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On the drive to the veterinary clinic, BeeBee looked out the window for while, or at least she faced it for a while, then shifted her focus to the air coming in the vents. She soon tired of that, too, and curled up on the passenger seat and went to sleep as if riding in the car was something she did every day. Because it wasn’t, I was impressed.

When we got to the clinic, at first Bee wanted to take a closer look at the donkeys and the llama, but as we got closer to them she decided that wasn’t such a good idea after all. She would have liked to get to know Rosalita the hospital cat who was sunning herself near the steps, but this time I was the one who didn’t think it was a good idea. Rosalita and I have had a few discussions over the years regarding who has dibs on the room where I see my behavioral/bond clients at the clinic and these have taught me two things. One is that Rosalita plays dirty. The other is that she doesn’t like to lose. Not being in the mood to add bite wounds (canine or human) to the agenda, I scooped up BeeBee and made a wide arc around the cat who took a swipe and hissed at us anyhow.

Once inside the clinic, BeeBee gave me yet another lesson in perception. Because of all the years I’ve spent in companion animal practice, I thought I was pretty good at estimating dog and cat  weights. And because I carry Bee up and down the stairs multiple times on any given day, I felt confident that the 20-22 pound weight I’d assigned her was well within the ballpark. Wrong. As she staggered around the platform scale, it quickly became clear that she weighed no more than 16 pounds. And when she finally settled on it, that dropped to 15.5.

I admit that I could be getting weaker as I get older. In fact, I know I am. But I don’t consider carrying BeeBee comparable to carrying a normal dog. When you pick her up, first she throws her head around a few times, and then she becomes dead weight. I have no idea if anyone has ever calculated the perceptual, if not the real, difference between live and dead weight, but to me it’s considerable.

After I got her weight–or she gave it to me–we settled in to wait our turn.

Although BeeBee loves people, dogs, and cats, I’m never sure how they’ll respond to her. What I did find interesting is that all of the people who interacted with her in the waiting room thought she was both normal and quiet beautiful. And what can I say? There’s something very special that happens when people discover this little dog with the very dark brown eyes is wagging her nonexistent tail at them, first tentatively and then vigorously when they acknowledge her. It never fails to make people smile, including me and I’ve seen it a million times.

BeeBee wasn’t such a hit with the other dogs, though. It was difficult to tell whether they were uneasy because they were  at the clinic or they realized there was something wrong with her, or a combination of the two. Rather than have her do her joyous bouncy shrieky bark thing and really upset them, I kept her close. All in all thought she did very well. The four rats who were in for physicals didn’t comment one way or the other.

When our turn came and I put Bee on the examination table, she was very well behaved. And she continued to be very well behaved when the veterinarian who was going to do the surgery took her leash from me and put her down on the floor again after checking her over. While we discussed the surgery and Bee’s limitations, she sat patiently and didn’t make a sound. Nor did she make a sound or move a muscle when I backed away to the door.

Instead, she locked eyes with me and I read so much into that gaze I went numb.

“She can certainly see you from here,” the veterinarian said as I continued backing out the door.

I nodded, quickly shut the door, and retreated to my car.

I barely made it inside before I started to cry.

Getting Fixed is a free audio book about how the way we relate to animals affects our lives, sometimes in most unexpected ways, and sometimes whether we want it to or not. Listen to the latest chapter below or click here to learn more about the story.

 

 Getting Fixed - Chapter 20 [13:31m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (1)

Did you ever congratulate yourself for having all the bases covered only to watch everything go down the toilet in an instant? That’s what happened to me the last day of April. I got up that morning and made a note on my calendar to set up an appointment to get BeeBee spayed in May sometime after her first birthday. My thinking was that she’d be old enough that her growth plates should be well on their way toward closing if not already closed and her stitches would be out before I took her to my son’s to babysit my granddaughter over the Memorial Day weekend.

Alas, Bee’s grooming that day resulted in one of those bad news/good news deals. The bad news is that I noticed a, um, uh sort of, sounds like pussy/pusy/pussie/pusy discharge from her feminine nether regions, a.k.a. a purulent discharge from her vulva in vetspeak. Let me digress here a moment to note that I am referring to pus, not a very small cat oozing out of my dog. For all the years that I have thought of exactly what I saw coming out of Bee as a pus-sy discharge, it never occurred to me that I had no idea how to spell it and even if it was an actual word. As is so typical of Spellcheck’s idiosyncratic nature, it pleaded ignorance to all definitions of the word but had no qualms about commenting on its proper spelling. This struck me as somewhat mystical. Is the proper spelling of a word for which one recognizes no meaning comparable to the sound of one hand clapping?

To continue: the bad news was that Bee obviously had an infection that was producing a gross discharge.

The good news was that Bee had an infection that was producing a gross discharge from her vulva.

At this point you might be asking yourself how this could possibly be good news. Or perhaps you’re thinking I’ve finally gone round the bend as you suspected I would one day. BUT it was good news in that the most likely place that discharge was coming from was an infection in my very long dog’s most likely proportionately very long Y-shaped uterus. Far better that that gross stuff was flowing out rather than trapped within her uterus because that spelled the difference between a relatively normal dog and one who could become direly ill in an instant

Not being one to look a gift discharge in the mouth–how’s that for a disgusting play on words!?–I was very pleased when I was able to schedule Bee for surgery a mere two days later.

That morning, I had to face the first challenge related to this event. You might be thinking this meant the surgery. Nope. I’m referring to withholding food from a dog with a greatly enhanced sense of smell that compensates for her deafness and visual limitations. I have not tested this, but there are days I think this dog easily could smell a single molecule of dogfood from a least a mile away if the wind was right. Moreover, she believes that every such molecule is created specifically for her and it is her mission in life to locate and eat it.

As you might have guessed, feeding two other dogs while not feeding Bee was like telling the Pentagon they can’t have more money. Oh, the noise, the drama! I put her in her crate while I fed Frica and Ollie because I had no doubt she would bulldoze them out of the way and snarf down their food. Although she couldn’t see them daintily eating their breakfast, she knew what was going on and she was not pleased. Had I possessed a magic decoder ring, I suspect I would have heard some deaf-dog profanity that morning because the sounds she was making were unlike any I’d ever heard her make before. My favorite was a half-howl, half-croak emitted from an upside down position with all four fat feet extended heavenward. This I decided was meant to convey the needless tragedy of a certain dog’s immanent death if some heartless, cruel, and abusive poor excuse for a canine bitch didn’t feed her immediately.

When said heartless cruel and abusive saintly (in my version of the story) individual did not and after Bee had sucked up every invisible molecule of food said villain missed prior to freeing her, she was back to her usual self. After stomping Ollie a few times, she acted like nothing had happened.

Until we got to the clinic…

Getting Fixed is a free audio book about how the way we relate to animals affects our lives, sometimes in most unexpected ways, and sometimes whether we want it to or not. Listen to the latest chapter below or click here to learn more about the story.

 

 Chapter 19 [14:01m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (85)

Once again I’m behind as spring clean-up and creating a new garden out of an area that consists mainly of sand and rocks takes up what little free time I have. Still, there have been some changes and BeeBee has been involved in most of them.

Previously I wrote about putting a Gentle Leader on BeeBee in hopes of reducing the troubling edginess she displayed around the puppies. It worked well and I rarely saw her acting as if it bothered her in any way. Because of this, one evening when I was brushing her (dog grooming is a daily routine with me and further evidence that I have no life) it surprised me to see that she was missing some hair on the skin between her eyes and the nose loop of the collar. Because the loop is loose enough that she could easily get it off if she wanted to, I couldn’t understand what was going on. But then I started to watch her more closely and discovered that this was a consequence of a game she now played primarily with Ollie, although sometimes Fric and the cat joined in, too.

The game consists of Bee pounding on Ollie who then races under the chaise with Bee in hot pursuit. But although Bee can wriggle under it, she has to slow down to do it. If she doesn’t, she doesn’t get her head down far enough. When this happens only her needle nose goes under and the rest of her head plows into the padded chaise and suddenly stops the action. Concurrently, the nose loop of the collar gets shoved up on her muzzle with enough force that, after multiple shoves, it’s worn the hair off. While all this is going on, Ollie or whoever is under the chaise escapes, gets Bee from behind, Bee backs up, and the game is on again.

That solved the mystery. But what to do about it? I did consider wrapping the nose loop with duct tape simply because duct tape is my first answer for everything. However, I quickly dismissed that idea for reasons too numerous to mention and decided moleskin was the way to go. 

So off I went to the local Wal-Mart to support the Chinese economy, undermine the American way of life, and hopefully find some moleskin. As it turned out, once there I remembered exactly where to find it because I had been misdirected to it by a clerk the previous week. Yes, you read that correctly. I did say “misdirected.” I forget what I wanted but the clerk I asked told me I could find it against the wall next to the pharmacy. Wrong. All I found there was such a dizzying array of condoms and vaginal creams and douches it made me wonder what went on in Claremont that I didn’t know about, but then I decided I didn’t want to know. Because what I wanted obviously wasn’t there, I’d wandered around a bit in that general area and found what I was looking for next to–in case you were wondering where this was going–the feet-related section with its moleskin products among others. Thanks to that what I now I considered a fortuitous past event, I could find what I wanted immediately.

Because one of the trials of being anal is that you worry about things that no sane person would, I worried about how Bee would act when I removed her GL long enough to put the moleskin on the underside of the nose loop. Would she immediately charge after Ollie with the idea of prodding him to death with her nose to make up for all those weeks she’s behaved? Should I put her in her crate to prevent this?

As so often happens with my anal worries, they turned out to be groundless. Not only did Bee not go after Ollie, she never left my side the whole time I worked on her collar. In fact, she kept her eyes glued on me and that collar the whole time. She reminded me of a little kid watching her beloved security blanket being mended. When I had finished, she stood perfectly still while I put it back on her.

Then she looked at Ollie, gave her peculiar but nonetheless loud and irritating deaf-dog bark, and chased him under the chaise.

Getting Fixed is a free audio book about how the way we relate to animals affects our lives, sometimes in most unexpected ways, and sometimes whether we want it to or not. Listen to the latest chapter below or click here to learn more about the story.

 

 Chapter 18 [12:44m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (86)

Since my last post several weeks ago, a lot has happened  to remind me how much the quality of our realities depends on how we process the sensory stimuli we receive from the world around us. It began when winter ended. I don’t mean “ended” as in “It gradually started to get warmer and the snow gradually melted.” I mean ended as in kaput, pffffttt! One day and it was winter and the next, the Big Thaw was on. Plow lines along the road, driveway, and front walk shrank so rapidly, I felt disoriented and even somewhat vulnerable. Until it wasn’t there, I didn’t realize what a safe cocoon all that snow made. Human and animals had been pretty much limited to the walk and small parking area in front of the house with few distractions. By January, the plow lines on either side of the road and driveway were so high and deep that skidding while driving wasn’t much of issue. True, I might bounce off a snow bank, but there was no way I was going to go through one and down an embankment or into a ditch.

The snow melted so quickly that I had the distinct  feeling that, sans all that snow on either side, I could fall off the walk and into the flower beds lining it. The slight feeling of vertigo that accompanied this fortunately waned before questions regarding my mental stability had time to form. As the snow receded in the parking area, I felt like a dog confined to a run whose barriers suddenly disappear: Where did all this space come from?  As the area exposed rapidly grew larger and larger, I also discovered another faulty perception on my part: the dogs hadn’t been eliminating around the perimeter of the parking area; they’d been eliminating around the perimeter of the plowed parking area. Because this area kept shrinking, that meant quite a large area.

Another perception that bit the dust was that I’d been able to clean up after them all winter, except when there was a storm. On second thought, that perception was probably pretty accurate. It was just that we had so many storms that there still was a lot to clean up. The worst part of that was that some of it was Watson’s. In that instant I sensed what it must feel like to stumble upon the disintegrating remains of droppings left by the last member of an endangered species. Seeing that irrefutable physiological evidence of a being once so alive who was no more and never would be again hit me very hard, much harder than finding one of Watson’s old  toys.

But while I was trying to negotiate this metaphysical morass, the puppies, Fric, and BeeBee were in heaven. Each day brought a new layer of scents for them to process and more ground to explore. Best of all, it brought puddles of water and mud to chase each other through. I’m sure there are those who would disagree, but I don’t think any breed of dog can get as much splash distance out of a mud puddle than a corgi who hits one at full speed with his or her fat front feet. The only exception might be a brain-damaged corgi named BeeBee whose normal high-speed gait consists of lunging attacks on the ground with her front paws. This is not a dog you want to be wearing your white prom dress around on a rainy day! In spite of this and providing further evidence of my questionable mental state, I took the puppies out every day and watched them transform themselves and each other from fluff balls into sodden lumps of mud and debris.

Since I last wrote the last two puppies have gone to wonderful homes and things dried out in more than a week of days so dry and sunny I felt giddy.  The pups’ departure was easier for Fric this time (see http://www.mmilani.com/commentary-200606.html for a description of what happened the last)  because this time one of them stayed, although there are times she looks at him then at me as if to say, “Remind me again. Why was it that I didn’t want them all to go away?”

Getting back to perceptions, from the time the puppies were born, I had to constantly remind myself that they weren’t deaf. I’d become so use to linking “puppy” with “deaf” since BeeBee’s arrival that I had to consciously override that inclination. Now that it’s Fric, Bee, and Ollie, the human-canine communication is such a curious mix of signals for the deaf, visually impaired, and uncoordinated, a “normal” adult, and a “normal” puppy that–I admit–I periodically get confused. So, for example, I sometimes might give a verbal command to Bee and an exaggerated hand signal to Ollie. Interesting (and thankfully!) Bee is becoming very good at reading my lips or the body language associated with those verbal commands while Fric has mastered the exaggerated signals I use with Bee and is teaching them to Ollie.

What’s even more interesting is that there are times when BeeBee is, as I refer to her, “the good dog.”  This usually occurs when I use both a verbal and a hand (more correctly a sweeping arm) signal when I want the dogs to come in after a play session. Perhaps because she intuitively recognizes that she needs to stay on my good side more than the other two, Bee is usually the first to respond. Fric has already figured out that, if Bee comes, pretty much all of her excuses for not coming go down the toilet.  I can easily imagine her saying to Ollie, “Son, if the deaf, half-blind brain-damaged dog obeys when she gives the signal, you’re gonna have a hard time convincing her you didn’t know what she was talking about.”  Whatever the reason, Ollie’s response is getting much better, although I’ve had to remind Fric on several occasions that verifying that the young and disabled are headed safely into the house is not her signal to take off and do her own thing.

Meanwhile the yellow alien has vanished and reappeared so many times, I’ve lost count. I assume it has something to do with Frica because, until the past two days, she’s the only one I’ve ever seen pay any attention to it. However, two days ago Ollie discovered it and likes to drag in under a chair where he’s safe from Bee’s probing proboscis. Once there, he happily gnaws on it for a while until the cat goes by or Bee turns her back. Then the chase is on.

And so life continues.

A friend recently sent me the following lovely poem by poet extraordinaire  Mary Oliver. Because it was about a dog, I automatically compared that animal’s experiences with those of my puppy, Ollie. Once I did that, I could not resist the temptation to portray Ollie’s alternate reality poetically, too. Below are both poems, the exquisite original and the parody.

Luke, by Mary Oliver from Red Birds

I had a dog
who loved flowers
Briskly she went
through the fields.

yet paused
for the honeysuckle
or the rose,
her dark head

and her wet nose
touching
the face
of every one

with its petals
of silk
with its fragrance
rising

into the air
where the bees,
their bodies,
heavy with pollen,

hovered-
and easily
she adored
every blossom,

not in the serious,
careful way
that we choose
this blossom or that blossom -

the way we praise or don’t praise -
the way we love
or don’t love-
but the way

we long to be -
that happy
in the heaven of earth -
that wild, that loving.

Ollie by Myrna Milani from the as yet unwritten Poems for Preparing the Soil

I had a puppy
who loved manure
Briskly he went
through the newly turned garden

yet paused
for the turd
or the turdette
his brindled head

and his wet nose
touching
the surface
of every one

with its bits of
of hay
with its fragrance
rising

into the air
where the flies,
their bodies,
trembling with anticipation,

hovered-
and easily
he adored
every nugget,

not in the serious,
careful way
that we choose
this salad or that dessert-

the way we praise or don’t praise -
the way we love
or don’t love-
but the way

we long to be -
that happy
in the heaven of earth -
that wild, that loving.

that indiscriminate
in our eating habits.

Getting Fixed is a free audio book about how the way we relate to animals affects our lives, sometimes in most unexpected ways, and sometimes whether we want it to or not. Listen to the latest chapter below or click here to learn more about the story.

 

 Chapter 17 [16:24m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (135)

Getting Fixed is a free audio book about how the way we relate to animals affects our lives, sometimes in most unexpected ways, and sometimes whether we want it to or not. Listen to the latest chapter below or click here to learn more about the story.

 

 Chapter 16 [12:22m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (80)