When I was a kid, my family had our share of pets. A couple great cats, an awesome old English sheep dog, and my first very own dog. Her name was Nixon and I loved her and miss her so much to this very day. But, this column isn't about them. It's about my boy Tux.
Picture it. The western suburbs of Chicago, 2014. I get out of my car after having gone to the grocery store and walk towards the house. Out of nowhere, this black and white cat comes trotting toward me, meowing. He stops at my feet, lays down on the ground and starts to purr, It's at that point that I start looking around. I was assuming someone was gonna be hot on the heels of this cat or at the very least, I thought I was on Candid Camera. But nobody jumped out of the bushes or anything, so I played with him a little, then he went on his way and so did I.
A couple days later, there he was again, this time I sat on our deck for about an hour and played with him. Eventually my wife came home and she immediately fell in love with him. About a week later I brought him into the house. Now, at this point, my wife didn't want a cat because six months earlier our cat had passed away and she was still pretty bummed about that. Plus, she wanted our next cat to be orange and Tux was definitely not orange. Over the next few weeks whenever my wife wasn't home, I'd go let him in. Eventually, I came clean with my wife and we got him a dish for food, a dish for water, and a litter box. At that point he was still outside half the time, usually at night.
Eventually he came in the house full-time. But we'd let him out on rare occasion. One night he was outside for a night. That night thunder woke me up at like 2AM. It was pouring rain, so I went downstairs, opened the door and hollered for him. He came trotting up to the door HOWLING. I didn't have my glasses with me, so I couldn't see if anything was wrong. I knelt down and ran my hands over his torso so that if he'd gotten bit or ripped open, I'd notice it. Nothing seemed to be wrong with him, so I took him upstairs and went . In the morning I was awoken by my wife yelling "DEAD BUNNY!! DEAD BUNNY!!! DEAD BUNNY!!!". Tux had brought a rabbit, or rather HALF a rabbit, in with him last night and had put it on my wife's side of the bed.
We've had many special moments with Tux. From him getting in trouble, to him not leaving my side after I was hospitalized for a week after suffering a heart attack. Back in January of this year, I noticed that he was limping a little. I just though that he must've jumped off something when we weren't home and landed wrong. No big deal. But the limp got worse, and eventually both of his back legs weren't working all that great. We took him to the vet, they ran some tests and gave us the unfortunate news that Tux has diabetes. This hit me pretty hard, I myself have battled diabetes for over twenty years. It's not an easy disease to have (like other diseases are a cake walk, right?), but the good news is that it's a disease that you can control. We started giving him insulin in February after the vet sent his blood away to a lab that could analyse it more accurately, and just today (September 6th) I got a call from the vet's office saying that his bloodwork looks great, and to keep him at the dosage of insulin that we have him at and to keep him on the amount of calories that we've been giving him.
He gets at least a half hour of playtime a day with either my wife or I. And we have noticed that he's being able to use his legs more, and his legs have gotten better, so we're very hopeful that in the near future he'll be back to his old self.
To us, and most people, pets are part of the family. I'm asking you today to TREAT them like they are. They aren't there for you to pet once every day and then spend the rest of the time yelling at them to get out of the way. If you're doing that, I'm telling you now, you need to find a new home for your pet, because right now is not the best time for you to have a pet. Like people, they need the right food (If one of the ingredients in your dogs food is corn, you need to get him some different food), they need exercise, and they need love and attention. If you're not willing to give an animal these things, please don't have an animal. Start with a fern. Yes, ferns are still around, they didn't end in the 70's. There's a lot that are out there looking for good homes,
Anyway, I have the most awesomest cat in the world.
Her Take:
Hey, hi! I don’t know if I can do this, and just wanted you to know that right here at the top.
I’ve started writing way earlier than normal (read: not starting the day before it’s supposed to be posted) and I’m giving myself permission to hit ‘Save’ and walk away when it gets too hard.
And, buddy, I mean to tell ya, it will get too hard.
Here we go.
I remember the day that we brought Frank home, of course, but what I remember most clearly is talking to the lady we got him from.
“Um… yes, uh.. I’m calling about the pug puppies?”, I stammered, “Do you still have them?”
“Oh! Yes! They are WONDERFUL!’, she replied, “We have two little girls that are already spoken for and a little boy who looks like he’s wearing a tiny tuxedo. You’ll love him! I’ll save him for you!”
Literally, that was how that conversation went. No suggestion that I’d better hurry because if someone could make it there with the money before I did, they’d go home with little tuxedo guy. She was just saving him for me. Me, and no one else. He was my dog already.
Frank as a puppy was like… um… picture if a dark chocolate cupcake grew legs and a tongue and then followed you everywhere you went. Now, make that cupcake snore like a Norweigian ice-fisherman on a bender. NOW make it do many-many-many-many naughty things like try to eat things that are clearly too large for it’s tiny mouth or poop IN your shoe. That was Frank.
In fact, that was pretty much all of Frank’s life. Sure, he became a much larger cupcake - really more like a nice heavy loaf of rye bread - but fundamentally he was always just that perfect lump of love.
Can I tell you what I miss the most? It’s a little weird.
You can look at a pug face and say to yourself “That thing lacks structural integrity for sure.” and it’s true. But you don’t realize the healing power of that squishy face, especially when it brings the little chunky body along, cuddles up next to you, SIGHS contentedly, and falls asleep. It’s like having a freshly risen lump of bread dough that loves you as much as you love bread. I don’t know if I’m making this as clear as I’d like, but it’s heavenly.
One day, when Frank was 8, he woke up and couldn’t move his back legs. He had messed in his kennel, he was crying a little, and he just couldn’t get out when we opened the door. Maybe he had seemed a little extra tired the day before, maybe we should have noticed something, but we didn’t. Shortly after we got him out and cleaned everything up, he fell over and had a seizure. There wasn’t anything I could do, just sit there and cry and watch. It was awful.
Once the seizure ended he fell asleep and I paced the first floor of our house, hysterically dusting and sweeping and crying. But when he woke up he seemed fine, and I breathed a deep sigh of relief. What was I even thinking? That sometimes dogs just get a little seizurey and you just let it pass? I don’t know.
A few weeks later he woke up with a useless hind-end again and we finally called the vet. As we waited in the exam room at our little country vet, I prayed ‘Let it not be too bad, let it be fixable, let me be wrong, PLEASE let it be something simple.’
I stared at the x-ray they showed us, I really couldn’t see it because I had read the compassionate and regretful look on the Vet’s face when he walked in and I was already half blind from my own tears.
There was a spot on his spinal cord that was inflamed and being pinched. Some days, the Vet said, if the swelling is down, his motion is better, but it will continue to deteriorate until, eventually, he won’t be able to use his back legs at all. There was a surgery they could do, but it carried a hefty price tag and only a 50/50 chance of survival.
He looked me in the eyes and said, “I wouldn’t recommend you do that. I’ll give him steroids to treat the swelling, and that will help him get around better. Take him home and love him.”
That was in late March.
At first, the steroids seemed magical. The first day he was up and around and by the second he was my normal, goofy little Frankie. I thought we have found a cure. But eventually the steroids ran out and his back legs started failing again.
Afraid to call the Vet and be told that a surgery that could kill him was now our only option, I begged my husband to do it. (Life Hack: if you work a day job and your spouse works a night job, use that to your advantage and make them make ALL OF the calls you don’t want to make. Say: “Honey, I’m at work when they’re open, can’t you call??”) They refilled the steroid prescription with a 30 day supply and told him to keep doing what we were doing.
Each month after that I dreaded the call to the Vet, and each month they did the same thing.
Frank spent most of the summer outside in his play yard and I watched him, not wanting to admit that even with treatment, I could see that he was declining. By August, the tile and wood floors inside our house had defeated him entirely and he could only walk on the grass and blacktop outside.
We’d carry him outside, set him down, and prop up his rear so he could stand and do his business. We tried to stop using a leash outside but he would try to run. It’s demoralizing in so many ways to have to chase - and have a hard time catching - a little dog that can’t get out of his own kennel in the morning.
Then the day came that no matter what we did, he couldn’t get up. His tiny body was too weak to drag that rear-end and he gave up. My husband called the Vet one last time for Frankie.
He scheduled Frankie’s appointment right away in the morning for me because I was bound and determined that I would go to work when it was done. I knew that would suck, but I also couldn’t bear the thought of sitting at home once he was gone.
I can remember one of the nurses saying “You did everything you could.” and how much that meant to me then. I can picture Frankie gently falling asleep on that table and hear myself saying “I’m sorry, I’m so sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry.” over and over again because I couldn’t stop, and then it was over. We were walking out. I was driving away from the clinic. I would never see Frankie again.
That was the fall of 2017 but it feels as fresh and hurts as badly as if it was yesterday. In fact, I’ve begun to think I will never move on from losing him.
I’m sorry. Right now I should be wrapping up with some hopeful message, some lesson that I learned and can impart to the world. Or, at the very least, telling you how, despite it all, the experience made me stronger. But it didn’t. It served to reveal the tenderest parts of me and then it damaged them terribly.
I’ve had a lot of chances to say to a lot of people that grief doesn’t have an expiration date. That you deal with what you deal with on your timeline and no one has the right to tell you differently.
Maybe I should take my own advice.
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