My friends in Denver had to put down their little Scottie named Annie on Saturday.
Windblown Annie in the window
Annie was 15, a good, round number for a dog’s life, but not long enough. My friends and everyone else who knew Annie will miss her.
I have had too much experience losing dogs, as have my friends. It’s never easy. I always feel guilty, not just in the cases where I had a vet end a dog’s life, but in every case. We are completely responsible for our pets’ live, and when their lives end, I feel like I haven’t done enough; I have failed them.
On the night back in 2000 when my father died, I felt as if I could step back and look at his life from beginning to end, a perfectly contained living history, separate from his current state and from me. His life was like a pearl on a necklace, and like a spherical pearl, it had no beginning and no end — a little bubble of existence floating away from us.
I can’t accept that my father, my mother, and my brother no longer exist. I don’t believe in god or in an afterlife, but I am incapable of accepting not that they are dead, but that their existence is gone. I feel like they must be back “there’, somewhere in the past, still existing as I remember them, and they would be there if I could somehow go into the past.
I feel that way about the dogs I have lost, and I feel that way about little Annie. She’s still back there, out of reach for us, but still sticking her head out the window to see the sights and catch the scents
Goodbye, little Annie. Hope to see you on the other side.
First things first; so what have the dogs been up to?
Dogs like Cheetos. In fact, I’m pretty sure this dog likes Cheetos more than we do.
Sam likes thumbs from leather gloves. I caught him before he ate the whole thing. I’m not joking about eating it; either he ate the thumb, or he’s really good at hiding stuff.
We had some light snow back in December. Some canid not a domestic dog left its tracks on the road. I suspect a fox. Look at the shadow to Zoe’s left. It’s not Zoe’s shadow. That’s Sam, best known for blue eyes and big, erect ears.
We had some nice days, too, sunny and warm, but not too warm, well suited for lounging for a few minutes. I hardly ever sit down in the grass of our front yard, so Sam was a little concerned. He also wanted pets.
Zoe invited a few Doberman friends over for a friendly game of poker.
Dobermans do not play poker. This is an image generated by an application called wall-e 2, which uses some kind of AI to generate images based on a simple instruction. The instruction for this image was “doberman pinchers playing poker in the style of Normal Rockwell.”
Actually, Zoe does play poker, but for her, poker means “poke her”, which she plays with the cat using her nose.
Speaking of weather (or were we?), something woke me up just at dawn a few days ago and I was able to see the sunrise. It was nice.
I hear that the sun rises almost every day, and often it’s quite picturesque. Maybe some day I will go to bed early enough to get up and see more of them.
Afternoons can offer nice skies, too.
Look at the evidence of wind shear, waves going two different directions. The sky over the parking lot was about all that our local Walmart had to offer, given the continuing supply chain problems.
Oh, about that doctor visit.
I went to my vascular specialist on Thursday of last week to talk about pulmonary embolisms, or blood clots as I don’t like to call them. Since my clots were not explained by any of the normal causes or risk factors, the various physicians I have dealt with have mentioned that cancer often causes blood clots. My vascular specialist repeated that, and added that in 10-to-20 percent of cases of unexplained pulmonary embolisms, cancer is diagnosed within two years.
I went home after that because it seemed like the best place to go. I considered not telling Leah what the doctor said, because I knew she would worry. I was right about that. I told her not to worry, and that, while I was considering potential courses of action should I be diagnosed with cancer, that was not the same thing as worrying. I spoke to my primary care doctor the next day, and he was more reassuring. He said that a cancer that was advanced to the point of causing blood clots would almost certainly be causing other symptoms, of which I had none.
The main concern at this point was that imaging of my chest right after my blood clots had found a nodule in my lung. Doctors said that it was small and did not show some typical features of a cancer, so it was probably benign. But not definitely.
I told Leah that we should hold off on the worrying until I saw the pulmonary specialist on Thursday of this week. I had a CT scan last Friday in preparation for that appointment to see whether the nodule had grown, which would be bad, or was the same, which would be good. The pulmonary specialist told me it had not changed in the six months since the previous CT scan. So, good news. In fact, he said it was probably not really a “nodule” but rather an enlarged lymph node possibly from a past infection, or something.
He said, “You do not have cancer.”
But the mention of an infection causing the enlarged lymph node made me wonder. About 10 years ago I had some heart function problems that were potentially pretty serious. A few months after that was diagnosed, my heart functions had recovered to the point that one of the two cardiologists I had seen discharged me. I asked what had caused my problem and why had it essentially cleared up. The cardiologist said he didn’t know, but that it might have been some kind of infection. So I asked my pulmonary specialist if the enlarged lymph node could have been caused by the same thing that caused my heart problem. He said it certainly could have been.
The doctor wants me to have another CT scan in a year, just to be sure, although the radiologist who read the CT image said there was no need for more imaging.
When I drove back home I felt as if a weight I didn’t realize I had been carrying had been lifted from my shoulder. I felt pretty good. When’s the last time you felt that good after leaving a doctor’s office?
Our dogs love to go for car rides. I don’t know why. The only place they ever get to get out of the car is at the vet’s. But they get excited when they figure one of us is leaving.
Zoe gets excited enough for both dogs, with some left over for a third dog, should we ever decide to get one. She knows what the door handle is for, although not how to use it, and she knows where her leash is. She thoughtfully points out both to me, just in case I have forgotten.
She is extremely sensitive to whatever signals we send unconsciously when the possibility of an inkling of an thought surfaces about taking the car somewhere. She seems to know we’re going to go at just about the same time I do.
She ran over Leah’s foot in the last clip. Leah is expected to make a full recovery.
I usually remotely open the sliding side door on our van before I let the dogs out. This is about the only time I ever let Zoe go ouside off leash. She runs directly to the car and jumps in. Sam, ever the polite dog, runs to the door and then stops. He needs to be invited before actually jumping in.
I don’t let Zoe jump out of the car off the leash. The last time I did that she led Sam down the driveway and up the street for a vigorous 15-minute workout.
I have forgotten where we went on this particular trip, but it’s the same routine for every ride.
And now the update on the as-yet-unresolved story of my lungs. I saw a vascular specialist on June 23, then a pulmonary specialist the next day. They were all reassuring. Everyone is reassuring. So far.
The regular practice for lung nodules such as I have is to watch them to see whether they grow, assuming there are no immediate indictions of malignancy. That’s what they are doing to me. I had a CT scan on July 14, about a month and a half after my hospital stay, when I had the first CT scan. I have heard nothing from it, so I assume there is nothing urgent. I don’t see the pulmonary specialist again until August 30, a month and a half after the CT scan. Is that a good sign? Someone tell me that’s a good sign.
Aside from whatever may be happening with my nodule, I seem to be OK. I’m walking with no shortness of breath, but neither the dogs nor I feel like going very far. I think Zoe’s feet may hurt because of an allergy of some sort. I am sure my knee hurts because it’s worn out. I expect to get a new one before long, but not before I find out what’s happening, or not happening, with my nodule.
I think I have mentioned before that our newer dog Zoe is very vocal. She is at her most vocal at dinner time, specifically, while I’m preparing her food.
She is fairly quick to learn commands, at least some commands, but I haven’t figured out a way to make her hush.
A few years ago I posted about a problem with out cat Sylvester’s tail. We were worried that it was broken, but our vet thought it might only have been sprained (a sprained tail?). There was a possibility of an amputation, if it was dead.
Liam coincidentally commented on my last post to ask what had happened to Sylvester’s tail. The answer is that he recovered fairly quickly and has had full use of his tail ever since; it’s fluffy, and it sheds, and holds copious quantities of dust and debris, just like a cat’s tail is supposed to. It looks normal and appears to be fully functional.
In the last few months, a new stray has appeared around our house. It started prowling and snooping on the front porch. We didn’t recognize it, and we certainly don’t need another cat, so I chased it away. It’s very careful, so any time it sees me it hightails it down the driveway and then up towards a neighbor’s house. Our neighbors had an outdoor cat that they fed on their porch, so I assumed the new cat was staying up there and eating that cat’s food, only coming down to our house to compare cat food brands.
I used the past tense because our neighbors moved away a couple of weeks ago, taking their cat (we sincerely hope) and its outdoor food. Now the new cat comes up onto our porch fairly often to eat the food we put out for our two outdoor cats. If it sees us, it hightails it back towards out neighbor’s house. It must have found some place to sleep, maybe under a porch or in one of the out buildings.
The cat looks well fed so far. It’s very skittish, so we haven’t been able to get a good look, and certainly not a photograph. Here’s the coincidence — this new cat has a deformed and shortish tail. When I got a good look at it a few nights ago I immediately thought about Sylvester’s tail of woe. I had not thought about that in years.
The cat is mainly gray, with short ears. Its tail is kinked, and about three-quarters the length of a normal cat tail. It seems to be a fighter, which is no surprise; it is, after all, a cat.
We hope it finds a home somewhere away from us. We have talked about trying to trap it and find it a home, but it might be too feral for that. Plus, if we set a trap, we are more likely to catch one of our own cats. I doubt that it will ever let us near.
Now, as to that dancing dog.
When we come home from running an errand, both dogs meet us at the back door. Zoe comes right to the door so she can wipe her nose on our legs, but Sam hangs back at the far side of the kitchen, where he does a little dance until we can get to him to give him some pets.
It turns out he’s a tap dancer.
I’m not sure how well you can hear his tapping, what with all the dog tags jingling and general commotion, but it seems to be clearest at the end of the clip. I think he has real possibilities.
Copyright 2013 Mark V. Paris
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