how pets are like their owners
Friday 31 October 2008 | 5 cookies in the jar
It all started on Monday, when I took Fiona to have her teeth cleaned. [Dark warning: What follows is delightfully gory, and not for the odontophobic.]
Ms. Finny was slightly daunted by not getting any breakfast, but was still all excited and slobbery and exuberant, as usual—until we got into the exam room and vet techs started trying to insert things into her. Fortunately the Brujo had warned me ahead of time that when touched by veterinary personnel, our goggly darling transforms into a slavering beast, smarling and grueling, lips curled back from bared blood-flecked canines etc. So I in turn had warned the techs, who had a muzzle handy. Whereupon of course she didn’t smarl or gruel at all, but tucked tail, tried to hide her seventy pounds in a corner, and whimpered pathetically. And the vet techs glared at me. And I tried not to say, but heard myself saying anyway, repeatedly explaining to no one, “Well, she’s not my dog.” Whereupon they all just ignored me in disgust.
While my own popularity suffered, Finny was very trendy that morning; one vet even came in to see her just because he “adores black Labs!” (I tried not to gape openly at this declaration.) Her designated vet clapped his stethoscope onto her chest, skillfully evading her long pink imploring tongue. “She has an incredible heart!” he enthused. “She’s got another five good years left in her.” At this pronouncement, I failed to hide my dismay, and the resultant Inappropriate Look meant that angry thought-bubbles appeared over everyone’s heads: DOG-HATER! Then the Lab-Loving-Vet told me a long didactic story about his black Lab who had lived to be eighteen, once he removed her benign tumors and her ear canals [sic] (you know, I didn’t ask, though it’s nagged at me ever since—how is it even possible to remove an orifice? The mind fairly boggles. Maybe he meant he resurfaced them, like rotors?).
EIGHTEEN YEARS OLD. That’s five more years of long pink tongue, mes amis. I drove straight home, got online and started researching clicker training. It’s actually pretty cool—operant conditioning or positive reinforcement training—kind of like DBT for animals; and in fact the DBT and the group leader both recommend Karen Pryor’s book Don’t Shoot the Dog to their human patients. (Bonus: Could I clicker-train myself? Every time I accidentally grade a paper or take a bath, I get a tiny cube of roast chicken or hot dog?)
Anyway, the vet called in the afternoon to let me know they’d had to pull…wait for it…THIRTEEN TEETH, including all the messy complicated multi-root ones. He was very short with me, apparently angry, which I can understand, since he was probably convinced that I’d kept her in a basement for her whole life and fed her nothing but Butterfingers and Ho-Hos, though in fact the Brujo has diligently brushed her teeth for many years and she just had them cleaned last summer before we moved. Now there’s nothing to brush or clean, really; all she has left are the little guys in front, and her canines.
The B. and I went to pick her up that evening, and the tech gave us many pills and instructions and further dark warnings: She was in terrible pain, she would bleed for days, she wasn’t to be allowed any movement of any sort, for a week, she was in terrible shape, we should call them if anything happened, anything! Fiona tottered gamely to the car and climbed in.
As we drove home, my hand on her shoulders, she whined. “I’ve never heard her whine in pain,” the Brujo said, scared. But it turned out she’d just needed to go to the bathroom really badly; and that was the end of the whining.
Truly, though, she was the least like herself we’d ever seen her, even her usual post-anaesthetic self; it alarmed us both. She was so still. She wouldn’t eat for a whole hour. (But then she briefly remembered who she was and diligently hoovered up a half-cup of water-soaked kibble dragéed with painkillers and antibiotics.) All that night she lay motionless, oblivious to our comings and goings, drooling bloodily on the area rugs I’d dragged into the kitchen.
And in the morning she was fine.
Well, okay; for a couple of days she slept more than usual and ignored her tennis ball, though she still enjoyed annoying the cat and walking clumsily on top of our bare feet (she loves to do this, with what the B. calls “her gnarled tree-root toes”). Her breath no longer, of course, like the mouth of an open grave, but refreshingly neutral, we petted her and fussed over her greatly. By Tuesday she’d started barking wrathfully at the mail carrier/recycling or trash collector/frolicking innocent children again; and by Wednesday she wanted to eat trash off the ground; and by this morning…well, we’ll get to this morning in a minute. In short, though, the dog is a fucking HEALING MACHINE and if we could bottle whatever she has, we’d never have to work again.
End of Part I.
And lo it came to pass that over the summer, the Brujo developed a ferocious tooth pain where a filling had fallen out; verily, it had fallen out lo these many years ago. (”Why didn’t you get it fixed then?” “It didn’t hurt.” Etc.) He skulked around for a couple of days with his hand over his jaw, scowling and moaning, until it got so bad that he caved and had the filling replaced and all was well.
Until he developed an abscess about a month ago. Fast-forward through daily nagging, threats, rolled eyes, tearful pleading—to yesterday, when he finally went to the dentist for what was supposed to be a root canal. He returned home barely an hour later minus a molar (too fractured to be saved).
Standing there gesticulating energetically, still in sunglasses and school clothes, he couldn’t talk because he was biting down on a gauze pad; but my eyes got big as the Brujo mimed for me the efficient act of cowboy dentistry which had just taken place. And truly, the debit card slip which he showed me was only for a hundred bucks, instead of the anticipated $1200. He then gave me to understand, through a complicated series of gestures, that he’d been given a hydrocodone prescription despite his initially not wanting one and that, in fact, recovery be damned, we were going to the pharmacy to fill it before the local wore off, which it was already starting to do. “Do you want me to drive?” Shake of the head. “But I just think—” He was already behind the wheel.
I translated all this to the pharmacist, the B. smiling grimly through his clamp on the gauze, and we left with the script. He took one pill and napped; ate carrot-ginger soup carefully and watched Safe with me (and I can’t yet articulate how amazing I think this film is); took another one and went to bed.
This morning I woke late. It was after eight. Pye was all fluffed up and purry, wedged between my arm and my chest, her nose cold. I heard the Brujo showering. Getting ready for work. For an A day.
An A day, as opposed to a B day, for those of you who are lucky enough not to work in the school system, is back-to-back classes with 45 minutes off for lunch. The Brujo teaches 133 students on an A day, and even at the peak of health usually comes home afterward and immediately starts undressing, leaving his clothing in a trail behind him as he makes a beeline for the darkened bedroom. He has been known to sleep from 4 pm until midnight after an A day, waking only long enough to eat, brush his teeth, and go back to bed.
Disbelieving, I got up, went to the kitchen and packed a lunchbox with milk-diluted clam chowder and leftover flan, taking surreptitious nibbles off the flan myself. Fiona nosed at my bare legs appreciatively. Pye came and watched, blinking, toes tucked carefully underneath her on the tile.
When I heard the shower turn off, I stuck my head in the bathroom. The Brujo grinned at me, his wet hair sticking up in spikes.
“You’re going to work?”
“Yeah, of course I am! I sure don’t want to lie around here all day!”
“Okay, CRAZY MAN.” You have a perfectly valid excuse not to leave the house, and you’re not going to take it? How can I possibly be in love with this person?
We stood outside in the sun for a moment, our schoolday ritual, as he finishes his coffee. “Oh babe, can you do me a favor? Can you go inside and grab a couple of ibuprofen for me? Not to treat you the way Julianne Moore’s husband does, or anything.” He leered at me, ironic through his lopsidedness.
“If you need something stronger, just call, and I can bring—”
“Nah, I’ll be fine.” He drove away, cigarette held on the other side of his mouth (”patients should refrain from smoking during the healing process”).
When I opened the door to go back inside, Fiona darted out, grabbed her new white tennis ball, and waved it at me, wagging. “Throw it, lady!”
“No, Fiona.” She danced into the back yard, looking at me over her shoulder suggestively. “I said no.”
“Throw it throw it!”
“I don’t think that’s a good idea.”
“Throw it throw it!”
“Are you sure?”
“THROW IT THROW IT!”
“Well….”
“!!!!!”
“Okay, okay—at least it’s white, so I’ll know if you start bleeding again—but just a few! And then we have to STOP. And don’t tell Dad.”
She chased it ferociously to the end of the yard about five times; then wanted to go back in, winded but well-pleased. Plopped down on the carpet triumphantly, where she can see the mailbox.
And now it’s nearly noon, and I’m here having written this, still in sweatpants, having written no poems, made no phone calls, graded no papers, weeded no yards, returned no emails, prepared no nutritious soups, nor for that matter eaten breakfast properly. Though I’ve used my lightbox for an hour.
And Pyewacket is face-down in a sunbeam on the carpet.
5 cookies in the jar
post your glowing encomium (or bitter philippic) »
Follow this heated, lively discussion through its very own feed; also, you can pingback or trackback from your own doubtlessly much more interesting site.
wait….what is not to adore about black labs? (only the greatest dogs on earth!!!)
Okay, well, let me just say: You do not know THIS black Lab.
Fair enough, after all the last time I had a black lab I was about eight years old, and at that age dogs are gods. Still I absolutely loved this post and the fresh take on how pets are like their owners.
Our cats don’t do much but fill the catbox to overflowing on a daily basis and cough up mounds of vomit on the carpet. I shudder to think how we might end up like them…
So sympathetic magic therapy? We buy you a gerbil or a hamster? What animal is, you know, hyperactive and extroverted? Besides, well, the black Lab?
Also: pondering the cat who wants to be in the room you’re in until she feels cornered, the cat who always has two escape routes plotted out, the cat I can watch out my dining room window getting affection and petting from passersby (our street has lots of pedestrian traffic) but who will let no one in our house touch her. And I don’t want to think about what that says about me.
Now excuse me, I think I have a hairball.
@patrick: Weighing in the balance against her many, many other sins, I will say in Ms. Peewinkle’s defense that, in the entire time I’ve had her, she has only thrown up once. And that was because she’d been in a car for 12 hours (en route from Texas to NM).
@oleoptene:
the one person who really knows me best
says I’m like a cat
yeah the kind of cat you just can’t pick up
and throw into your lap
the kind who doesn’t mind being held
only when it’s her idea
yeah the kind who feels what she decides to feel
when she’s good and ready
to feel it
and now I am prowling in the backyard
and I am hiding under the car
and I’ve gotten out of everything
I’ve gotten into so far
and I eat when I am hungry
and I travel alone
and just outside the glow of the house
is where I feel most at home
(but in the window you sometimes appear
and your music is faint in my ear)
(mr. difranco, “virtue“)