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.

Tea and shoes and bad pickup lines.

This is what I had for lunch yesterday. To the right is my polka-dotted belly, anxious for the sandwiches, cakes, and scones I will soon fill it with. Kelly and I have made Tea and Sympathy on Greenwich Ave. between 11th and 12th streets our haunt. I've written about it here before, as a place where a lady can have a meal by herself and not feel like a loser because the place is so small, but it really is lovelier with a good friend. Most things are. We split the afternoon tea for two by the window, where we people-watched and talked for a long time. People who walked by gawked at our impressive tiers of tea goodies. It made me feel smug. They wish they had that egg and cress.

From Kelly's photography skills with her Blackberry, I segue to mine with my webcam. Here are the shoes I got at the Salvation Army on for $10. I'm a little obsessed.




Purple suede, a few extra inches of height, and toe cleavage should be worth more than an Alexander Hamilton, but I'm just glad I snatched these puppies up before someone else did.

To close, I leave you with a theory I've recently thought up on pickup lines. They're kind of irrelevant to me, because if you're attracted to the person delivering them it really doesn't matter what line they use, you're probably going to give them your number or Facebook name or blog URL or whatever else floats your boat.

Case in point, my current celebrity crush by the name of Joseph Gordon-Levitt. He can currently be seen looking suave in three piece suits while wielding machine guns in "Inception." You should go see it. But without further ado here he is winning me over with a bad pickup line.

I'm sure it would, darling. But if anyone else tried this on me I would run fast in the other direction.

Lists make me feel better about the direction of my life

I'm trying a new technique that will hopefully result in a dramatic increase in my overall productivity. Every night before I go to bed, I'm going to write a list of what I need to do the next day and put it on my nightstand. My Youtube crush Alex Day does it, and he seems pretty productive and well adjusted. Or maybe he just appears to be like that because he has a British accent.

Anyways, I've been finding it remarkably easy to get lost in the lazy days of summer. Freelancing does that to people I guess. So does Netflix Instant Play. But I think a little bit of structure and direction is good, so I have a list on some graph paper by my bed. Tomorrow I need to finish compressing boxes in the garage so they can be recycled, sweep said garage, call someone back for an interview for an article I'm working on and hope I don't get their voicemail again, leave for a doctor's appointment at 3:30, and if I have any time at all in between these things, I'll work on my Division 1 essay. This is basically something that my granola artsy crunchy school has us do to evaluate our first year at school and discuss what we want to do in the future. I have about a sentence so far, and I'll probably scrap it in favor of something else that makes me sound like less of a spaz.

I hope that my grandparents who read this blog are still with me after I dropped that slang bomb just then.

So hopefully by tomorrow I'll have a semi-clean garage, pages full of interview notes, and a new arm attached to my side so I can dangle things in front of my cat, drink tea, and flip through my mom's "Oprah" magazine at the same time (that's what the doctor's appointment is for.)

Oy vey that was not a good joke.