And just like that, she was gone.

This was taken three months ago. Just three months. I pulled her into my lap and she loved the camera and it loved her back (Even though it made me look like I hadn't washed my hair in months.)

We decided to put her to sleep today. If you've been reading past entries you know that she's been sick for a while and was just diagnosed with a tumor in her brain stem. The drugs that were supposed to make the swelling go down didn't work, so radiation wouldn't be possible. Also, the anesthesia would put additional stress on her brain. She's had over three seizures in the past fifteen hours or so, more stress is not okay.

She just doesn't deserve to live like this. She can't even walk on her own. The dog we remember has already died. It just sucks that mean dogs get to live and snarl at people, and Penny who only wanted to share your bed has to get a huge brain tumor and die. She only lived seven years. She had given a lot of joy to a lot of people, but she was only getting started.

Going back to school, I think, will be good. It'll remind me that there is life beyond this, and I'll be surrounded by fall air and foliage and friends. Maybe someday I'll accept that this doesn't just happen in movies and memoirs. It happens to real people too.

In which Lisa gets her hipster war face on.

Well my portfolio is just a paragraph and a half on my computer, and a stack of papers on my nightstand, and I haven't even begun to pack anything I need for the year (or at least until Thanksgiving break) but I know that no matter what, I'm ready for my second year at Hampshire College. I've got my war face on, and I'm equipped to blend right in with all the hipsters who skulk around campus on the regular.

First, I've got a pair of sunglasses with the lenses punched out. My vision is the tops, I don't even wear contacts, but everyone knows that glasses make people look smarter. I'll have much more credibility if I decide to get some fresh air at a party and there's a whole bunch of people debating existential socialism in Palestine or something like that.

Next, I've got my Moleskine. I use it to write down my thought on existential socialism in Palestine.

Finally, a Mason jar. It's so much cooler than a thermos, and holds more coffee. I need my coffee to wax poetic on readings I didn't do. Anyway, this jar is legit because I found it laying around my house, and didn't buy it at Urban Outfitters. When I'm not busy reading Czech philosophy, I'll crochet a cozy for it. When Easter rolls around, I'll rinse out the coffee residue and take it into the woods at 7am to fill it with PBR during Easter Keg Hunt. Later I'll fill it with more coffee to sip while I lay in the sun apathetically hungover.

I love my school to death and if its crippling debt ever forces it to fold I don't know where I'll go, but some of the folks there are serious pieces of work. That being said, I'm so psyched to bring my Mason jar to Keg Hunt. I may even wear the glasses to make my morning drinking seem highbrow and somehow literary.

School-sickness with a side of writers' block

I WANT TO GO BACK TO HAMPSHIRE.

I want foliage and cider donuts, creative minds and packed dance parties in the mods. I want to sit down with my wonderfully kooky advisor and plan my future because it's something worth planning. Being home is not working out right now. I have a constant tension headache and I'm tired all the time. I know I only have five days left here, but it feels like forever. I think I can describe all this as school-sickness, which would be a cousin to the homesickness I felt as summer camp when I was thirteen, but this is kind of a different animal. School-sickness is agitating. The stomach pains of homesickness are all up in my head now.

I'm trying to write my Div 1 essay for my portfolio, so I can move on to Div 2 once school starts. But alas I've come down with writers' block as well. Every time I sit down to write, I either end up writing something that makes me sound like a total spaz, or I can't write anything at all. I have, however, begun to compile some work samples from last year to put into my portfolio. A lot of it is damn good. Weird to think I was productive not so long ago. Hopefully the Pioneer Valley air will still be as motivating as I remember.

Oh and before I go to either take a catnap or get work done, I wanted to say thanks for all the support I've gotten these past few weeks with my dog getting sick. Said support, while somewhat solicited on my part, is much appreciated. A lot is up in the air with her health now, and she still can't walk or stand on her own (sometimes not even with help) but if it is her time to go (which it shouldn't be) she'll at least go at home.

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