pets became substitute children that no longer joined you as a part of your life but were vehicles for commodifiable categories in your life. Your obligation rather than just desire is to give them the best, as if they were your own flesh and blood. The best of course only being as available on shelves at your local megastore.
So, for quite a while we limp along, actually and metaphorically as the tripod hop only appears sometimes. Overall, it’s not too bad. Although, the ball chasing has to go. The race to get him on the lead if we round a corner and some other dog is there already, chasing ‘his’ small green bundle of joy, has him quivering slightly with frustrated passion. Friends we encounter in the park discreetly hide ball and ball thrower in a tree. A gracious gesture, effective at stopping play and starting conversation, yet still awkward. Their dog alongside mine is left standing under the tree, looking upwards, wondering what is going on? Is the tree going to throw the ball?
Every now and then, he’d overdo it, usually if I hadn’t connected the dots, realising that the grass was slippery with dew or rain, and he was making sharp turns or running on a slope, playing with a friend. He’d always be fine on the walk home but by the next morning, he’d pull up lame. I’d put him on rest for a few days, start to build back up with just a walk round the block on a lead once he came right, gradually increasing the distance until we were back to what had become our new normal. Then one day he had a play with a couple of dogs owned by a friend, just on the flat, and in the dry. It was slightly longer than normal, but he was fine walking home. Then the next day, he wasn’t; the tripod hop was back along with the family joke that it ‘looks like lame again’. We waited as usual, to do the rest, then the baby steps round the block and then incrementally, step by actual step. A week went by. Then another. And another. And he didn’t come right. He kept limping. Should I take him to the vet? I remembered his vet saying that they couldn’t do anything more. Just drugs. Painkilling medication that wasn’t bad per se, it might make him a bit woozy … but I wanted him, still, him who is my dog, not just functioning muscle and bone but his personality. And hadn’t his body been through enough? I would not rule out the drugs, but I’d pause on them, and we’d look around for alternatives first.
We went to a canine osteopath. Naturally, it’s in a chi-chi part of town. Never knew there was such a thing and never knew I would use one.
Heck, I never even thought that I would have a dog who wore a coat in a climate that never drops below freezing. However, his second operation was also in winter and the vet advised that he would notice the cold so much more. Still not sure what I was thinking, coats, unless strictly utilitarian. being considered with a certain level of disdain in my family as a laughable affectation, I nevertheless went shopping. Pets have become a consumer category, a part of one’s ‘lifestyle’. Animals in captivity such as horses, dogs, cats have always needed handling equipment- bridles, saddles, collars, leashes, litter trays. The functional requirements used to be durable and able to be cleaned, possibly able to be polished for shows (not the litter tray, definitely the bridle). Pet shops used to be small often slightly dimly lit, verging on dingy, to keep the multitude of animals’ calm. Now, I stand overwhelmed by the bright colours in a big barn of a pet warehouse store. Packed shelves reach to just above eye level, rows of objects designed to appeal to the humans not animals, nothing but air and emptiness above. Fair enough, it’s not the pets doing the purchasing. I have been trained by a range of dogs in the strength of their appetite for boredom, and thus destruction. I cast a jaundiced eye over the likely durability of many, many of the items on offer. The things that smell — cow hooves, pig’s ears, straw are vastly outnumbered. Hay now in plastic wrappers, the offerings for sale are dried, sanitised, and removed as far as possible from the reality of animals’ lives, of life with death as inextricably bound as the two sides of one coin, one animal dying for another to live.
I will not find his coat here. Not the coat for my dog. There are coats for dogs, but they seem more like clothes for dogs, and I have never felt the desire to dress my dog. I want function and comfort for him, not quasi-fashion for me. If others wish to dress their dogs, that’s fine in my mind — for as long as their dogs don’t mind. My desire to express myself through my dog pretty much ends at his collar which is now a very faded red, but it does its job. To my mind, my dog is a dog and there is no need for him to ‘ape’ being human, akin to a chimp at a tea party and denigrating to both species. He is not a human, I do not want to pretend that he is a human, I don’t want him to be a human, I have enough humans. He is a dog, that’s the point.
I finally find his coat at the greyhound stadium. There are racing kennels nearby, so we have recently seen a lot of greyhounds come and go in the carpark of his vet. Intensely muscled bodies with delicate long limbs, they feel the cold and many wear dressing gowns in winter. Actual dressing gowns, sized for children, forelegs through the sleeves, secured round their middle in roughly the same place as a waist if they were human, any hood flapping about at the back but adding some warmth at the neck. Greyhounds have long bodies as well as long legs and these dressing gowns long enough, as well as cheap and washable. They do the job. Brought up by a single parent, I am bred in the bone to worry about money, but she had her standards and so have I. I have only one dog, and the dressing gown solution, while practical, is still that bit too close to dressing up. So, after a tip off during a chat with one of the greyhound owners waiting to see the vet for routine vaccinations, I finally find his coat at the local greyhound stadium. A lovely, local woman has been making them from offcuts of polar fleece, and she has a couple left. Long enough, warm enough, washable, designed and cut to fit a dog’s body. I choose one with a smart, understated navy-blue layer on the outside. Whilst he seems bemused, even faintly embarrassed when he first wears it, it does the job. Reversible, it is lined in a lime green so bright that it almost ranks as hi-vis. Useful for walking a black dog on moonless winter nights. The coat becomes his winter ‘pyjamas’, worn against the chill of the night as the warmth from the fire in the wood burner dies down. Once he is used to it, we let him choose when to wear it; if he resists, it doesn’t go on. Lately, he has been choosing to wear it a lot, his choice to keep it on stretching into the daytime.
He probably is part greyhound. We’ve had a couple of moments as greyhounds whom we are assured will only ‘talk’ with other greyhounds, have paused to check and then ‘chat’ with him. He has a long body, so I thought maybe his back was involved too. He’s always had a little flinch point on one particular spot on his spine. I guess it’s around where lumbar goes to thoracic, I mumble awkwardly rather than authoritatively to the osteopath. It is calm and warm, she is friendly and French, not that that matters. There is a picture of her, happy and tanned with a horse, on her website. She is welcoming and seems to genuinely like people as well as animals, which is surprisingly rare (or unsurprisingly maybe) in the animal care industry. He is relaxed with her, licking smeared treats off a mat as she works. I am wary at first, suspecting my desperation of sucking me into some quasi-science, colloquially known as ‘woo-woo’, but I warm to her. She seems to care, in the right way. She fully turns her attention as well as her emotion towards him as an entire creature. His physical body, yes, and also his physicality from when that body is in motion, and his intellect, his personality, his emotions. She seems to communicate with the dog, as if he is talking and she is listening but through her fingers. It is not as clear as speech, maybe, lots of static, but messages seemed to be getting through. To give her her due, she really tries. She even gets out the acupuncture needles. Afterwards she warns me that he will still be like this for a bit. And also, to be prepared that he might get a bit worse for a bit before he gets better. I can hope, but miracles are unlikely, I know. And yes, he got worse, but the better bit never came. I wait, and I wait, and then I contact her again. I am trying not to be impatient, I know healing time predictions are imprecise, but it is taking longer than she said. It is not just taking too long; it doesn’t appear to be happening. Have I been ‘had’? My gut instinct says no, and to give her her due, she advises me to go back to the vet. She knows the limits of her art, and it turns out is not looking to suck my money out through the twin straws I am clutching, my fears and my hopes.
So, I made an appointment to take him back to the vet. The same one where he’d had all those surgeries bar one. At a time when the surgeon would be around, in case he could pop out and have a check and a chat. Before this, by chance I had a chat with a ‘dog’ friend about the corporatisation of vets. (‘Dog’ friends are those who you start talking with because they too have a dog, then you find you get on, and possibly weeks later you finally learn their name, not just that of their dog. Although they will be recorded with both human and dog names in your contacts, just in case). Years ago, I had signed him up for a ‘vaccination for life’ deal, and the contract had gradually been passed on from vet to vet, to now a practice in a vet chain. Annual vaccination due a few months earlier, this vet had tried to sell me a tooth powder for him. He’s older now, he has plaque on his teeth, this stuff is great, you just sprinkle it on his food … and somehow the plaque will magically disappear? If it’s that good, why aren’t the humans using it? It costs $50 for a very small pot that might last him a month. But don’t you want your animal to be well? Well, yes, I do, and that includes not giving him stuff with dubious efficacy and paying a fortune to do so. Veterinary operating costs (the cost of actual operations as well as business operating costs) have increased to be fair, as their range of therapeutic interventions have increased. It is a complex issue, my dog friend and I agreed, but some of those caring for the snakes seem now to have become snake oil sellers. Walking away from our chat, it became clear. I have made the appointment because we can’t go on as we are, me and Hopalong. I will now consider the painkillers. But I am now certain in my mind that I will refuse all suggestions of imaging like x-rays and MRIs and CTS and the like. They all require an anaesthesia, and he’s had so much of that through his system already. And what are they going to tell me? That he’s got arthritis? That’s pretty much certain, a foregone conclusion as foreseen by this vet years ago.
As it turns out, they will tell me something more. I have timed it right, and our usual surgeon comes in, a lovely man with a sweet smile, a flop of dark fringe and the bonus of an engaging manner with humans as well as animals. I don’t need more friends, I want the vet to care more about my dog than me, but his ability to communicate clearly with the human side of the partnership is useful. He smiles and greets my old boy like an old friend. It is relaxed; it is friendly. And his first words as he has his hands on my dog’s stifle — that’s the big bit down from the hip, with a joint in it where that ACL or ‘anterior cruciate ligament’ is, which is that malfunctioning band in him that has caused all those operations — well, the first word out of the vet’s mouth is ‘bone’ and the second is ‘cancer’. It was not definitive, obviously. It would need to be confirmed by imaging. I go outside to think, the dog sniffing the grass and limping along, relatively carefree beside me. I am not made of money which, honestly, is another albeit secondary reason that I had resisted the idea of an x-ray, or MRI or CT or any other acronym. But when a surgeon who works with his hands every day says something like that, well, his hands have come to know and understand and recognise what they can feel. Bodies talk, they tell stories of their joys and strengths and hurts and injuries. And he has been listening to them for years. And so, I know that I should listen to this surgeon and so I agree to an x-ray. The receptionist shuffles appointments around so that they can do it right then. I walk him through the back door of the consulting room, into an area of bright lights, gleaming clean, medical-grade steel, double bunks of animal caging, eyes peering anxiously through the wires as they wait their turn, and wonder. It is caring, but clinical. I hold him, then leave. Tense moments in the car park. Then we’re called back in. The prognosis is not good. There is no plan for treatment. Nothing more can be done.
