How could this be? When I look at you now, 90 pounds of muscle and Fundy-proof fur, led at one end by your big block head bearing an infallible nose, wise brown eyes and impossibly soft ears. Bringing up the rear is that thick ever-thumping rudder of a tail. Yet inside that muscular shoulder, just infront of your strongly beating heart-of-a-lion, it's eating you, they tell me. And it's eating you fast.
This was not the outcome that I expected when I brought you to him yesterday. I was so sure. A limp in that same dodgy shoulder - surely just those problematic tendons flared up again? No problem, I thought ,cortisone injections and a month of leash-rest and you'll be good as new. Well, good as any "new" 9 year old lab can be. In my mind’s eye I had you sitting in my canoe a month from now, as we paddled up the meadow to the portage trail where you'd be trotting along ahead of me. Once in a while I'd tilt the canoe up to see you looking back, checking on me to make sure that I was still coming. I can see you now at the top of every steep rise, between the huge mossy rocks, looking down at me with a panting smile as I stumble my way up, panting and smiling a little myself.
So when the vet looked your over and you yelped and flattened your ears at his gentle touch, the furrow in his brow was not lost on me. My stomach did a little flipflop when he said that he wanted to do a quick x-ray before proceeding with the cortisone injections. I don't understand - you can’t SEE tendons on x-rays, can you? Oh well, nomatter, it's only money and nothing is too good for my Fur Kid. I went along to help the techs to get you comfortably and calmly onto the x-ray table. You were compliant as usual, as I nuzzled my face against yours while they positioned you for an image of the offending joint. I looked up and we watched the magic of the digital x-ray slowly appear on the screen. And then we were quiet. Even my untrained eye could see it plain as day - a matrix of honeycomb throughout the top of your humerus. When the vet was called to look, and he said quietly, 'Come with me'. No 'flipflop' this time - more like a punch in the guts.
I follow him and we sit. And the news hits me. Hard. And as he keeps talking, and I keep asking, it keeps hitting, as each tendril of hope snaps and rocks me back in my chair. In the silence that follows, I am left with very little to cling to. I have a few palliative drugs to try to make you comfortable. I have the looming knowledge that it will be up me to understand, and to listen to you, when you need me to bring you back here for the last time. And I have the knowledge that that day will be soon. All that I can give you is the promise, because while you owe me nothing, I owe you everything, that I will help you.
Back home, we move a bed downstairs so that we can live together on one floor, respecting the fact that you've always preferred to be within a few feet of my ankles at any time, and that the stairs, like our steep portage to the trout lake, are now off limits for you.
And time with you now is a rollercoaster. At times, lying splayed on your side in an opiate daze, you stare at the wall and I want it to be over. But then you drift off, and all five limbs (because if a lab's tail isn't a limb then what is it?) twitch and thump as you charge off after a pheasant flushed and tumbled to the ground in a field of dreams. And then you wake and wince to your feet while I leap to mine. Outside, I curse the snowy remnants of the longest winter in recent history as you stumble around painfully trying to get positioned. When you wince and I see the whites of your eyes, your velvet ears pinned back against your big yellow head I am shattered. I hope that no neighbors happen by at that moment to witness my grief. But a moment later you're snuffling your nose happily into the snow, flushing some ghost of a peanut deep beneath. Then, we both freeze at once and cock our ears to the sound. Clear as a bell in the cool spring air, even over the swish and splash of springtime urban traffic, we both heard it. Ga-HONK. I turn to look at you, and I'm gutted once again by your bird-stiffened stance, strong neck stretched upward, ears forwards, with that gleam in your eye as you focus on the sky and wait for them to appear. When they do appear you glance quickly at me, then back at the geese. Yes, I saw them too! As the nine of them glide right overhead, their own long necks stretched northward over the neighbourhood rooftops, I can see the slight tremble of anticipation that you always get. If you heard the click of a safety you'd flinch a bit and coil yourself for the retrieve. And if I shot one, you'd make that retrieve I'm quite sure - three-legged and osteosarcoma be damned. And this shatters me too. Once again, no neighbours to witness my heaving shoulders as I kneel and gather your big head into my arms. You pull away - I'm blocking your view of the departing geese dammit!
To be continued...
This was not the outcome that I expected when I brought you to him yesterday. I was so sure. A limp in that same dodgy shoulder - surely just those problematic tendons flared up again? No problem, I thought ,cortisone injections and a month of leash-rest and you'll be good as new. Well, good as any "new" 9 year old lab can be. In my mind’s eye I had you sitting in my canoe a month from now, as we paddled up the meadow to the portage trail where you'd be trotting along ahead of me. Once in a while I'd tilt the canoe up to see you looking back, checking on me to make sure that I was still coming. I can see you now at the top of every steep rise, between the huge mossy rocks, looking down at me with a panting smile as I stumble my way up, panting and smiling a little myself.
So when the vet looked your over and you yelped and flattened your ears at his gentle touch, the furrow in his brow was not lost on me. My stomach did a little flipflop when he said that he wanted to do a quick x-ray before proceeding with the cortisone injections. I don't understand - you can’t SEE tendons on x-rays, can you? Oh well, nomatter, it's only money and nothing is too good for my Fur Kid. I went along to help the techs to get you comfortably and calmly onto the x-ray table. You were compliant as usual, as I nuzzled my face against yours while they positioned you for an image of the offending joint. I looked up and we watched the magic of the digital x-ray slowly appear on the screen. And then we were quiet. Even my untrained eye could see it plain as day - a matrix of honeycomb throughout the top of your humerus. When the vet was called to look, and he said quietly, 'Come with me'. No 'flipflop' this time - more like a punch in the guts.
I follow him and we sit. And the news hits me. Hard. And as he keeps talking, and I keep asking, it keeps hitting, as each tendril of hope snaps and rocks me back in my chair. In the silence that follows, I am left with very little to cling to. I have a few palliative drugs to try to make you comfortable. I have the looming knowledge that it will be up me to understand, and to listen to you, when you need me to bring you back here for the last time. And I have the knowledge that that day will be soon. All that I can give you is the promise, because while you owe me nothing, I owe you everything, that I will help you.
Back home, we move a bed downstairs so that we can live together on one floor, respecting the fact that you've always preferred to be within a few feet of my ankles at any time, and that the stairs, like our steep portage to the trout lake, are now off limits for you.
And time with you now is a rollercoaster. At times, lying splayed on your side in an opiate daze, you stare at the wall and I want it to be over. But then you drift off, and all five limbs (because if a lab's tail isn't a limb then what is it?) twitch and thump as you charge off after a pheasant flushed and tumbled to the ground in a field of dreams. And then you wake and wince to your feet while I leap to mine. Outside, I curse the snowy remnants of the longest winter in recent history as you stumble around painfully trying to get positioned. When you wince and I see the whites of your eyes, your velvet ears pinned back against your big yellow head I am shattered. I hope that no neighbors happen by at that moment to witness my grief. But a moment later you're snuffling your nose happily into the snow, flushing some ghost of a peanut deep beneath. Then, we both freeze at once and cock our ears to the sound. Clear as a bell in the cool spring air, even over the swish and splash of springtime urban traffic, we both heard it. Ga-HONK. I turn to look at you, and I'm gutted once again by your bird-stiffened stance, strong neck stretched upward, ears forwards, with that gleam in your eye as you focus on the sky and wait for them to appear. When they do appear you glance quickly at me, then back at the geese. Yes, I saw them too! As the nine of them glide right overhead, their own long necks stretched northward over the neighbourhood rooftops, I can see the slight tremble of anticipation that you always get. If you heard the click of a safety you'd flinch a bit and coil yourself for the retrieve. And if I shot one, you'd make that retrieve I'm quite sure - three-legged and osteosarcoma be damned. And this shatters me too. Once again, no neighbours to witness my heaving shoulders as I kneel and gather your big head into my arms. You pull away - I'm blocking your view of the departing geese dammit!
To be continued...
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