The Curse of the Strawberry Moon

Last night was my and my brother Jim's second visit to the Emergency Animal Clinic this month, this time at 1 a.m.  Daisy had been playful and enjoying life all day but started whimpering around 10.  I thought she had to go out.  I thought her staggering was the urgency of needing to go out.  After she did her business, however, she kept staggering on the trajectory of "out".  I went after her with cookies but immediately realized something was terribly wrong.  She could barely walk, had no sense of direction and fell down in our 20-yard odyssey back to our own patio.  I called my brother because I can't lift her into my high-slung Ford Escape and told him Daisy had had a stroke and I needed help.

He was here in 20 minutes and we bundled her off.

Turns out she's having a vestibular episode, which old dogs are prone to.  The very kind vet explained this as I sat on the floor with Daisy in my lap (she adores her Uncle Jimmie, but when times are tough she needs her Mama).  Vestibular disorder affects the inner ear so the animal (including humans) have horrible vertigo, explaining why she threw up on the way back from her business walk earlier.  It passes within two weeks.  He gave her a shot to settle her stomach and another, at my request, to sedate her because she was panting and shaking so much.  We went home and Jim settled her into her bed and warned me she was out but a wreck.  She was: sleeping but still shaking.  Twenty minutes later, the full effect of the sedative had taken over and the shaking passed.  She looked like a stuffed animal.

She had seemed better at the vet's but this morning's walk was careening, she didn't want water and later came into my room and wanted to get in bed with me.  I hauled her up, slid way down  and whenever she whimpered, I'd wake enough to scratch her butt, which soothed her into calm something.

I just lifted her off the bed because I didn't want her to fall off in the quest of finding me.  She's in her bed in my office, limp as vermicelli.  It pains me to watch her walk a bit, then come to a standstill, tilted to the right, unable to make her body do what she wants.  She's probably more embarrassed and scared than she is in pain.

Luckily we only have to get through seven more days of this wretched month.

A recap:

Memorial Day: Home alone with a big resentment on my chest, Daisy begins to experience rolling shivers.  It's not right.  She's been diagnosed with failing kidneys, put on a kibble she hates, has to go out multiple times a night and now this awful shivering.  I think she is dying.  I call my brother.  If I have to put her down, I need my big brother.  The wonderful Emergency Animal Clinic does tests that should have been done by her regular clinic and announces her kidneys are fine but that she has a roaring bladder infection.  He puts her on antibiotics and pain meds for the sore back he's also found and we switch vets the next day.

June 2: Daisy iss been improving.  We are coming from a walk and I see we can't go inside from the patio because the sprinklers are on.  Then I notice a loud buzzing that, yes, is coming from our apartment complex and then the wail of fire engines.  I carabiner Daisy to a railing and go inside -- an alarm that could shatter all my crystal is going off and water is pouring into my apartment.  The upstairs neighbors sprinkler system had gone off and that sprinkler was  water sluicing from their window and deck.  The firemen are right behind me and snatch up my computer components and carry it into the living room and tarp everything they can.

Daisy and I are homeless.  We head to Jim's while they dry the apartment with enormous hot fans for four days and stay on because I can't move with so much recently behind me.  Also, Daisy loves rolling in their grass.

June 3: Jim calls me early in the morning to tell me Daisy can't walk.  He'd coaxed her out to pee that morning from the basement door and, fuck it all, gave her an ibuprofin for the pain, which I approve of even if we shouldn't give her Motrin.  When I go upstairs, she's gimpy and tender but mobile.  We see her new vet that day and he goes after her pains and problems aggressively, taking x-rays that show no masses & no arthritis, doubling down on antibiotics and on pain meds.  I want to marry him.
She starts feeling better immediately, is eager to eat the new kibble they've prescribed and is thrilled to go swimming at Flathead, screaming for me to throw the stick.

(Daisy does NOT believe I can swim.  As soon as I get up to my crotch in the freezing water, she keeps coming after me to do what I call Tunnels of Love, in this case swimming through my legs and circling back to do it again.  She is herding me to shore.  It's hilarious.  I am disappointed that I don't take the plunge.  As a kid, no matter what the weather, we were in the water on Memorial Day weekend and it's a week later & I'm too much of a weenie to go all the way in.  I am old.)

June 7: Daisy and I move home.  Dust everywhere.  Shattered glass from a picture knocked down in a bathroom, shelves moved from the hall into the living room, the hutch moved into the living room, my computer on the table in the living room.  A load of laundry forgotten in the washer for a week to re-wash.  No towels.  Can't log in on my lap top because the router is in the living room.  For insurance purposes, I need receipts for everything so after a visit to Best Buy to make sure my tower/hard drive are OK, I book the Geek Squad to come in and reconnect all the rest of my lap top in case parts of it were drowned -- the tower was farthest from the stream three feet away.  Everything checks out and they even bundle all the cables so that they aren't tripping me when I stand up.

Can they fold fitted sheets too?  If so, I want to marry them.

The apartment complex sends in guys to move the heavy furniture back into place.  Later they come in to replace a bunch of light bulbs the Great Deluge ruined as well as a socket plate the huge fans yanked from the walls.  I clean and mourn my periwinkle pansies that have died.  Daisy and I settle in and she lays in the sun while I combine what plants survived into two pots.  This working with flowers feels...affirming.

June 12: The Pulse Massacre.  Flags are at half-mast even in het Missoula.  I trade emails of horror with a client and decide to write an article in his name based on a list of facts I drew up for his website. I lose myself in writing over the course of two days.  I'd look up from it and four hours would be gone.  Daisy cracks me up on each walk by throwing herself on the grass to "rrrolll, rroll, rroll in de hay" although she doesn't catch the reference to Young Frankenstein.  Oh well.  I do.  I am writing journalism and I am Woman and I am Strong.  I have a novel to write.

Which brings us to last night.  And this afternoon.  Daisy is now a failed croissant in her bed, not moving.

*  * *

On Saturday, the 18th, my sister-in-law celebrates her one-year anniversary for heart valve replacement by climbing the M, a gleaming white M on a barren mountain above the University of Montana.  Everyone in the family except me (I spent the afternoon making the coconut cake she wants to end the day on) joins her.  My niece comes back to their house with their new dog, a five-ish-month-old what looks to be an English spaniel.  My niece lost her beloved dog last year and is having some buyer's remorse over the puppy.  He's all over Daisy, who in her uninterested dotage and former role as dog boarder, permits anything another dog throws at her.  She considers this one of her jobs, along with keeping me from drowning, running after thrown objects and rolling in the grass.  

This encourages the pup to try out fancier moves, such as humping.  I had just warned my niece that his squatting days wouldn't last forever and that, even though she was sure neutering would take care of it, he'd get into humping at some point.  Whereupon he began humping Daisy madly.  I made the mistake of cheering him on and got into trouble with everyone.

I'm sorry about that, Beloved Niece.

(Both male and female dogs hump.  Daisy humped Boomer and Hero whenever she could, as well as the odd fireman and a friend of mine she was clearly in love with.  I walked a dog who hated everyone except his owners, groomer, Daisy and Hero.  He LOVED me, and would attach himself to my leg as soon as I walked in the door.  The same with Grace, my best friends' Lab puppy.  She clamped on to me like a vise and left claw marks and dirt on my legs after.  It was an act of love and delight.  Dogs hump for reasons of which sexuality is the least.  Mostly it's a way of getting the humpee's attention, an invitation to play.  

I walked a dog who ran into his apartment and humped his big squishy bed: I think it felt good.  Dogs don't always like being humped, especially males, but it's a matter of hauling them off and redirecting their play energy.  I'm just sayin'.)

Everyone was in the kind of mood that showed us off at our worst that night.  I was glad to go home to get away from the simmering emotional noise.

Chatting with my sister-in-law today, I realized two things about all this dogginess.  My niece had gotten her Dog of all Dogs when Dog was a year or so old.  She hasn't done puppy.  When Daisy was a very young puppy, she was vicious.  It really wasn't until she got into the dog run in Brooklyn and played, got nibbled, gotten in trouble and made friends that she calmed down enough t risk petting her.  One of her first friends, older than she, humped her regularly, a sign, I think, of ownership since we were at her apartment and throwing her toys for Daisy.  But there was also a big white Lab in the dog run that Daisy humped so much that we wept with laughter.  Little Daisy began at his butt and humped all the way up to his head.  Then she'd turn around and hump him all the way from his head to his butt.  Again and again.  He knew this was puppy stuff and let her.

Beloved niece's Dog of all Dogs had a terrible and lingering death.  Beloved me had a puppy with a terrible and lingering puppyhood.  Now I'm experiencing the beginnings of what Beloved Niece went through and I'm not good at it.  It makes my hysterical.  As a confirmed pessimist, each visit to the Emergency Clinic has been, I believed and will believe, Daisy's last car ride.

Beloved Niece was much more optimistic and accepting when Dog of all Dogs could no longer swim, no longer run, no longer walk much.  I think of Daisy as a puppy and when these losses, so far temporarily, occur, I see it as the end.

It also occurred to me that my father experienced very little of the degradations of dying.  Losing his sight could have been one but he forged on with what vision he had left, his books on tape, his music and his incredible memory.  He died of an aneurysm, immediate and painless.  What other failing of old age, my brother dealt with.  My brother found him dead (on June 26th, just to round out this mense horribilis) and that has been very hard on him.  

Daisy is my turn, challenging my mindset, my patience, my experience.  I'm so glad, in retrospect, that Dad made me put my dog, a black Lab named Jan who was dying of kidney failure, down by myself when I was 18.  I remind myself I've done this before and survived it.  This series of crises and recoveries is what I owe her and owe my brother for taking care of Dad, and Dad, whose decline last year I squirreled up & hid from as much as I could.

The Strawberry moon has swelled and diminished in the last three weeks.  It's payback time for me, to the cycles of life and the lives I didn't, perhaps, honor as much as I should have. 

But I will need you a lot, Jim.  Even at our ages, big brothers do certain Things for little sister.