The Deployment Diaries... Part 4
It's a new year and a fitting time to wrap up this Deployment Diaries series. A year ago, we had just said goodbye to Stephen as he left for six months in Kuwait, and we are extremely thankful that this year is not beginning with the same challenges as the last. (I'm not kidding myself—life is full of challenges—I'm just glad that this year shouldn't include the same ones as last year!)
Much of this final chapter of our deployment story revolves around the antics of our beloved Sugar dog. Sadly for us, she left our family on December 21 after eleven years of being the sweetest, goofiest, most wonderful dog a family could hope for. Though it has been terribly sad for us to lose her and we miss her dearly, we have such fond memories of our sweet pup and are comforted that she did not suffer long, had a natural death, and we were all able to be with her, loving on her, as she passed.
Sugar at our family river house in November
May 29, 2017
Another month draws to a close.
And we are excited to be counting the weeks remaining instead of months… 7 weeks to go.
It’s Memorial Day, and we’ve enjoyed a nice, relaxing weekend—and remembered what Memorial Day is all about.
While I’ve not wanted to wish time away—even this deployment—I’ll be glad to see May come to an end. Talking to my good friend Katie last week, she said, “May is the new December,” and I agree. How did this month get so busy?
Even though we don’t have a graduation in our family this month (which is rare, considering that every milestone, large and small, seems to be cap-and-gown-worthy these days… preschool… kindergarten… fifth grade… eighth grade…), or even the end of the school year (we're in school through June 23!), it does seem that this month has gotten harried. There’s Teacher Appreciation Week. (Don't get me wrong—I was a classroom teacher and appreciate teachers as much as anyone, but why has this become an official, week-long thing? With something to do or send in every day of the week?) And planning for summer vacation. And Mother’s Day. (I often feel more stressed when the attention is supposed to be on me.) And planting things, which I enjoy greatly but feel a little more pressured about as a solo operation this year. It's a lot for one month.
And then there was the weekend in which Sugar ate an entire bar of SOAP. (Hasn't she heard that washing your mouth out with soap is a punishment? How did that taste good?)
Funny, but not funny: The four-legged bubble machine, as my daddy dubbed her
She consequently vomited and had diarrhea for about 24 hours, which culminated in her collapsing, unconscious and unresponsive in the yard. YIKES. Thank God for friends. Melissa was here in under two minutes to stay with the girls while I took Sugar to the emergency vet at 9:30 on a Friday night. Sugar had come-to by the time Melissa arrived, and while it scared me half to death, she seems okay. (Maybe fainting due to the trauma of all the vomiting? Or it could be a common heart condition for boxers…)
The next morning, the girls BOTH had to have TEETH PULLED, which thankfully went much more smoothly than any of us anticipated. I think we were all stressed, just knowing it was on the calendar!
And after waiting on the girls and the dog for another 48 hours, I got sick. Just a cold with a fever, but I spent the following week mostly on the couch. Which is probably exactly what I needed after such a stressful weekend. So glad the girls did not come down with that one. I continue to see that my body just can’t take any extra stress while Stephen’s away.
June 16, 2017
It’s all fun and games until someone eats a sock. Or five.
It’s a shame that I seem to only think to write when life has been stressful! But then there’s therapy in that.
T-minus 30-ish days and counting… It is definitely time for Stephen to come home.
We had another bizarro week, which included Sugar eating an entire COSTCO-sized twin pack of King’s Hawaiian Rolls. Totally my fault—I left them on the cedar chest, planning to put them away in the freezer, but forgot to actually do so before picking up the girls at school. Came home to see the packaging massacred all over the floor and knew we were in for a rough couple of days. Amazingly, Sugar didn’t really get sick until more than 24 hours later, and then she wasn’t really sick again after that, except for a couple of little pukes here and there…
Earlier that day, I tried to scrape off one of the old, superfluous, expired Pennsylvania stickers from the van windshield (continued drama from Deployment Diaries Part 3), only to bizarrely have the razor blade fall out of its holder and disappear somewhere in the dashboard around the steering column. What are the odds? 100%, evidently, if that’s what God has in store for me on a given day. I figured that even if it didn’t cut into some critical piece of wiring in there, surely I will forget about it and then have it fall out in my lap, startle me, and cause me to slice my hand open at 70 mph when I try to swat it away on reflex. None of that would have happened if Stephen had been around—A) He would have been doing a task like that, 2) Weird things like that simply don’t happen if I’m not by myself, and Q) Even if it had happened, Stephen could have taken apart the dashboard to find the crazy thing.
And then I came home from picking up the girls at school to find King’s Hawaiian Roll packaging all over the floor. Ugh… That was Monday.
What else happened that week? Oh yeah, the internet died. Totally a first-world problem, but we are particularly dependent on it these days to facilitate talking with Stephen. And as I was trying to trouble-shoot according to the Verizon website (via my phone), the main box for the internet fell out of the wall because it hadn’t been installed properly. Was very relieved when I called and the tech guy was super-friendly and helpful, would have sent a technician out that day had I been available, but instead had someone out first thing the next morning. We needed a new router, because the old one had been wired in a way that made it slowly kill itself.
A wonderful thing that week was wrapping up Orff Club with an end-of-the-year concert. I was more than a little stressed about this, I admit—being on the “putting on the concert” side of things is at least as stressful as performing. But the kids did a great job—the girls' music teacher, Lauren, and I were tickled at how they peaked at just the right time, and they had a great time. And I was so surprised at the sweet poster-sized card they presented me the night of the concert, along with a tote bag of goodies from Lauren to thank me for volunteering. So sweet! Annette and Dennis came, as did our sweet neighbor, Nita, who brought a single pink rose for each of the girls.
Sugar vomited another time or two last week, and when she threw up again this Monday morning, I knew something was wrong. I was thinking that she must have some of the plastic from the King’s Hawaiian Roll packaging lodged in there and was hoping it wasn’t one of those plastic tie-tabs, wishing I had thought to see if all of that stuff was present and accounted for before throwing all the debris away that day.
So to the vet we went, and the vet wanted to give her an anti-nausea injection, the logic being that if she still vomited through that, we’d know we had a real problem and would do x-rays the following day. In hindsight, I wish we’d just gone ahead with the x-rays on Monday, because I knew that something wasn’t right. But we went with Plan A, and though she was better for the rest of the day on Monday, she vomited again Tuesday morning. After I called the vet, I called Annette—I was already stressed and in tears over having to take her for x-rays and having to make the decisions about this thus far; I knew I needed some support in listening to the doctor and trying to decide how to proceed…
June 20, 2017
We saw a different vet than our usual on Tuesday, and Annette and I liked him right away. He apologized that the x-ray machine was being serviced—but they would keep Sugar for a couple of hours, x-ray her when they could, and call me. If she did, indeed, have something in there, the vet could possibly try to go in after it with a scope ($$$), or he might have to perform surgery ($$$$).
Thank God for Annette. Besides being there, helping me absorb all of this, and asking questions that I might not have thought to ask, I needed someone to hug and someone to comfort me when my mind went to the dark place of “This is all my fault.” We went back to her place, she fed me some breakfast, and we watched some TV while I periodically called the vet to see if they had any news for me.
Finally, we decided to go to lunch, and as we were getting ready to leave the restaurant, my phone rang. The vet said, “Good news!” and proceeded to tell me that as they were about to x-ray Sugar, "she vomited... FOUR SOCKS—two pair!" Ummm...???! I was smiling and giving Annette the thumbs-up sign, GREATLY relieved that the dog was sick, not over shreds of plastic wrap, but from having eaten SOCKS. Which she barfed up on her own. Hooray! However, the vet said that they did go ahead with the x-rays, and in one of the views, there was something that concerned him. It was hard to see, but there might still be something in her stomach. He would show me when we got back.
A few weeks prior to this, I had caught Sugar transporting Abigail’s socks across the house. The girls often take them off and leave them on the stairs, planning to take them upstairs and deposit them in the hamper later. It was definitely weird that our nearly-eleven-year-old dog was suddenly interested in them, but we talked about how we needed to pay attention to that and not leave socks around, as they could be very dangerous for her to eat. And I bought her a stuffed chew toy for the first time in years, thinking that maybe she needed something like that in her life. We were conscientious about socks after that. So when had she eaten them???
{This is where I stopped actually journaling, so the rest is a re-cap.}
Long story short is that there WAS a fifth sock in Sugar's stomach—in her duodenum, to be exact—and I decided to have it removed. After all, there is no dignity in dying from ingesting socks, and I could not deal with the thought of A) losing our dog without Stephen there, which would lead to B) having him return from his deployment without our Sugar dog and without being able to say goodbye. Trying to scope it out sounded like a good option, but when they were performing an ultrasound to determine the position of the sock, the vet found a tumor on Sugar's spleen. Thus our veterinarian's first combination splenectomy/sock removal surgery.
And she survived! The surgery was a success, the tumor on her spleen was benign, and she recovered after about a week of me practically living in our basement with her so she wouldn't have to go up and down the stairs. (One time, the girls let her outside to do her business, and she made a beeline to our deck stairs, went straight up, and looked rather pleased and proud to have figured out a way to get upstairs to the main level of our townhouse in spite of our having baby-gated the inside stairs. Stephen said it was the smartest thing she'd ever done.)
For all of you non-pet people out there who are rolling your eyes at the trouble and expense I've gone to—believe me, I hear you. I actually hear your eye-roll. See an old post, For the Love of Dogs, to read of my humbling transformation from pet-skeptic to dog-lover. It's also a fun trot down memory lane with some old stories and pictures of our beloved Sugar dog.
Stephen came home on July 14, about six months plus one week after he left. The anticipation in the days and hours right before he got home just about drove all of us crazy, but we made it. The pictures say it all. We were okay without him, but nowhere near as good as we are when we're all together. I will always be thankful to our friends and family who loved on us in so many ways while he was away and appreciative of the greater sacrifices that so many make to ensure our freedom.
