Love Is the Best Medicine (8 page)

The second fracture wasn’t too far behind though, and once again, indirectly, doggy day care played a role. Cleo was having fun rough-housing with a Labrador puppy, oblivious to the weight and size disparity, when she pulled up lame on a front leg. She had broken two of the bones in her paw, an injury that was amenable to a fiberglass cast, though Cleo violated proper cast protocol by using her immobilized leg to stir the water in her water bowl. New casts came and went and with them the inevitable, unavoidable sores and cuts that come with a dog struggling to tolerate an itchy, bulky, heavy package
wrapped around a sweaty foot. But once more Cleo healed just fine, and once more Sandi did not.

“I’m a lousy pet owner,” she told her vet when the cast came off and Cleo finally got a decent chew on her toes. “I’m not good enough for this little dog. I don’t deserve her. She needs a home with someone who can look after her safely and properly. She just gets hurt around me.”

No doubt some of this reckoning contributed to Cleo’s sojourn in Bermuda that January. Perhaps, with all those diabolical guilt demons dancing in her mind, she trusted Sonja more than she trusted herself to take good care of her dog. Cleo, of course, was just a puppy doing what all inquisitive puppies do—discovering her world, making mistakes but ultimately getting away with it. If Sandi had known what would happen next, she would have gladly insisted Cleo suffer a winter of discontent in Calgary.

S
ONJA
pulled into her driveway, cut the moped’s engine, and removed her helmet. Shaking out her red hair she noticed her husband, Dave, standing behind her.

No greeting. No “how was your day?” or “glad to have you home.” He just stood there, one hand on his hip, the other hand scratching an imaginary eyebrow itch, watching her dismount, and instantly she was tuned in to his awkward body language.

“What is it? What’s wrong?” asked Sonja, certain that something bad must have happened.

His palm was out, patting the air between them in a calming gesture, only twisting the fear even tighter in her chest.

“It’s Cleo,” said Dave.

When Sonja heard Cleo’s name an adrenaline wave surged in and she felt it propelling her forward, into his face.

“What do you mean? Is she all right? What’s happened to her? Where is she?”

“She’s in the house, curled up next to Odin on their bed.”

Dave’s soft tone and patient delivery made Sonya realize she had been shouting and rambling. She heard his reply but she still didn’t understand. She was moving past him, not listening as he called after her.

“It was an accident. I don’t understand how it happened.”

In the kitchen, across the terra-cotta tile, two little dogs looked up, pricking their ears as they heard Sonja’s heels clicking in their direction, and for a second Sonja was confused as to what could possibly have made Dave so upset.

And then Cleo stood up and walked toward her, her nubbin of a tail offering a greeting, and Sonja saw it, saw how the little dog refused to put her right hind leg down, saw the swelling around her right thigh, the distension puckering her previous surgical scar, a slight parting of the hair revealing its ugly white line.

As she stood there, paralyzed, her brain caught up with Dave’s words. Sonja didn’t turn around. She could sense his presence behind her.

“When did this happen?”

She made no attempt to hide the accusatory tone in her voice, and they both knew she was really asking a series of different questions altogether. What did you do to her? What happened on your watch that went so terribly wrong? How did you let this happen?

“Shortly before you came home,” said Dave.

His voice was at her back, her eyes were focused on Cleo, her mind’s eye focused on her mother. She spun around wearing a facial expression trapped somewhere between incredulity and panic.

“How shortly?”

Dave shrugged, trying to convey concern and not terror.

“I don’t know, half an hour.”

Sonja turned around and saw him now, for the first time, all casual in jeans and a T-shirt that said “comfortable,” not anxious, as she thought he ought to be.

“Christ, Dave, why didn’t you call me on my cell? Why didn’t you take her straight to the vet?”

Dave looked down at the floor, glanced up, looked down again, swallowed, and finally met her eye.

“Because it’s probably nothing. Because she will probably be fine in a couple of hours.”

Incredulity crept into Sonja’s glare.

“Since when did you get a veterinary degree?” And then, “I don’t believe you.”

She brushed past him, Dave feeling her breeze by like a ghost as she went to a linen closet and found a clean beach towel. She picked up Cleo as though the dog were broken glass, easing her bit by bit into her cotton stretcher before gentle levitation.

“Well if you won’t take her, I certainly will.”

She picked up his car keys sitting in a bowl on the kitchen counter and headed for the door. Dave thought about reaching out to her but caught himself, as Sonja seemed to anticipate his move, veering her body out of his reach.

“She got caught up in her own leash,” he shouted after her. “She twisted and fell down. It wasn’t my fault, Sonja. Honest.”

But Sonja had no time for excuses and closed the door behind her, sealing him on the wrong side of their relationship.

D
R. NICK
Glynn, Odin’s regular veterinarian, made short work of diagnosing Cleo’s injury: sudden-onset lameness; pain on palpation of the right thigh; lower leg dangling in the breeze like a silent wind chime. A quick X-ray sealed the deal—Cleo had refractured her right femur at the junction between normal bone and the bone plate from the previous surgery.

Glynn put up the X-ray on a viewing box for Sonja and watched her response. At first Sonja wore a tight grimace, every muscle frozen,
a full-facial Botox, and then a freckled hand flew up and clasped her lips tightly, muffling a scream.

Eventually she loosened her grip and said, “I don’t understand. My husband swears she just got caught up in her leash. How can such a minor thing result in such a major catastrophe?”

Glynn tried to get a read on this woman reeling from shock. He didn’t think she was pointing fingers. Instead, he sensed fear and a desperate need to understand and justify what had happened. If not for herself, then for someone else.

“You said this is Cleo’s third fracture, right?”

Sonja managed a nod.

“And she’s only fourteen months old?” asked Dr. Glynn.

She nodded again, hypnotized by the X-ray, the proof, the crack in Cleo’s white bone big as a crevasse. How was she going to tell her mother?

“Sorry, what did you say?”

He repeated, “Cleo’s only fourteen months old?”

“Yes, yes,” said Sonja, back now.

“Fed a regular canine diet? Adult, not puppy?”

“That’s right. She gets the same food as Odin. For treats she gets blueberries, grapes, cranberries, and carrots. She also gets a wild salmon oil pill every day. Do you think she could have some sort of birth defect in her bones?”

Glynn pursed his lips, took a deep breath, and turned his gaze to the X-ray, as though the answer might be there. In truth he was raiding his mental database, flicking through a Rolodex in search of diseases that predispose young dogs to fractures.

Sonja had raised an excellent point. Fractures resulting from everyday, prosaic activities beg the question, is there an underlying problem with the bone? Is the bone weak and therefore vulnerable, and if so, is that weakness a congenital problem, because the dog is so young, or is it an acquired disorder that has developed early in life?

He would need more time, as well as his textbooks and the Internet, but his memory tossed out a list of words:
calcium, phosphorus, vitamin D, sunshine, rickets
, and, to his surprise (and, one would imagine, the surprise of those who taught him pathology at vet school if they knew about it), osteogenesis imperfecta, known in people as brittle bone disease.

Of course, lacking all the details of how these factors specifically influenced Cleo’s bone structure and anticipating that this was precisely what Sonja sought, he packaged his insight in the following manner.

“I think that’s a very good question. It is hard to imagine that poor Cleo can have this much bad luck in such a short lifetime. We should definitely take some blood samples and a urine sample for analysis to make sure we’re not missing something obvious.”

In fact, unbeknownst to Sonja, Cleo’s vet in Canada had previously hunted for, and failed to discover, an underlying cause after the second fracture. Still, she agreed, especially if there was a chance to find some explanation for her mother other than a failure to properly care for her dog.

“But what about this?” she asked, forcing herself to tap a finger against the image at the break, like a tongue searching for the pain of a loose tooth.

“Cleo’s going to need surgery, yeah,” said Glynn. “The kind of surgery we might not be comfortable doing here—you know?”

Sonja’s eyes widened and for a brief moment it was if she was sucked up in a vacuum. All that was left was a whisper.

“So where will she get the surgery?”

Here Glynn smiled, offering confidence and reassurance.

“I have a friend who works at Angell in Boston. It’s a huge animal hospital. One of the best in the world. I’ll give him a call right now.”

“You’re saying it’s safe for Cleo to fly? With a broken leg?”

Glynn pursed his lips, nodding his appreciation of her concern.

“You’re right. It’s not ideal. There’s no good way to stabilize her
fracture for travel, but she’s definitely small enough to fit under a seat and with the benefit of a few pills I guarantee she’ll be comfortable for the flight. It’s direct as well.” Then Glynn added, “Less than two hours,” and regretted it, thinking he sounded like a travel agent.

Sonja was silent, suddenly feeling tired and demoralized.

“Don’t worry, everything will be fine,” said Glynn. “I’ll go and make that call.”

And he left Sonja and Cleo alone in the examination room. Sonja looked at the X-ray and looked at Cleo snuggling in her towel, trying to get comfortable. She ran a hand across the dog’s skull, flattening the velvety ears, while Cleo’s wet eyes blinked open, checking who it was, and content with the discovery, she closed them again.

Sonja wondered if this innocent dog was somehow destined for disaster on her watch as some sort of payback for the way she occasionally treated her mother. In the next few minutes she would have to put her fears aside, pick up a phone, and call Sandi, and what made it worse was knowing exactly how their conversation would play out. This was when her mother was at her best, in a crisis, able to separate personal feelings from what needed to be done. In times of fear and uncertainty Sonja would let down her defenses and allow Sandi to tend to her emotional needs, allow Sandi to play the loving mother. This was when they were always at their closest, and the certainty of her mother’s unconditional support only reminded Sonja of how unresponsive and cold she herself could be, especially when she felt the oppressive weight of Sandi’s neediness.

The bustle of the hospital continued all around them—barking dogs, a woman’s voice asking for a prescription refill, the copycat parrot she had noticed on the way in voicing his opinions—but inside the examination room there was silence as Sonja and Cleo came to an understanding. It would be awful telling her mother the bad news, but at the same time, here was an opportunity to prove herself, to handle the situation and take care of Cleo in a way that told Sandi
she understood, respected, and approved of this special dog’s role in her mother’s life. Sonja would drop everything, fly all the way to Boston, and fix her up. Whatever it took, whatever it cost, she would make it happen and the world would right itself and all would be well once again.

N
OBODY
ever suggests that what I do for a living is boring. They might say “gross” or, occasionally, “wicked awesome” and I’ve certainly witnessed facial expressions ranging from respect to sympathy to dismay, but no one, to my knowledge, has ever labeled my career choice as boring.
Unpredictable
would be my one-word synopsis because implicit in this adjective is the certainty of surprise. No amount of training will ever fully prepare you. Education may teach you the science but you have to live this job to discover the art.

I leave home in a shirt and chinos and change into my pajamas when I get to work. I ask way too many questions, crawl around on the floor, and wear a hearing aid around my neck. Sometimes I even risk life and limb (well, mainly limb … okay, maybe a finger or two), but the point is there is always an element of danger. There is also mystery and intrigue, passion and intensity, fear and hope. I get to say “Sweetheart” without feeling sexist or inappropriate, and petting, kissing, and public displays of affection are encouraged in my workplace. Arguably, I have the best job in the world. I am a veterinary surgeon and I am a lucky man.