She's Home!

We brought our girl home today, and even though she still can't walk or stand up on her own, her movements are wobbly and floppy, and her breathing is quick and heavy, I know she's supposed to be nowhere but here. All we can do now is give her all the love we have and all the drugs the doctors gave us to keep the swelling by her tumor down, and hope that soon the swelling will go down enough for her to start radiation. No word on when that will happen, but we've been told that the best way to gauge this is by her behavior. Right now, she's by no means in the clear, but by the way she licked my hand when I pet her face I can't help but think it's likely she's on her way.

On the contrary, I've thought of the worst case scenario. How could I not when it's seemed at times like it's staring me in the face? We're not ready to let her go, she's only seven and this escalated so quickly. But if this really is her time, there's at least a small chance that the last place she sees will be the place she loves most. That's how I'm leaving it, but she's such a fighter. She's still here and she's eating and drinking. Her eyes are bright like chestnuts again. Maybe soon she'll be something we can call normal,and the cat will stop sniffing the stuffed dog she had in the hospital, wondering where she's been.

Visiting Hours

It's a little strange how quickly time passes in a spartan exam room with your sick dog. I can't explain it very well. It felt like I checked my phone at 7:10, put it away, then the next thing I knew it was ten minutes to eleven, the end of visiting hours. I'm honestly not sure where my mind went during those six hours. At some level, I just had to disconnect a little bit to avoid completely unraveling. I'm tired of doing that. It's hard enough that instead of the vet calling us with a pickup time, he called with news of another seizure.

As it turns out, whimpering and crying about all this is just as exhausting as disconnecting. The former just makes me feel hopeless, the latter like I'm wasting what could be my last times with her. So much is unknown right now about her health and if she'll even pull through. I'm realizing I know even less than I told myself I did. When I was laying down next to her on her dog bed, I just put my ear near her nose and watched her belly rise and fall. I did my best to believe the vet tech who said her breathing was normal, even though I thought it looked a little bit strained. I watched her breathing, because it was pretty much the only thing that looked anything near healthy on her. The rest was full of Valium and anti-seizure drugs. Her eyes were swollen. Her hair was dirty and matted. She couldn't stand up on her own.

Towards the end of the night, my mom held her up and she (our dog) licked pureed chicken off my fingers. She drank water from a bowl and a syringe. I felt, for the first time all night, like she really knew who we were. She had yet to eat for anyone working at the hospital. I wanted to feed her all the food in the world then. Her eyes opened wide, and it was like shades of her were coming back. Some of my lost hope came back too.

So now I'm home and my suitcase from our tragically shortened vacation is still packed even though I'm not going anywhere for a while. A while, in this case, is ten days. I hope that when I go back to school then I'll have something else to write about besides my sick dog. But for now I need to, because there's a huge part of me that still can't believe it's happening.

The calm after the storm

This blank text box is probably the most calming thing I've seen in what feels like ages. We had to cut our vacation short on both ends, and the short few days we were lounging on the beach were covered with a dark cloud of worry. Our dog was still home and sick with something mysterious and murky. When we left, she had been diagnosed with Lyme Disease and given an antibiotic. But while we were gone, the medicine didn't do anything for her. She had a seizure and was admitted to the animal hospital.

The day after that happened we came back from Martha's Vineyard on the ferry and drove straight to the animal hospital in the pouring rain. I was a wreck. It came in waves, really. Sitting in the standby lane waiting for the next ferry, I was fine. I was shoving a peanut butter chocolate cupcake into my mouth and reading Sloane Crosley. A few hours later, Samskeyti by Sigur Ros came up on my iPod and I started to cry. Then I was okay. Then we got to the hospital and I felt like throwing up I was so miserable.

They were keeping her in a cage. She was so drugged out she couldn't even look at me. All she had was a towel and an IV. There were sick animals everywhere and no one was paying attention to them. Emotionally, I mean. Just because some place has the best animal neurology department somewhere doesn't mean these animals are happy. As I stood in front of my dog, petting her and telling her to hold on, I heard a horrible howling sound behind me. He was a huge German Shepherd with an ugly wound and a big collar to keep him from licking it. I spent about half a minute pondering how weird it would be if I went over to be his friend, then I went over. All it took was a minute of me talking to him and he quieted down. It took all I had to not slap one of those doctors and tell them to give the same time of day to these animals.

So we left and went home and I slept until noon the next day and stayed in bed until two. That was yesterday. A waiting game. Today we finally got news. A tumor on her brainstem. They can't operate on it, but once the swelling goes down they can do radiation. The good news is we can wait for this at home, and there won't be permanent damage after they kill the tumor.

I don't know if the dust has settled yet, I don't know if we're in the clear, but I do know that we'll have our dog at home tomorrow, and that I'm forgetting what it's like to have things be simple.

Guest Entry from Julia

Lisa's dramatic last blog entry kind of made it seem like I was dying. I'm not dying. It wasn't even an infectious tick disease. That was just kind of a misunderstanding. So I'm just chilling out, awkwardly telling Lisa what to write because I felt that her last entry was, for lack of a better word, false.

Cheers!
Julia

This might be what catharsis feels like

It's been a weird few weeks, folks. I don't quite know how to break it down, because some of what made this week so weird has been intangible things. Like the air around me just felt yucky.

I guess I can start by saying my dog got sick. She was throwing up and being very lethargic. Normally when anyone comes home after being gone for a while, she runs up and jumps and barks and wags her tail. We knew she was sick when we'd come home from errands or something and she wouldn't move from wherever she had decided to collapse earlier. My mom took her to the vet and he diagnosed her with a gastro-intestinal illness. He gave us some anti-nausea medicine to give her, but she couldn't keep it down. So we had to wait for her tiny little furry body to heal itself. She's starting to feel better now, but she's still tired a lot.

So that sucked. It was weird seeing the one family member who is always happy suddenly looking and acting like the world was about to end. What was also weird was that around that time, I started to feel really lethargic too. Suddenly I couldn't go for a day without napping, no matter how much sleep I had gotten the night before. I've never been a particularly hyperactive person, but this was weird. I also started to feel very unmotivated. I was living in an anti-depressant commercial. Which was oddly ironic because I'm on an anti-depressant. In fact, I find that I have to change the channel when the ad for my pill comes on TV.

Anyway, I was just kind of on autopilot for a while. I woke up, did some stuff, napped, wasted time, slept, and then did it all again. It sucked. But last night, something weird happened. I had been having an especially crappy day. My sister had been sick for a few days and as we found out yesterday, she has a tickborne infection that can only be cured with an antibiotic that has, in the past, made her extremely sun-sensitive. So not only does it hurt like hell to watch her lie around completely ill, but we might not get to go to Martha's Vineyard for a week on the beach.

So once all this happened, I just kind of snapped. I started crying about my sister and probably not being able to go to the beach and then about my ongoing fatigue and lack of motivation and then all this stuff started coming out of my mouth about my parents' divorce that's going on now, and all this anger I've been keeping under wraps. The floodgates were open from last night to early this afternoon. My eyes are a little raw now, but I don't feel tired like I normally would at this time.

I think I finally get catharsis. I used to think I did, because I've always liked sad movies and music and all, but I never knew what it was like to feel healed from getting all the gunk out of your psyche.

I sound pretty granola now, so I'll stop. But I just kind of felt like writing this out. I promise I'll write something funny soon.