LIVING PROOF

 

 

He hadn’t eaten anything in two days. (With a beagle, you should worry about loss of appetite after two hours.) He was clearly in distress. Breathing heavily. Hadn’t budged in hours. I took him to the emergency veterinary clinic where they initially diagnosed it as a treatable infection, but Toby was not getting better.

 They did an ultrasound.  The doctor came into the waiting room with the results. “Can I take him home now?” I asked the doctor.

 “If you really want to,” she said, explaining that the tumors they found on his liver were probably life threatening, and they might soon become painful. He was too old for any aggressive treatment.

“I do want to take him home,” I said without hesitation. “I want some time with him to say good-bye.”  I looked into his eyes; the sparkle was gone. I hoped that taking him back to the house was the right decision.

Barney—who passed away ten years ago this week— had accompanied me on 2,500 TV shows for WISH-TV.  Rather than become my next TV sidekick, Toby became nothing more than my next best friend. And nothing was more important than that. I’ve had a hound by my side for 23 years. The transition from beagle to beagle was seamless. The two dogs looked alike, they acted alike, they drove my wife crazy alike.

 

When we got home from the vet, Toby curled up on his bed next to the TV. He didn’t move for 12 hours. No interest in water or food.  I spent most of the next afternoon lying next to him, stroking his ears. When my wife got home, I remember saying, “I know this dog; he is dying.” Mary Ellen took issue with my prognosis. “I think he’s going to be fine,” she said, an observation that I took to be directed more at assuaging my anxiety than a legitimate medical assessment.

Over the next few days, Toby began wandering around the house, soon barking to go outside to sit in the afternoon sun. His tail started wagging and by the end of the week he had tipped over all the wastebaskets in the house and snatched a loaf of bread from the kitchen counter. I was ready to kick his butt. I wanted my wife to wipe that self-satisfied look off her face. This was three months ago.

Except for a newly torn cruciate ligament, he’s pretty much like a pup again, carrying around his dinner bowl in his mouth, coaxing me to fill it constantly with the canned moist food I switched to when he got sick. I don’t have the heart to go back to the tasteless dry fare that he never relished.

Toby is 13, but my hope is that he lives long enough for his leg to mend and that we can head out again for our daily walks around the neighborhood. The growths may never have been found had he not been treated for this incidental infection. I’m thinking he may stick around for a while.

I could have easily made a different decision that night at the clinic, never knowing if I made the right one.  This experience offers no life lessons. There is no moral here. It’s just a story, but so far, a story with a happy ending.

               

CAT NIPS

As of this past Saturday morning, I had nothing to write about. Then the cat bit my wife. I know, a cat bite is nothing to make fun of.  Neither was my lung biopsy, but I managed to crank out an entire humor column about that several weeks ago.

Mary Ellen had pretty much forgotten about the feline attack, but that night after dinner with friends, she casually mentioned the redness on her ankle while on the way home in the car. Bob and Cathy, both armed with their iPhones, were in the back seat googling away, entering phrases like: Fatal cat bites; deadly feline teeth; and, lethal kitten puncture wounds.  Hey, what’s more fun than surfing the net?

Once Bob and Cathy had convinced my wife that the swelling was either pasteurella multocida or staphylococcus aureus, we headed for the nearest walk-in med center. At that point, three of us decided to make it a fun evening by socializing in the waiting room while my wife was being examined.  I know that’s a really dumb way to spend a Saturday night with friends, but with my wife’s excellent health insurance, it was actually a cheaper evening than all four of us going to the movies.

Before she was treated, Mary Ellen had to fill out a form. The first part was titled “Victim Information.”  The second section was labeled “If the Victim Was an Animal,” which is either the kind of man-bites-dog story I’m always looking for as a reporter, or if it’s a dog bites dog story, then I want to be there with a news crew when Fido picks up a pen and fills out that form.

The receptionist said there was a long line to see the doctor and requested that Mary Ellen put herself on the waiting list and come back in an hour or so. I told the nurse that the next time my wife needed medical attention like this, we’d try to call about 45 minutes before she planned to torment the cat. Mary Ellen did not think that was funny.

Cats and dogs aren’t the only attacking culprits.  In fact, one part of the form provided a list of species that could potentially bite a human. They were in alphabetical order, so the first one on the list was bats, and number two was cattle (which I think would be embarrassing to admit to.) Okay, maybe a mad cow, but how do you let an entire herd bite you? Squirrel is the very last one listed.  And there is no mention made of pigs, more proof of just how powerful the bacon lobby is. That’s also probably why the expression: “When pigs bite,” never got any traction.

When we finally saw the doctor, he confirmed the potential severity of a cat wound and suggested that an X-Ray be taken to be sure the ankle bone had not been penetrated. Cathy, who was by now the leading cat bite expert in Central Indiana, wanted to know why that procedure was necessary. “Because the cat is now missing two front teeth,” I told her.

By the way, I forgot to mention that two years ago Mary Ellen was at this very clinic after she tried to take a chicken bone away from our beagle. The gash from Toby’s bite required three stitches in her hand.  My wife has a way with animals. Which is why we are not getting a cow.