Love Is the Best Medicine (7 page)

“Good thing she still has a decent sense of smell,” said Dr. J., lifting up a weighty black ear and peering into the pink cauliflower folds within. “Because I can’t imagine she hears very well. For all intents and purposes she has to be nearly deaf after a lifetime of neglect for a classic cocker spaniel ear problem. I’ll leave you with some ear cleaner and topical and oral antibiotics. We’ll see if they help her out.”

Dr. J. lifted up on Helen’s upper lip, inspecting the dental arcade below, and the dog took this as a cue to pant directly into the veterinarian’s face.

“Whoa,” she said, “that’s impressive. Nothing personal, but I think I might pass on sharing some spaniel kissy-face.”

“It’s awful, isn’t it? Sometimes I’ve seen the poor thing rubbing her face along the ground and pawing at her mouth as though something hurts inside.”

Dr. J. placed a finger on Helen’s lower incisors and gently induced her to “open wide.” Chipped canines, stone-ground incisors, and molars caked in a lime green frosting of fetid plaques smiled back at her.

“She’s going to need some serious dental work, I’m afraid. It’s amazing that she eats as well as she does despite her bad teeth.”

The history of tick infestation prompted a test for Lyme disease, Helen stoically accepting the needle in her jugular vein as the blood sample was obtained. More injections followed, in her neck and her right thigh, providing the vaccines that had either lapsed or were never given in the first place.

It was while Dr. J. was listening to Helen’s chest with a stethoscope that the doctor had her first and only moment of hesitation during the entire examination. Gliding across the right side of Helen’s chest, Dr. J. could detect the whisper of air drifting back and forth through healthy lungs. Off in the distance, she could hear the faint “lub-dub” of a strong heartbeat. However, when she switched sides, placing the diaphragm of her stethoscope behind Helen’s left armpit—an optimal position to hear blood rushing through the heart’s different chambers—her ears were greeted by relative silence.

Helen stood patiently, clearly unfazed by the apparent absence of a beating heart.

Dr. J. looked puzzled. She looked at her stethoscope, double-tapped the diaphragm with her finger, and heard two deafening thumps on a snare drum inside her head. There appeared to be no technical problem with her equipment.

She listened again, roving around an imaginary silhouette where Helen’s heart might be inside this compact chest, looking like a safe cracker who can’t quite dial up the correct sequence of numbers.

“Is something wrong?” asked Eileen.

Dr. J. raised her eyes, hearing the question but not daring to speak, as she finally picked up the heartbeat but somewhat more muffled and from slightly farther away than expected.

“Weird,” she finally said. “I was having a problem hearing her heart on the left side of her chest.”

“Is it something to worry about?”

“Hard to say,” she said. “The heart itself sounds normal. I don’t hear any dropped beats, murmurs, or abnormal rhythms. It’s just a little dull and indistinct in that one area.”

She gently patted the left side of Helen’s chest.

“It’s probably nothing. Overinterpreting any variation from normal in a dog with no history is easy. Who knows what might have happened in her medical past?”

T
HE
severity of Helen’s hearing impairment became increasingly apparent over the next few weeks. Both Ben and Eileen found themselves calling her name to no avail, inadvertently creeping up on her and making her startle with their touch. Only the loudest noise, like the screen door slamming shut on a whipping wind, penetrated her head and pointed her snout in the direction of the sound.

On Thanksgiving this deficiency took on a new urgency for Eileen. Helen was still transitioning from the status of lodger to family member, still glued to her mistress, though she had made allowances for visits to the mailbox at the end of the driveway, so long as constant visual contact could be maintained by sitting vigil at the front door. Then that Thursday morning, the kitchen suffused with the smells of oven-roasted turkey and freshly baked apple pie, Helen scrambled out the back door and began sprinting across the open fields, heading for the freedom of the distant forest.

She was halfway there by the time Eileen realized she was gone, little legs pumping, barking her head off as though she had caught the whiff of a deer or a solitary coyote staring back from the dense undergrowth.

“Helen! Helen!” Eileen cried, chasing after her as the dog continued on her course, either choosing to ignore the woman closing in over her shoulder or, more likely, not hearing a thing.

The fugitive was caught right at the equivalent of what would have been the barbed-wire perimeter fence, if this had been a prison break, looking surprised and pleased to see that Eileen had joined her, as though a human presence lent credibility to her belief that
there had been a threat lurking on the outskirts of the property, a threat Helen was not afraid to subdue.

The incident prompted Eileen to purchase a small silver bell to attach to Helen’s collar, its metallic tinkle offering the comfort of a poor man’s canine LoJack. If she ever tried to repeat her great escape, at least they would hear her making a break for it.

W
ITH
Christmas came an appreciation of the relationship developing between Helen and Didi. What had started out like a mating ritual between desert scorpions had matured into understanding, respect, even codependence. Didi seemed so cognizant of her own proportions around her Lilliputian sister, so endearingly clumsy in her attempts to be gentle and tender. Though this lovable giant of a dog was so physically immense, it wasn’t until Helen entered the picture that they realized something had been missing. Didi cherished and embraced her new companion so completely that Ben and Eileen came to believe a creature that took up enough space for three regular dogs had to have been lonely.

Come Christmas Day, the dogs wore matching red bows on their collars. Each dog had her own stocking hanging over the fireplace, with bones proportional to the size of the recipient—a carefully selected shank from the local butcher for Helen, something impossibly large for Didi that looked like it had been excavated by a paleontologist. Ironically, a mutually agreed-upon bone exchange took place early in the festivities, with Helen dwarfed by her enormous chew, dragging it through pine needles like an obstinate white log. Despite all her dental shortcomings, Helen happily whittled away at this project for weeks to come.

Early in the New Year Ben went through major periodontal surgery of his own, and the ensuing pain and difficulty eating opened up a whole new world of empathy for Helen’s daily plight.

“I can’t imagine what she’s endured for so long,” he said. “Here am I popping Percocet every couple of hours and it hurts drinking a glass of cold water. No wonder the poor dog is constantly rubbing at her muzzle. We really need to get her to a dentist.”

And that was all the prompting Eileen needed to pick up the phone and place a call to trusty Dr. J.

“I can set Helen up with a veterinary dentist, but with dogs it’s always a little more complicated than white knuckles and Novocain.”

“What do you mean?” said Eileen.

“I mean Helen’s an unknown commodity. I’m guessing she’s twelve, thirteen years old but that’s only a guess. Regardless, she needs some serious work on her mouth and that means general anesthesia. No dentist will want to touch her without blood work, chest X-rays, maybe even an ultrasound of her heart.”

“Her heart?”

Eileen thought back to the house call, wondering if Dr. Judy had been holding back on her when she listened to Helen’s chest. That difficulty hearing her heart with a stethoscope, was that indicative of heart disease?

“Eileen,” said Dr. J., with the uncanny gift of a mind reader, “spaniels are a breed susceptible to heart valve disease. It’s called endocarditis, and oral bacteria can be a major underlying cause of the problem. Anyone anesthetizing Helen would be crazy not to want to thoroughly check out her heart.”

Eileen appreciated the explanation but was disappointed that there was one more hurdle standing in the way of relieving poor Helen’s toothaches.

“Don’t worry,” said Dr. J. “I’ll set it all up with a cardiologist I know. She’s wonderful.”

“Where does she practice?” said Eileen.

“She’s at Angell. Angell Animal Medical Center in Boston.”

Eileen looked down at the little black dog by her feet, wondering what secrets her body was trying to hide. Helen was an enigma, of indeterminate provenance. What mementos of her former life lay hidden beneath her fur, beyond the smiling eyes and twitching tail? What price had this innocent creature paid for her neglect?

One certainty struck Eileen powerfully—
nothing bad must happen to this dog
.

J
ANUARY
in Bermuda can be iffy. Of course everything is relative and Bermudians are permanently blessed with miles of pink sand and gin-clear water, but come January they brace for brutal winds and horizontal rain, the honeymooners keep away, and tourist beaches become a playground for local dogs, bare feet and paw prints side by side in the sand.

Compared to the interior of Canada, winter in Bermuda will always feel positively tropical. And so, Sandi, who had settled in Calgary and who was working long hours, thought a frisky fourteen-month-old Cleo would love the warm weather and constant attention a visit to “Aunt” Sonja in Bermuda would bring.

Cleo had already become the consummate international jet-setter. Her impeccable manners and placid demeanor wooed even the most militant of flight attendants and caused protracted deplaning for anyone seated behind her. And it was obvious she relished all the time she could get with Sonja’s male Min Pin, Odin. The two dogs bonded with the familiarity of cousins thrilled to have one another at family gatherings, prowling the backyard together, chasing lizards, mocked by the calls of kiskadees, romping in the lush Bermuda grass as palm fronds whispered overhead. Sonja loved to watch them
engage, politely taking their turns dominating and submitting, smiling as they played out their mouthy bravado and then, exhausted, cherishing each other’s company as they slept it off. And like an anxious mother hovering by the sandbox, daughter Sonja always felt the weight of her responsibility for her canine guest’s safety. Not only did she know how much Cleo meant to her mother, she sensed that this creature supplied all the things that were missing in their own mother—daughter relationship. Sonja wasn’t jealous or resentful, and this had never been discussed, but she only had to hear her mother talk about Cleo to know an emotional void had been filled by a surrogate. To some extent it was a relief knowing her mom had found a vessel for her emotional outpourings. But the pleasure of sharing Cleo for a few weeks was always offset by a degree of worry, not least because of the poor dog’s eventful medical history in such a short amount of living.

It started back in Canada when Cleo was only five months old. Already a gifted canine socialite, Miss Popularity had been unable to contain herself when she and Sandi pulled into their familiar doggy day-care parking lot. As unpredictable as it is common, a classic scenario unfolded.

Sandi was sliding out of the car with Cleo cradled in her arms when another dog trotted past. For whatever reason—new kid in school, the exciting prospect of making a new best friend—this sighting proved irresistible, and Cleo transformed into a coursing greyhound intent on a hare, shifting from neutral to sixth gear in an instant, legs scrambling, accelerating, desperate to find traction. Sandi had milliseconds to choose: clamp down and risk breaking Cleo’s neck, or attempt to get her to the ground as quickly as possible. The lesser of two evils resulted in a drop, a screaming human, and a whimpering dog no longer interested in the chase, holding her right rear leg off the ground.

Nausea, fear, and remorse took turns beating up on a woman who had waited so long and cared so much for this Min Pin puppy.
Yes, the leg was broken. Yes, Cleo had decided to ignore the basic principles of biophysics by selecting an unusual fracture configuration in the shaft of the long bone in her thigh. In a five-month-old dog, the growing portions of the bone known as growth plates should be the weakest points, the locations where the majority of young dog fractures occur. Contrary Cleo had decided to flout that rule. She had also chosen to break at a site where the conservative options of a splint, a cast, or cage rest were either contraindicated or ill advised. Unfortunately for Sandi, five-month-old Cleo was in need of a major surgical fracture repair using stainless-steel plates and screws.

In the days before Cleo’s surgery, Sandi discovered that sleep was for people with less guilt in their lives. Yet the procedure went well, Cleo healed, and in those requisite eight weeks of quiet recuperation, Sandi and Cleo tightened their bond. Reluctant to crate Cleo and abandon all her hard-won socialization skills, Sandi purchased a backpack specifically designed for dogs. With Cleo safely constrained like a canine papoose, the two shared even more time together, doing household chores, shopping, and going for long walks on two legs. When Cleo eventually skipped free of her confinement, she did so without hesitation, as though her broken leg had never happened, an observation that moved Sandi to tears, torn as she was between joy and a guilt compounded by a dog’s unconditional forgiveness.