SUN DOG (2)

This past summer April developed a new habit, puking on rugs. She never pukes on the floor, on the indestructible membrane of vinyl. My response was to develop a new skill, cleaning up puke. No detail offered here. It was a job, I had to do it.

The course of my denial was "maybe I bought a bad bag of food," "maybe all old dogs puke daily." I wanted to think anything other than "something is wrong." Clean the puke, deny the problem.

Dog ownership is no picnic. It's messy. The amount of hair shed by a big dogs fills an Electrolux bag in two weeks. Cleaning is part of the drill.

April weighs sixty-seven pounds, always sixty-seven. People say "she is getting fat", but they are mistaken. Fresh water freezes at thirty-two degrees, April weighs sixty-seven pounds.

After a month of puke and denial, I take her to the veterinarian. April is down two or three pounds. The vet and I discuss her lower than usual energy level (leaving my arm in its socket).

But April puts on a compensating show for Nancy the veterinarian. April dances on the linoleum, speaks in gutturals and pleasant yammers, turns this way and that as required for her physical exam, she glistens. She is a picture of health in an older dog.

To deal with the puking and diarrhea, the vet orders a change of diet and prescribes a course of Flagyl to rule out Giardia as the source of April's diarrhea. These measures fail to bring about a change in April's health. Her weight stays in the low sixties.

I perfect my rug cleaning technique. Life goes on. Life is a dog walk. I measure my life by dog lives. I am five dogs old.

Come October I had to go out of town for a week. April is my traveling companion, she rides in the front seat and puts noseprints on the window. For variety, she'll climb in the back to nap, or she'll put her head on my shoulder and watch the windshield display.

April is my ambassador, I am not immediately friendly but she welcomes the world. She is the better half.

But even a dog princess isn't welcome if she is puking (now more than once a day). I have a neighbor who looks after April when I have to leave her behind, but puke-cleaning skills are not part of his inventory. So I call Nancy the vet and arrange to leave April with her, in the kennel, not April's favorite place.

At the vet's they observe April's behavior and run more involved diagnostic tests to get to the bottom of her three-month trial by puke.

After a week, April weighs fifty-eight pounds and the puke has a name, lymphoblastic leukemia, cancer of the blood. I am advised of the palliative, remission inducing medicines available in the modern veterinary pharmacopoeia. I am informed of other, more advanced diagnostic techniques available for staging and managing her disease. I am encouraged to consider these techniques.

The question I have to answer is Why? Are these options offered for me or for April? Time was these spin-offs into the dog world from human Oncology were not available. But Americans have the heavy pocketbooks, Americans have the Knowledge. We can keep Companion Animals alive.

I elect not to do the drug therapy, chemo by another name. I resort to chicken soup therapy and calls to Jesus instead.

We stick with the routine. I roll up all the rugs in the house and move downstairs, sleeping on the floor next to the dog and the door. One neighbor says, "you got the wrong vet, ain't nothing the matter with that dog". She looks good, she shines, she barks at squirrels. But the truth is in her weight, dropping, fifty-three pounds. I feed her by hand.

She eats rice, she eats eggs, she eats white meat, she eats low-fat beef. She is dogged in her persistence. She lives, she greets the mailman. She continues to do her part, to carry out the contract. But her weight loss is relentless, forty-eight pounds.

My part of the contract? How do I know when to let her loose? I figure she'll pull a Lassie and tell me, "there is a dog in here suffering and you, Timmy, you have to let her loose, set her free, lift the weight off her body and let her fly." Contemplating euthanizing April is akin to thinking about cutting off my hand. Our contract is simply to be together and be good to each other. This must be the small print in the contract, a stipulation that I might be required to kill my best friend if she looks at me with eyes that say "let me go" rather than eyes that say "let's go for a walk." I know the look of "let's go for a walk" and now I am waiting for a request I've never seen. I hope I have the sense to recognize and the kindness to heed her request.

Continued...