He is home after a day at the vet. We went this morning at 8:30, assuming that I would wait for them to take a couple x-rays and then take him home. The doctor hesitated. “I’d hate to have you wait. Why don’t you go home and wait for us to call. You’ll be able to pick him up around lunchtime.”
The vet’s office was besieged by emergencies soon after. Zeke got home at 6:30. He is hobbling around now between the bed and the food bowl, dopey on Tramadol. He can hobble, that’s something.
The X-ray is not diagnostic for the lameness. The vet yesterday took one look at him and quietly thought “cancer dog.” She didn’t say anything until the bloodwork came back. Zeke’s thyroid hormone levels are low. In skinny dogs, cancer is one possible reason for such anomalous readings. He’s lost 15 percent of his body weight in the last six months. He’s weighed this little before, and there are plenty of other possible reasons for his weight loss, icluding his being a life-long picky eater and getting bored with the food we make for him and not feeling like eating when his hips hurt. And we wait for the phone call, tonight or tomorrow, about whether the X-rays show a tumor or two.
I am surprisingly serene about the possibility of cancer. This is partly for selfish reasons: I am faced with the prospect of killing my dog, and in a sense I would prefer it be to prevent his suffering from a painful, terminal disease as to end a non-terminal disability. It is partly because he is nearly 16, and geriatric cancer is as near-inevitable as losing milk teeth.
And it is partly that the doctors would not likely spend time looking for cancer in a dog they felt should be put down next week.
So file this wherever you put such odd occurrences: I have had a medical professional suggest cancer as a possibility and it has been good news. But we will see. It could be next week we need to put him down, or three months from now. But it will not be this weekend.
Thanks for the update! I hope you all enjoy the weekend!
Zekey. :(
Kathy’s thoughts above reminded me of something. I had a friend in Brooklyn who, after a couple of bad years in his life, quit his job as a city planner and became a dog walker and caretaker. In short, he was INTO dogs, observed them, wrote about them, spent most of his days in the company of a large variety of them.
He once told me that he had come to see that dogs weren’t as attached to their physical selves as we were to ours. I disagreed at first because I had come to really understand, especially having a dog in the city, how much they lived in their bodies as opposed to their heads, how they WERE their bodies, so much more than we were.
I think we were both right. Dogs, of course, have an abstract sense- anyone who’s lived with one knows they can think, manipulate, lie, enjoy a joke. But it doesn’t mean as much to them as ours does to us, it doesn’t nurture and comfort them——(And maybe ours shouldn’t mean that much to us)——clearly, the fullest, most balanced expression of dog spirit and lifeforce is primarily physical. But after having lived for a while with an aging dog, through her decline and death, I saw how much of an unwanted burden and task it was for her to stay in that decaying container. It became obvious, in time, she didn’t want to be there anymore in that prison. Not even for us, her pack. It became clear how much more we were attached to her body than she herself was.
As I write this, I have a parrot on my knee, my eight year old cattle dog is sighing louder and louder to remind me that THE WALK is over due, and the 9 month old carolina dog is pestering the cat, channeling his pent up energy till I pick up the leashes. So, I know something about living with animals. Living longer than them, seeing them through those transitions, be they sudden or prolonged, is awful, wrenching, overwhelming.
You’ll do the right thing at the right time because you are his and he is yours.
Peace
Oh, Chris. I saw this picture and burst quite suddenly into tears. Zeke looks so much like my childhood dog, who was my only friend for years. I was so impressed by how much effort he put into his final days, how much he seemed to care that we saw him trying. What a terrible loss that was.
Endless hugs to sweet Zeke.