Back to Busy, But...

All of a sudden, life is getting busy again. Bill is leaving tomorrow for Illinois to see his dad through another round of medical tests, then he is due in Philadelphia on Monday for another week of work on the USNS Pollux.

I would consider accompanying him on his travels, but then there's the little matter of my having a job now. I knew this was going to be trouble! This morning I have a dental appointment, then I'll go straight to work at noon, and not be home until tonight.

And there's always plenty to do around here--the garden needs to be put to bed for the winter, the leaves are a constant clean-up chore, and the basement is a mess again. The dishes and laundry are constant, and something always needs to be fixed.

There is no dog hair to vacuum up.

Last week, Mr. Professional Carpet-Man came and cleaned all the rugs and furniture. I still find Echo in my knitting and on fabric items in the house, but there are no more dog-hair tumbleweeds rolling across the carpet.

I am still sad.

The Dogless Life

It's very weird. Each time I walk into another room, I keep expecting to see Echo--bounding off the couch, ears up, tail wagging, ready for a walk outside. When I am upstairs working on the computer, I have half an ear out, listening for her padding up the stairs to the loft. When I've been involved in a project, I suddenly think, "did I let the dog in?"

We're very sad, but coping for the most part. We tell funny stories about her, and laugh through our sudden tears when one of us says, "do you remember when she...?" All normal processes, but it's hard to get used to being without her constant presence. So much of our daily structure revolved around her needs, and we are suddenly rudderless.

Bill is coping by cruising dog-adoption websites, prefacing each "listen to this!" with a disclaimer of "I know we're not ready for this now, but..." He has decided that Echo was indeed a Belgian Malenois, after doing research on their behaviors and putting to rest the issue of her black-spotted tongue--it turns out that lots of breeds have this characteristic, and it does not denote any Chow-chow heritage by itself. He has stopped calling Echo the "Faux Malenois."

I am just taking it one day at a time, trying to desensitize myself to the jolts of remembrance and the eerie absence of my furry friend. I'm waiting for time to do its magic, and the images of her death to be replaced by mental pictures of her alive and active.

Sigh.

Better Today

I woke up feeling sad, but not overwhelmed like yesterday. Today, there is just normal grieving going on, not the shock and guilt we felt when Loki died suddenly one morning, 10 years ago. Maybe it's the awesome healing power of rationalization, but I know we did all we could for Echo, ultimately couldn't save her from her inevitable demise, and gave her mercy and peace at her end. I'm okay with that.

Bill is having the harder time of it I think, because he wasn't able to be here for the closing chapter of the story. Though he left Monday knowing that he probably wouldn't see his dog again, it was hard coming home to a suddenly dogless house. But we're both dealing with it, and we will heal with time.

In the words of Forrest Gump: "That's all I have to say about that."

Echo Laid to Rest - Epitaph for a Good Dog

It is a glorious autumn day. Cool breezes are shaking a floaty, colorful rainfall of leaves onto the forest floor, the warm sun is shining, and the birds are calling. I just came up from the pond--where Bill had prepared Echo's final resting place, and I just finished burying her.

Echo went to sleep for the last time at 9:30 this morning, in the back of the red car where she was always so happy. She was lying on her "double-stack" dog bed, with her chin resting on her favorite toy, Hedgehog. There was no pain, and the vet and I sent her off with our mutual tears and gentle words, both of us stroking her soft, furry ears for the last time.

I know I will spend the next few days, weeks, maybe months, automatically looking for her in the house, thinking "I have to take the dog out," or "is it time to feed the dog?" These animal companions of ours become such an integral part of our daily lives. They worm their way into our hearts, and it is so hard to let go. But what I did this morning was a loving mercy, a refusal to let my friend suffer any longer.

As long as there was a chance she could be treated (or would quietly expire on her own), I kept the faith with her. But yesterday, the Leptospirosis test finally came back, and it was negative. The only good news in this is that Bill and I won't have to be on doxycycline for the next month ourselves, since it transmits easily to humans. So, after ruling out the lepto, we were left with the obvious signs of a massive and ultimately fatal abdominal tumor.

The vet said she was a fighter--any other dog would have been dead three weeks ago. Even if we had taken her to UT and spent thousands on further treatments, the vet said the outcome would have been the same. Bill and I concurred.

She stopped eating anything at all on Monday, and as she grew progressively thinner over this week, I could see how the tumor was taking over her body. I just couldn't bear to put her through any more drastic measures; Bill, still in Philadelphia, said not to wait.

So, I did what I could for my canine friend. My dog Echo protected me on the property from other dogs and human strangers and was a whiz at catching and eating any stinging insect that made its way into the house. Her insistence on exploring the woods every day got me outside and on the road to physical and mental recovery from my surgeries last year. She was a constant source of amusement and laughter with her doggie antics. She traveled all over the country with me, logged more than 30,000 miles, left her "mark" in hundreds of highway rest stops, and invariably took the best bed in every Motel 6 we stayed at.

While she was a fine "townie" when we lived in New York, she came into her own when we moved to Tennessee. At last she had acres to run in, critters to chase and watch (she especially liked making turkeys fly), and she mellowed into a total country dog here. She loved digging for chipmunks and squirrels. She even got over her fear of water, happily trotting through the creeks, especially if there were frogs and fish to stalk.

We noted, however, that she still loved sleeping on the couch when the sun went down.

She was a great companion, and a faithful friend. Rest in Peace, Echo. We loved you greatly, and you returned our full-hearted devotion with your own.

"The dog is the most faithful of animals and would be much esteemed were it not so common. Our Lord God has made His greatest gift the commonest. " -- Martin Luther

Rethinking "Ugly"

Thanks to MaryAnn and Hannah having a little side-comment fest going about my new Crocs, I've decided to re-evaluate my initial aesthetic judgment. My new mantra is: "A Comfortable Pair of Shoes is a Beautiful Pair of Shoes!"

I spent some of yesterday looking on eBay at Crocs and decided that there are some v-e-r-y clever knockoffs coming out of Hong Kong right now (mine are Made in the U.S.A.). I looked at other colors, and frankly my dear, none of them rocked my world. I even found a pair with teeth and eyes. Bill liked them best of all.

Now THOSE shoes make a statement!

Looking at my humble, Dust-Bowl Brown, New-Best-Friends, they don't look so bad after all. And they feel marvelous!

P.S. Echo is hanging in there. We made it through one more night peacefully.

Echo, would you like mustard and relish with that?

When Echo was an adolescent, I enrolled her in agility classes to burn off some of that excess energy and give her a bonding experience. She was very fast, extremely smart, and completely intolerable to all the other dogs. She would bark at them when they made mistakes. She didn't want to wait her turn to do the course. The hardest agility move for her was where she was required to lie down and stay in one place for 3 seconds. The training reward in the class was small pieces of hot dog, which we humans held in our mouths, (because our hands had to be free for gesturing to our dog), and doled out when the dog completed a move successfully.

I remembered this yesterday, and though she hadn't eaten much of anything for 36 hours, she perked up at the smell of Nathan's franks and ate a bowlful of small pieces. She even kept most of it down for about 18 hours. When we got up early this morning to take Bill to the airport, she upped a little undigested hot dog, but most of it stayed in her. But this also tells us that her digestion is slowing way down, and we're becoming more convinced that we're dealing with a tumor, not Lepto.

We still need to know whether it is Lepto (or it could be Lepto AND a tumor), because it is a contagious disease that could transmit to us. If the test result is positive, Bill and I will have to take a course of doxycycline ourselves.

Today, the only thing she would eat was a bowl of cooked, crumbled hamburger meat. But she's drinking clean water again out of her bowl in the house, and she went for a slow, short walk up the back hillside this afternoon. She's sleeping comfortably on the couch now (she can still get up and down on her own).

I suppose the question is "how long am I going to let this go on?" Every time I think she's a goner, she perks up, wants to go outside, or eats something. She is still responsive to us, alert most of the time, wagging her tail when we speak to her. She's trying her best, and I'm not ready to give up on her as long as she isn't in pain and exhibits normal dog behavior.

Bill said his goodbyes this morning and told me he'd trust my judgment, if I thought she needed to be put gently to sleep at some point this week. She hasn't given up, so I'm not going to give up on her either. I'm not there yet.

Still holding on, Waiting & Hoping...

I don't know what to tell you about Ms. Dog. She is steadily getting weaker, has no interest in even the most esoteric of our food offerings. We're now into the mail-order specialty sausage, cottage cheese, ice cream, bacon--what normal dog would turn her head away and get up and walk away when you held a piece of bacon under her nose?

We've offered everything we can think of--she perks up when we talk about it, she sniffs it tentatively, but then turns away with an expression like "Nope, that's not it." She's waiting for us to bring her something worth eating, I guess.

Bill's idea this morning is...wait for it...Cat Food. Whenever we visit a house with cats, Echo's first order of business is to find the feline food and eat it all up--preferably while the cat is watching of course. There's a hint of the forbidden (because we always scold her for this behavior), it's stinky, and might interest her nose enough to get some nutrition down her.

In the meantime, we worry and we sigh and we fret. There just doesn't seem to be much we can do for her.

Bill is headed to Philadelphia tomorrow for a one-week temporary assignment as First Engineer on an old friend, the USNS Pollux, an SL-7, the biggest steamship on the planet. I once visited Bill on this ship down in New Orleans, and was amazed at its size and complexity. To give you an idea of the scale of this leviathan, I took a walk one morning from the stern to the bow and back again. It took a full 15 minutes of brisk hoofing. The ship's holds of seven parking garage-type stories can carry an entire Army Division's equipment in one cross-ocean trip, including helicopters (with the props folded down), Humvees, Bradley Fighting Vehicles, Strikers, tanks, etc.

Bill was aboard the Pollux, anchored near her sister ship USNS Bellatrix, immediately after Katrina's landfall. The Bellatrix could not move out of the way of the hurricane because the main shaft was torn apart, so they battened down the best they could and rode out the storm. For months post-Katrina, the ship made fresh water from its de-salinators for the city, pumped its own diesel fuel into emergency fire and police vehicles, set up a dialysis facility on-board for hospital patients to come to, and housed and fed visiting veterinarians who were caring for all the abandoned pets. I'll bet you never heard any of that on the news, did you? The captain made these executive decisions on site, and didn't consult with FEMA or even the Navy in Washington DC; he saw a need, and did what he thought was necessary.

I'm sorry to see Bill go for the week, but I am also immensely proud of the work he does. If they need him, I'm all for his going to contribute. He'll be back on Friday or Saturday, and we'll see where we are with our own domestic dog-drama then.

Echo Updated

Once again, we trekked Echo over to Church Hill for a vet consult yesterday afternoon. She was so excited about riding in the car, she tried mightily to jump into the driver's seat, but her back legs failed her. Bill had to lift her into the back.

After much waiting and finally much discussion with the vet, our best guesses are that she has a tumor (spleen, liver or kidneys) or a bacterial infection called leptospirosis. If she has a tumor, there is a 75% probability that it is malignant and will kill her. If she has lepto, it is treatable by a six-month course of doxycycline. The smart and economical choice seemed to be to rule out or confirm the lepto infection, rather than doing ultrasound or exploratory surgery, looking for a tumor.

So now we wait. Test results will be back sometime in the middle of next week.

She is getting progressively weaker, because she is not eating much of anything. We were up at 5 this morning, cleaning up the results of dog barfing. I'm not even sure she could tolerate 6 months of antibiotics, as they mess with her tummy so much. But we are hoping for a lepto diagnosis anyway. The other prognosis is just too grim and final.

Echo ate about a tablespoon of tuna in water this morning for breakfast. She appears to like it straight out of the can, as opposed to having it in a clean dish. What is up with that?

Back to wait-and-see.

A little knowledge is a sad thing

Echo's abdomen is suddenly swollen, and when Bill brought it to my attention last night, my first thought was "spleen." We looked at dog anatomy on the internet--everything is so packed in together, it's hard for amateurs to discern between liver, kidneys and spleen. Bill went online last night and started researching dog medical issues. The news is not good.

There's not much we can do for Echo. The vet can do an ultrasound, or surgery to remove the spleen (which is also exploratory for other issues such as liver and kidney), but the bottom line is that Echo has all the symptoms of a spleen tumor, and 75% of those in older, large-breed dogs are malignant. Even if it's not cancerous, the surgery itself is extremely dangerous and the long-term prognosis is that you can extend the animal's life by only a short time. Most dogs in this situation die suddenly from an internal bleed (this is what we are pretty sure happened to our first dog, Loki.), or slowly because of mini-hemorrhages from the tumor. Performing surgery just hastens the process, costs a ton of $, and gives the dog more discomfort.

In the meantime, poor Echo is just as sweet as can be, but getting weaker. She's not eating or drinking much (pressure in the stomach squeezes the other internal organs), and last night, she couldn't make it up the final six steps to the loft--her back legs slumped on the landing, then she turned around and went back down.

Bill and I had a little cry, and went to bed. This morning, Bill went down to the pond with a shovel to pick out a spot for her final resting place. We're determined to support her as long as she appears reasonably comfortable, but we're coming to the realization that the end is probably coming soon. We've pretty much given up the idea that she's going to recover. We love our loyal companion, so we will try our best to do right by her.

Feeding Miss Doggie

Echo had a good day yesterday.

She went down to the pond to see her dog-friend Bear, and the two of them spent some time sniffing and peeing on each other's property. She made it back up the driveway, although she took her time and did it slowly. Her eyes were quite yellow, but she had a decent appetite.

Echo seems to be tempted by novelty foods. Yesterday, it was a can of albacore tuna packed in water that got her attention, fed to her bit-by-bit. She also seemed interested in Bill's Rice Chex, so she tried 3 small handfuls of that (with vanilla Ensure as the liquid). She drank about a litre of water--but not from her dish, of course. No, she likes the nasty rain water than collects in the folds of a tarp in the yard. She took a few pinches of grated cheese from my hand. She had no interest in egg, milk, Gatorade, rice, chicken or anything she ate enthusiastically the day before.

I'm thinking we need to get back on a regular feeding schedule, instead of trying to get her to eat a little all through the day. Maybe she'll eat if she is allowed to get a little hungry? She also smells very bad. I know that dogs don't sweat, but she really needs a bath. We are reluctant to stress her out by putting her in the tub, but it may be unavoidable. Bill and I cleaned our house yesterday instead, trying to keep the doggie smell down to a minimum. He vacuumed, while I swept and mopped the kitchen and bath floors, scrubbed the crud off kitchen cabinets and wiped tables.

Today I am off to Kingsport for an acupuncture treatment, shoe shopping (still trying to find something that doesn't kill my feet at the library) and a run to the liquor store for Marsala, brandy, tequila, and wine, for cooking.

I like cooking with wine. Sometimes, I even put it in the food...

Echo Goes SWIMMING?

My girl-dog Echo does not like water. She hates the rain, walks around to avoid even the shallowest puddles, suffers through inevitable baths when she begins to stink, and never, ever, swims.

When we moved to Tennessee, she became more of a "country-dog" instead of a "small-town dog." She began to get a just a little more relaxed about water. She would occasionally tramp through the mud-flats of the pond and come home with muddy feet. She would periodically get wet crossing through the creek to investigate something her nose told her was on the other side.

Yesterday, while I was busily picking blackberries (and trying to extricate myself from the brambles snagging my shirt and pants), I heard a scuttle and small splash--followed by the giant SPLASH! of my dog leaping into the pond after whatever creature went in first.

As I whirled around, Echo was frantically paddling in the murky water, headed for the shore. Apparently, her limbic brain reacted before she thought about it rationally, (or as rationally as a dog can think), and suddenly, she was in the water before it registered that she really didn't want to be there.

She was a mess. Mud up to her flanks, dirty water pouring from her belly-fur, and pond scum all over her face! She stood on the bank, shaking herself, muddy water flying everywhere. It was definitely time to go home.

When we got up to the house, I immediately filled the tub. Echo slinked into the bathroom without any coaxing from me, and climbed into the bath by herself. I honestly think she was chagrinned at her own foolishness.

After much sudsing and rinsing, I brushed about a pound of hair off the dog:

She spent the rest of the day huddled damply on the couch, looking disgusted with herself.