For the Love of Dogs
In honor of our Sugar dog's TENTH birthday this month, I'm reposting a favorite from the old blog. I'm happy to report that she is doing great, rarely limps at all, has no potty problems, and wiggles and wooooos like crazy every time we walk in the door. Stephen likes to tell her that the Bible says her gray muzzle is a crown of splendor, and we are certainly thankful for every extra day we have with her.
Originally posted February 24, 2015
Once upon a time, I was a girl who did not want a dog. I could not for the life of me understand people who wanted fur-shedding, dirt-tracking animals in their homes. Sleeping with a dog?! Bizarre. And don't even get me started on people who spend thousands of dollars on surgery for their pets. Where are your priorities, people???
But then, I also did not want to be that wife whose husband never had a dog because she refused to allow one in the house. And Stephen wanted a dog.
We did our research, decided on a boxer, and foolishly went to Claremore, Oklahoma (birthplace of Will Rogers), to "just look." It only took a few puppy kisses on our sandaled toes to know that we were not "just looking," after all.
And so, eight and a half years ago, we welcomed our firstborn: a brown-haired, brown-eyed boxer named Sugar. We named her Sugar Ray, after Sugar Rays Leonard and Robinson, of course, but we quickly found that she was as sweet as her name.
I rode in the backseat with her on the way home, and Stephen slept on the floor next to her crate that night. When he left me alone with this fully-mobile yet not-potty-trained child the next day, I thought I might kill him when he got home, but Sugar quickly learned to go outside, and I let Stephen live.
Like all parents, we were in love. Was it aggravating when she took the toilet paper in her mouth and ran through the house with it? Yes, but we laughed about it later. Did we think she'd ever learn to stop eating tissues and q-tips from the trash can? No, but she did. (Come to think of it, maybe we should have put some more fiber in her diet.) And we were so proud to show our families and friends when she learned to ring a bell to let us know that it was time to go outside!
Slowly, we became the idiots that I had judged. I bought a giant winter coat - partly because the Oklahoma winters were the fiercest this Georgia girl had ever seen, but mostly because I needed something warmer for my twice daily walks with our puppy, who needed the exercise...and so I could play with her in the snow.
A little more than a year later, our human babies were born. When we brought them home from the hospital, Sugar trembled in her crate as we'd never seen her do before. Maybe she knew that they were somehow part of us, yet somehow not, or maybe she knew her status as only child was about to change forever. But she learned to love those babies, was always gentle with them, and I only wish I'd snapped a picture of her with her paws up on their crib, looking in on them, before I sternly told her "NO," and she never did it again.
Four years later, our four-legged family member began functioning mostly on three legs. When she wasn't getting better, we took her to the vet and learned that she had torn her doggie ACL. Surgery. Okay. We were officially "those people."
Sugar fully recovered from her ACL repair, and I found myself doing other insane things like baking pumpkin dog biscuits for her to ease her tummy troubles. http://susanna-twintalk.blogspot.com/2013/02/for-love-of-dogs.html (I subsequently learned that she would eat a tablespoon of pureed pumpkin right out of the can. Much easier.) We search for dog-friendly hotels so we can take her on trips, spend more money all the time on healthier and healthier dog food, and insist on including her in family pictures.
But what made me know for sure that I had completely crossed to the other side was when we almost lost her this Christmas.
Her other ACL had torn, and deciding to draw the line at another surgery - after all, it had taken a full year for her to fully recuperate from the last one, and boxers only typically live 10-12 years - we chose to pass on a second surgery, give her an anti-inflammatory and some pain meds for a little while, let the tear heal on its own the best it could, and accept that she might always have a limp.
The thing was, though, that she had kidney disease...and we didn't know it. At my parents' house on Christmas Eve, a few days after starting the drugs, she started vomiting, and we woke up Christmas morning to find my parents' couch soaking wet. (And started thinking we'd have to give my parents new carpet and a new sofa for Christmas. Thankfully, they understood - they once had a beagle that had eaten a brand-new bedspread at my grandparents' house.) After a few days of getting sicker, more lethargic, and refusing food, I took her to a vet near my parents' house, and we learned that she was in acute kidney failure, due to the anti-inflammatory drug we'd given her.
Because it was almost New Year's and vets' offices would not be keeping normal hours, we initially thought that the only way she'd survive would be if we took her to an emergency vet and put her on an I.V. around the clock for several days. $$$. Considering that we'd just decided against an expensive surgery, it seemed that we couldn't justify such extreme (and extremely expensive) measures. And I cried. Big time.
When Stephen called the vet to tell her that we didn't think we could do something like that, we got a glimmer of hope: We could take her to the vet's office for I.V. fluids while they were open, and then give her subcutaneous injections at home. It would cost less - and only had about a 25% chance of working - but we could give it a shot. And we needed to hurry back home to Knoxville to get it started.
We nursed our poor, pitiful, grown-up puppy for the next couple of weeks, and gradually, she got better. The first time that I came home from the grocery store and she was well enough to greet me with her wiggly nub of a tail, I wept.
Almost a week ago, we cautiously put her on another drug to hopefully help with her continued urinary incontinence. (Another thing that I never thought I'd tolerate in a pet.) It seems to have helped, but yesterday, she started having diarrhea, and this morning, we got up at 4:45 to the sounds of her crate rattling because she'd had a rather nasty accident in there. (Crate-training continues to be an absolute God-send. It's always been her happy place, and we've been relieved to be able to close her in there more often lately with her recent potty troubles.) After Stephen and I got Sugar, her crate, and the surrounding area all cleaned up and had sat down with a cup of coffee before getting the girls up for school, I found tears falling from my eyes yet again. For someone who rarely cries, this dog has brought on a lot of tears lately. Was this a symptom of her kidneys shutting down again? Had we poisoned her with this new drug? Are we getting closer to losing her?
The vet doesn't think so. We didn't give her the incontinence med this morning, she seems to be a little better, and we'll see.
I may miss my mothers of multiples club meeting tonight, because I didn't get much sleep last night and am now one of "those people" who does ridiculous things and misses sleep and misses "more important things" for the love of dogs.
I can't help thinking of a student that I had about ten years ago, one of my favorites. Her dog died the week before our state standardized testing, and she missed two days of school. I tried really hard to be sympathetic, but what I was really thinking was, "Seriously? Two days? For a dog?"
Now I know. Yes. Seriously. I never thought I'd love a dog, but I do. And I have been absolutely heartbroken over the thought of losing her. Turns out that my precious student was not the one who needed a lesson on those two days of school that she missed after she lost her dog - I was. And boy, am I getting one. I might come up with a better closing, but I need to go and kiss my dog.
