by Julie Barton
The vet asked if he could take Bunker to the back for “just a few quick X-rays.” I nodded, then sat alone with Bunk’s empty leash, feeling like a helium balloon that had just been let go. The longer he was gone, the less oxygen there was in the room.
The technician brought Bunker back and told me that the doctor was going to read the films. “He’ll be back in a few minutes, okay?” she said, her tone consoling and sad.
I sat down on the floor, not caring how much dog shit and cat piss might have once sat in that spot. I wanted to be on the ground with my boy, feeling him, holding him, with him, as close to the earth as possible. I felt lightheaded and spacey when the door clicked and the veterinarian returned. I awkwardly scrambled to my feet. He paused, indicating with his silence that most pet owners don’t sit on the floor of the examination room. The veterinarian stood over me like a big brother and cleared his throat.
“I’m afraid I have some bad news,” he said, and his voice began a long descent through a tunnel of sound, as if the tubes in my ears had distended and bent and couldn’t take in his words. Really the worst case I’ve ever . . . Not even in the socket. I don’t know how he manages to walk. Severe hip dysplasia. Only two options here. Put him down. Probably your most humane. Surgery is very, very painful. Difficult . . . Cost . . . Run you about four thousand dollars . . . recovery . . . carry to urinate . . . not sure what you . . . so sorry . . . We euthanize here at the office . . . won’t be able to walk for much longer. Save these X-rays for colleagues . . . Just amazing to see a case this severe . . . hip socket . . . complete misalignment.
I felt stoned. I thought of Clay chasing me down the hallway. That same vein of adrenaline, reserved only for trauma, opened up and ran through my body—only I was older now, stronger. I looked at the vet through squinted eyes.
“We’ll do the surgery,” I said.
He began speaking, and again I fell backward into the tunnel of this man’s voice: Several thousand dollars . . . triple pelvic osteotomy . . . months of recovery . . . sequester in a crate . . . break the pelvic bone in six places. Two separate surgeries. Long months of pain for him . . . Really the most humane option is . . .
“Thank you,” I said. “But if you mention euthanizing him one more time, I am going to scream bloody fucking murder.” My whole body shook. I thought of mothers who could lift cars off of their children. I thought of fathers rushing into burning buildings. The doctor’s face registered shock and insult. I didn’t care. I wanted to call my mom and scream and cry. I imagined collapsing on the floor of the vet office, Greg rushing to my rescue. Instead, out of my mouth came, “Who’s the best hip dysplasia surgeon in Seattle? I want a consultation with him immediately. Where can I do more research? I don’t care the cost.” In an instant, I was my father, snapping-to in a crisis. I knew how to do this. I knew how to come to someone’s rescue. And whether or not this white-coated guy cared, I was going to save my dog.
I drove home, my eyes flooded with tears. The road blurred. Bunker sat in the passenger seat, his back legs splayed in what struck me as a misleadingly comfortable bearing. At a stoplight, I wiped my face and pressed my hand against my chest, trying to collect myself. I held Bunk’s shoulder and felt my breath steadying. Just one touch on his body helped me slow down, collect myself. My upper lip buzzed with emotion and I drove the rest of the way home with one arm wrapped around him. The word euthanasia would not stop looping through my mind. Bunker leaned down, sniffed my forearm, and licked it with a warm, slow pull of his tongue.
When I reached the house, I parked the car and cut the engine. Bunker was getting tall enough that his head was level with mine when he sat up in the passenger seat. I was panicking. The depression seemed to be threatening a return, like it was sitting in the backseat with a smirk and a knife. It would take out Bunker first, then kill me once and for all.
But when I slowed down, took inventory of how I felt, instead of being defeated or scared or sad, I was furious. I wasn’t broken this time. Though the depression seemed closer than ever since Bunker had first come to me, I felt capable of tamping it down, of facing the situation and saving my boy. I wasn’t broken; my dearest companion was. This situation uncorked a reserve of strength that I didn’t know I had.
It occurred to me, sitting in the driver’s seat, one hand on Bunker, one hand on the steering wheel, that perhaps it wasn’t just Bunker who had come to save me. Perhaps we had found each other so that I could save him too. The veterinarian had said something about several thousand dollars. He kept repeating euthanasia as the best option, and that many owners choose to put down their dogs, and he bore no ill will toward them. Most people, he said, balked at the price. The veterinarian didn’t know that I would’ve gone into lifelong debt and homelessness to save Bunker. I would’ve crafted a wheelchair out of sticks and rubble just to keep him alive and with me.
Parked in front of the house, I petted his soft-as-silk ears and said, “We’re a pile of broken parts, aren’t we, Bunk? We’ll fix it.” He opened his mouth, panted, blew his warm puppy breath in my face. His breath had become my favorite scent. I was officially a goner. I inhaled, knowing logically that Bunker had no idea what I was saying or what had just happened or what pain and suffering lay ahead for him. But part of me, that same deep-down part that had, since childhood, communed with trees and deer and birds, stirred when I held his head in my hands. I knew that our connection was not of this world, and that my determination and his pure goodness might just conquer any malady either of us suffered.
AS MUCH AS A USED CAR
JANUARY 1997
I found the best veterinary orthopedic surgeon in Seattle and scheduled an appointment for the next day. There, I gently petted Bunker while the doctor reviewed the X-rays. I had come straight to the clinic after racing home after work. Bunker howled with excitement when I walked inside, led him to the car, and drove off.
Greg still wasn’t talking to me, and I wasn’t forcing it. I wanted to give him space, and I needed time to consider what I wanted. Jason blew me off the next time he delivered a package to my office. “That was fun, huh?” he said. “Just a fun night is all.” I got the message loud and clear and sat down at the reception desk with a clawing emptiness in my gut.
Sitting on the cold table at the vet’s office, Bunker’s disappointment was palpable. This was no romp in the park; this was more poking and prodding from a stranger. Bunker was tolerant as the veterinarian pushed and pulled on his legs, pressed his back, and tested his range of movement. As he manipulated Bunker’s hips, he made “hmm” sounds, and a few times said quietly, “Okay, all right.” This doctor was in his fifties, fit, with a salt-and-pepper beard and hair, and he acted more like a doctor for humans than animals. I wondered if he had an older brother who was an MD, who teased him for doctoring less-important beings. I appreciated his demeanor, his furrowed brow, his sensitivity to my boy’s condition.
He began speaking, and after his first few words I lost focus. My hearing muddled again, like I was underwater. This was bad. I saw his frown, his concerned brow, his crossed arms creasing his white coat with the blue cursive letters spelling Dr. So & So in fanciful font that looked too old-fashioned for someone who was saying that our only hope lay in two drastic, highly technical surgeries. Six weeks apart, two complete triple-pelvic-osteotomies. “Repeat that?” I asked. I wanted to know the term. I wanted to brand it into my brain, the fix for this problem: Triple. Pelvic. Os-te-ot-o-my.
“Without the surgery, I’m afraid Dr. Vance is right. He will be immobile before he’s two years old. I’m sorry,” he said, rubbing his chin, leaving the skin pinkened under his spiky silver goatee.
What did this veterinarian see when he looked at me? A young nervous girl? Could he see my panic, the lump in my throat rising as the situation began to feel more and more dire? Did he feel anything for us? Could he understand just by smelling, or feeling with his sixth doctor sense, the immensit
y of this situation?
I wanted to tell him that this animal was my lifeline. Without him, I would be confined to an emotional prison cell. I would never know how to lift myself out of the blackness again. I was hurling these thoughts across the room, as if they might enter his ear canal and worm their way to his sympathetic brain center. Please, please, please, please help me. Please don’t make this happen. Dear man, please save my dog.
“. . . shave his entire backside. Two plates and six screws, some quite long, inserted into the center of the hipbone, which has been sawed apart into three sections. Then the bone heals in a whole new shape. But the immobility is essential and the healing process is extremely arduous.” He actually used the word saw, as in chainsaw. I nodded, my brain a fuzz of static. I searched for consolation and failed, like this were a pitch-black room with the light switch installed on the ceiling. I tried my best to listen from the darkness.
I gasped when the vet told me what I should’ve anticipated, that each surgery would cost over two thousand dollars. I began nearly chanting it in my mind. Four thousand dollars. I had less than four hundred in my bank account. I’d just paid my third month’s rent and was feeling flush with more than a hundred bucks sitting around. Where the hell was I going to come up with that kind of cash? I couldn’t possibly ask my parents for more money. I didn’t want to need my parents anymore. I wanted to survive on my own, and I had, so far, succeeded. But with the price tag on this turn of events, here I was, once again, desperately needing outside help.
Out in the parking lot, I stood and blinked, perhaps hoping I would wake from this nightmare. The dim, cloudy light slowly pulled me back into the moment. There would be no waking up from this. Behind my truck, I knelt down next to Bunker, his sweet, happy energy a contrast from the surgeon’s office. I tried to remember what the vet said. There was hope that Bunker could be healed. It would be arduous, painful, and difficult to witness. Each surgery would last at least five hours, and Bunker would have to be confined to a crate almost twenty hours a day for eight weeks, carried up and down stairs.
The vet said he would want to walk soon after the surgery. His mind would be ready, but his body wouldn’t. I sat listening, distinctly aware of the parallel between this prognosis and mine. I could move someplace new, convince myself that I was better, but my broken spirit still wasn’t healed. I still made terrible mistakes, hurt kind people, acted stupidly and self-destructively. There was an internal cascading then, a falling out or down or through, and I turned inward. I would heal Bunker, I promised. And maybe if I just focused on helping him, I could stop hurting everyone else.
NEW FAMILY, TRUE FRIEND
FEBRUARY 1997
I called my mom, who was aware of the potential diagnosis, and after her usual singsong hello, came the avalanche of my distress. “Mom,” I said, “that vet was right. This one said the same thing. They said Bunker’s so malformed that he won’t be able to walk in a year if we don’t do something.” She took a sharp intake of breath and then was silent. My shock became hers, and her quiet felt collusive. This was bad. Really bad. Not what we had planned at all. She quietly asked what I wanted to do, and I told her that there was only the option of surgery. That was all. No other. I didn’t mention the price tag, and I made an excuse to get off the phone. I knew she was worried about Bunker, but I also knew she worried that I would become depressed again.
As was my habit, I went to my room, closed the door, and cried. I imagined ways to escape and avoid, moment by moment, these terrible fears. I listened to music, tried to sleep, ate a box of chocolate chip cookies, and watched out the window as cars, buses, and people went by, their lives far better than mine. I was the only one so lost and scared and confused. I was the only one who needed a dog to survive. Clay would laugh at me if he knew.
My sense of isolation was all-encompassing. I still couldn’t fully recognize that I had control over my thoughts, that if I were able to see the negative self-talk, I could choose something else. I would not notice that I had a choice whether I told myself, time and again, that I was the only one this weird, this wrong, this weak. I was the only one I knew who was unstable enough to need psychiatric intervention. I hadn’t found a therapist in Seattle yet, but I knew that I needed one. I promised myself I would call Aurora and ask for a recommendation. I stayed in my room hiding until late into that night. Dark, quiet corners were best. I curled up there, feeling safe alone. Bunker seemed weak now too, settling in right beside me.
Melissa came home from work late, and I stayed in my bedroom. She wasn’t mad anymore about my not showing up for her at the airport. I told her about Jason, that I’d had raunchy sex with him and felt awful about it. She put together that the night of my one-night stand was also the night I abandoned her at the airport. Her frustration created a distance between us that was real enough that it broke my heart a little, set off the negative voices in my head: You’re such a shitty friend. No wonder you’ve never had a best friend until now. And look how you treat her.
I stayed in my room, reeling from the surgeon’s concurrent diagnoses. Bunker and I lay on the bed together. From the ceiling, we must’ve looked like two halves of a heart. His hind legs were curled into his stomach, his front paws resting on my chest. His head curled into my neck, my nose on his forehead. When he stretched and his eyes met mine, I imagined he felt sorry. He was hurting, and he needed me. He knew that I needed him too, but he was not able to do his important work. In his few short months of life, he’d been pure happiness and goodness. How could pain sprout in his body? I cried and imagined that all the pain and blackness Bunker took out of me was finally showing up in him.
Then there was a knock on the door. I stopped my weeping and sat up, whispering, “Shit, shit, shit.” Bunker hopped to the floor and stretched, wagging his tail. I snatched a tissue and wiped my face, wishing I’d locked the door as it opened slowly. I could see Melissa’s hand, her long, elegant fingers and pretty fingernails, way healthier than my gnawed nubs. She looked at me and I held my breath, trying my very best to look okay, but she saw right through that effort, and I burst into a sob.
None of the roommates knew the extent of my terrible year in New York, of my breakdown or my diagnosis, and I wanted to keep it that way. I wasn’t a depressed or sick person to them. I wasn’t someone who ruined friendships and didn’t show up and cried too often. Before Jason, I’d reinvented myself in Seattle as someone fun, responsible, thoughtful, and smart. But I felt like I was tricking all of them and now the façade of a put-together person was cracking, and they’d see who I really was: a terrible person, a royal fuck-up, a crazy-dog-lady who believed that if her dog died, she would too.
I couldn’t hold in the sobs. “Honey!” Melissa said. She closed the door quietly behind her and came and sat down on the bed next to me. “What’s wrong? What happened?” What was remarkable about this moment was that, in her voice, there was no trace of What’s wrong with you? There was an absence of judgment.
“Bunker’s sick,” I fumbled. “Well, he’s not really sick. He’s broken.” My voice cracked and I burst into another mucky sob. I hated how familiar this felt. But Melissa sat with me, quietly, peacefully, not yet tired of my tears.
“What do you mean, broken?” she asked, and when I looked at her, I saw tears in her eyes, too. Amidst the avalanche of relief that came at this sight, I leaned across the bed and hugged her and we cried together. We sank down to the floor and sat on either side of Bunker, our hands stroking his resting body. I told her about his hip dysplasia, how severe it was, how it explained why he couldn’t climb stairs sometimes. Tears dripped down her cheeks and she petted Bunker’s ribs, still soft with silky red puppy fur.
“So what do we do?” she asked, and in that moment I felt, for the first time in my life, that I really did have a real best friend. She could’ve said, “So what are you going to do?” but she didn’t. She said “we.”
I didn’t have
the words then to say what this meant to me, how much gratitude I felt that she intended to fight this battle with me, that she cared so much about me and my boy. And I don’t think the leap to our deep, abiding friendship would’ve been nearly as quick had she not forgiven me for my idiocy that snowy night and had we not shared deep love for this wise, little, old-soul of a dog. I loved Bunker. Melissa loved him too, which made me love her more.
In the kitchen that night, I told Chris about Bunker’s diagnosis. Something in me wanted to stop myself from showing the deep distress I felt. I worried that everything would change if I let the men in the house see my weaknesses. They would see me as someone with crazy problems. To say I was averse to men having a negative opinion of me would be a gross understatement. I was terrified, but trying my best not to show it.
I watched Chris put his hand on his mouth as I spoke, and I hugged him back when he pulled me in saying, “Oh, Jul, I’m so sorry.” As if he could hear my thoughts, Chris said, “You doing the surgery then?” Bunker’s demise was simply not an option. I smiled, another ally in my corner, and said, “Yep. I’ll sell lemonade on the curb and get two more jobs if I have to.”
Chris clapped his hands together and smiled. “Let’s raise some money,” he said, in his indomitable way, his spirit so lively and energetic, his athletic, six-foot frame bouncing, his gestures deep and wide. He rubbed his hands back and forth cooking up a plan. Chris was a man unafraid, undeterred by any potential judgment—and I nearly cried as he stood before me planning what he’d already called The Bunker Kegger. “How much do we need?” he asked.