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.