Therapy

I am going to write about Meg.

Chances are this is going to be rather depressing, but I know that for me to get through this as best I can, I need to experience and fully realize the pain of the situation.

So here is the story from the beginning:

My wife and I, against our own better judgement decided to adopt a Boston Terrier Emily found on the internet. I don't know why she was looking, but she found her picture and fell in love with her instantly. I told her that we couldn't do it because of the nature of our living situation at the time and our plans, but Meg's (Maggie at the time) picture and my love for dogs knocked my willpower to the floor and began to lick it's face into laughing submission.

We adopted her from a Boston Terrier rescue organization who had taken her from a shelter in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. Apparently she was seized after she or her "brother," Pete, had nipped at a kid. The old owners never came back for them so they went to rescue. The rescue organization discovered there that she had an intense case of heartworm which nearly killed her but were able to treat her for it. In December of 2004, we decided to go pick her up and she moved in with us... and two other adults... three cats... and two frogs... and maybe a fish or two at the time.

She had her issues. She had accidents around the house in secret places and had major trust issues. We realized later that she had likely been badly abused before we got her. But eventuallyher bad habits faded and she became less hand shy. But she was always noted by dog people as "a very serious Boston Terrier" for her personality around strangers.

She was great at home, though. She would jump from couch to couch chasing her toys and it took all of three nights of her living with us for her to move from her kennel into our bed to sleep. In hindsight, that may have been a bad move, as it was among the many things that made us so close to her...

Things were going pretty well up until December of 2005 when she began to have seizures. The first one scared me so badly I think I was in tears. To see her lose control like that and to not know what to do made me feel like the weakest human being on the face of the planet.

In time that feeling passed as the odd seizure became more regular and we just held her through the seizures making her as comfortable and safe as possible. Emily and I began to research heavily into the causes of her problems from the beginning. We gave her medication, changed her food, changed her medication, and did screening after screening to find out as much as we could about the cause of her epilepsy. We went to a neurologist at the U's vet clinic and he told us that it could be anything and that we should decide to either give her a CT scan and look for a tumor or to watch to see how her symptoms progressed. He said that if the seizures don't become more severe for 6 months, we should be "in the clear." We decided on the latter believing that if a tumor were there we would not be able to treat it very well anyway. We relied on hope to carry us through...

and it did for about 5 months.


Then the seizures became more frequent. She began having what they call cluster seizures (3 or more in a 24 hour period). Again we had her screened and tested and changed her medications and there was little change for about a month. All the while I tried to convince myself that it was just something stupid and small like a food allergy and once we figured it out, we would be able to tell this amazing little story about how she was allergic to wheat or corn and pat her little head five years from now and chuckle about it.

But that wasn't what fate had written.

Last week she began to stumble. She would shake her hear to make the collar slide better onto her neck and she fell onto her side. She would stand back up right away, but something was obviously different. It happened more often and last Sunday she fell off of the stairs at Emily's parents' place twice. We decided that damn the money we needed to know what was going on and found a low cost CT scan. They were able to do it the day after we called and at a huge fraction of the cost that the U charges.

When we were there, they took Meg into a room to sedate her and as I saw them walk with her away into the sterile offices and stainless steel tables I felt the weight of what we about to find out heavy on my heart. Because Em is a vet tech they let us come back into the trailer to see the CT scan done. As soon as we walked in, they said they were sorry, but they had already found the problem.









I was able to hold back the emotion for a while but as I stood there listening to words instantly forgotten I started thinking about all of the little things she does/did/won't do anymore.

As she woke up from sedation Emily and I sat in the car and cried harder than I have ever cried in my life. I knew there was no one to blame and that things were eventually going to be OK and that she will soon be free from whatever suffering that she had been through in her life and that we gave her the best years of her life and that we should be proud of the time we spent with her and that we were so lucky to have the time we had with her. But none of that was important.


Because she wasn't going to go camping with us at Mt. Rainier or take a potty break at the side of the road around Lake Crescent or walk along the Pacific Coast or go to a dog park in Vancouver.

She wasn't going to lick the baby food off of our first baby's cheeks and sit eagerly at the side of the high chair awaiting falling scraps.


Fuck, this is hard.


And I hate myself when I sometimes think about how much harder this is because we have to watch her get worse.
















But right now she is doing well.

She occasionally stumbles, but we have her on medication to help relieve the pressure in her head and give her more time. Something may even on the off chance help shrink the tumor a bit. She isn't feeling pain from this thing. Her breathing and heartrate are normal. She occasionally gets confused, but is otherwise the same dog we have always loved, just a little more mellow from the medication. She still playfully bites our noses when she is happy and chases her toys around a bit. She rolls onto her back and lets me make fart noises on her belly. She still stretches out in bed taking up far more space than a 20 pound little thing should be allotted and snorts in three short little conteded breaths before she falls asleep.


It's just that she is going to die sooner than later and we can't really do anything about it.

And that is one of... no that is the worst feeling I have ever experienced in my life.



But we look for and hold on to the good moments. Yesterday, when Emily came home she played "wrestle-ies" and pounced around like she hasn't done in months. I think she knows what we are going through and trying to give us a few highs for our lows.

I love her more than I will love most people I meet in this world. She has always been a great little girl, that stinky little dog.