by Nancy Laracy
Copyright © 2018 by Nancy Laracy
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available on file.
Cover design by Mona Lin
Cover photo credit Nancy Laracy
Print ISBN: 978-1-5107-3682-5
Ebook ISBN: 978-1-5107-3683-2
Printed in the United States of America
This book is dedicated to Cheryl Welch, VMD, and Bunny Boy who have no doubt been reunited on the other side of the Rainbow Bridge. They both left huge footprints to fill during their time here on earth. The relationship we formed, based on love, determination, and unwavering trust, is one I will cherish forever.
Cheryl’s love for animals and all those who surrounded her radiated in her being. Her knowledge of veterinary medicine and innate ability to know her animal patients was remarkable. Bunny Boy and I owed her our deepest gratitude for helping to give him the long, full life that he had.
Bunny Boy taught me that unconditional love heals. He was a breath of fresh air that blew into my life, unknowingly, changing our family forever. Our indelible bond grew in sickness and in health. He was, in the end, my role model for how to conduct oneself with dignity—even when life throws you one difficult or humiliating curveball after another. He was my friend, my third child, my Bunny Boy.
This memoir is a work constructed from memory. It reflects the author’s present recollections of experiences over time. Some names and identifying details have been changed to protect the privacy of the people involved.
Foreword
The first thing I learned about rabbit medicine after graduating vet school is that rabbits are born victims. They are nervous, skittish, defenseless creatures whose only hope is outrunning whatever is pursuing them. They evolved upon this planet as the perfect food source for most predators. They are difficult to treat medically as they often succumb to their fears and to pain. Anesthesia is riskier in rabbits than in other mammals. Frankly, they give up easier than most mammals. Not Bunny Boy.
Bunny Boy had the heart of a lion. He was anything but skittish. He was loved, and he loved back. He overcame medical problems that most rabbits die from within a year of the onset of their illness. He fought back regally and endured countless procedures. He had survived surgeries, medications, MRIs, CT scans, and two episodes of cardiac arrest. He was a rabbit unto his own. We warned his people time and time again that eventually the chronic infections would take their toll, told them countless times that he may not survive one more procedure. We tried to prepare them for the inevitable. Well, the inevitable did not come for eight years.
Bunny Boy was one of a kind. He cooperated when we needed him to. He allowed us to clean and dress his wounds. He allowed Nancy to hand-feed him when his teeth needed to be extracted due to chronic infections in his jaw. He was a kind, gentle soul who brought hope and happiness to all he touched. He surprised us and made us smile. He fought back when he shouldn’t have had the strength. He had an impact on every person in the animal hospital. He has given us reason to believe that other rabbits can live with similar ailments. He has given us inspiration.
We all loved him and he will be missed.
—Cheryl Welch, VMD
Introduction
When I was eight years old, my parents finally agreed to get us a dog. My little brother Tommy, who had been very sick from birth, had just received a clean bill of health. I think it was our parents’ way of letting us know that the coast was clear that life could, at last, go on as normal.
I was four years old when Tommy, the youngest of five children in our Irish Catholic family, was born. The celebration began before Tommy even took his first breath. While our mother was in the hospital for three days, my father split his time between the hospital and our home, pulling out all the stops when it came to organizing festivities for the occasion. We dined on spam and cheese on a hard roll, drank Yoo-hoo, raised hell, and stayed up all night. Mom was a registered nurse who insisted on healthy meals and reasonable bed times, so the temporary free-for-all was like Christmas and New Year’s and our birthdays all rolled up into one.
From the moment Tommy came home, with his jet-black hair tied with a yellow ribbon, we adored him. However, within months it became obvious that Tommy was not thriving the way he should have. By the time his first birthday came around, he had been rushed to the hospital by ambulance several times with serious breathing issues and convulsions. Before long, our baby brother was diagnosed with cystic fibrosis. The prognosis was poor, and the celebrations around our house ceased abruptly. Our newfound joy was replaced by a kind of anxious anticipation, dread of what was around the next hairpin turn on the roller coaster of our lives.
Months passed. Seasons came and went. Mom looked thin and worn out. Dad didn’t smile quite as often. We took turns trying to keep Tommy comfortable and entertained. When he needed oxygen, we sat quietly with him, watching television or reading him a book. Tommy rarely complained when he couldn’t come outside with us to play. His spirit was remarkable.
Then, one day, like an unexpected gift from above, things flip-flopped. After years of the same discouraging news, we got a reprieve. Newer, more comprehensive tests determined that my little brother did not have cystic fibrosis at all but rather acute asthma. Within months of proper treatment, Tommy began to flourish like any other four-year-old. Finally, he could come outside and play with the rest of us. I believe it was then that my parents decided the time was right to adopt the family’s first pet. We could pick up where we had left off. It was the celebration of Tommy’s rebirth.
We weren’t a family with much disposable income. Raising five children on a nurse’s and a machine foreman’s salaries meant we had to watch every penny. So, we weren’t exactly in the market for a pedigree pup. We needed a charity case, a lost pup who needed us as badly as we needed her. As luck would have it, a neighborhood family had just announced at Sunday mass that their dog, which was of no distinct lineage, had just given birth to five puppies. Fortune, it seemed, after years of scowling, had smiled upon us a second time in a week.
Our family meeting after church was nothing short of a summit of great minds and varied opinions on how to pick the perfect pup in the litter. We all had our various screening criteria, but our carefully calculated calibration theories went out the window the moment the puppies charged us, swarming across the plush green lawn like honeybees in search of the sweetest flower. The game was on. The score was even. There were five of them and five of us. One adorable puppy for each. But which one would we take home? It was impossible to choose.
Finally, the runt of the litter flopped down at my feet and looked up at me with loving, mournful eyes. She had silky blond fur, a black snout, and a tail that curled up like a donut. I loved her instantly.
“I think we should call her Flop,” I said, knowing we had found our puppy. And somehow, the puppy knew it too. Flop looked up at me, as i
f to say, Enough inspecting; I’m perfect. You know it as well as I do, so take me home already! We all looked at each other; everyone else knew, too. Flop was our dog. No voting required. My oldest brother, Mike, carried Flop home in a large box. We laughed at how quickly we had picked the puppy’s name, realizing we had deprived ourselves of a moment of family bickering at its finest. Our family had a brand-new member.
Having a puppy around the house was like extra gravy on your mashed potatoes. I was crazy about Flop, and I wasn’t alone. We all loved her, and soon so did the whole neighborhood. Flop had a calm, nurturing temperament that fit in perfectly with our raucous group of seven. It was as if she had been custom created just for us. Flop would curl up in my armpit and rest her nose on my cheek, as my heart melted. She loved to ride in the car on family trips, tear around the little league field while my father coached, or follow me around on my bike. She memorized my brothers’ paper routes, striking up friendships with anyone along the way, including the mayor. Our less-than-pedigree pup had become the town mascot.
Flop conquered us all with her instinctual understanding of what each of us needed at any given moment, and she always, without fail, delivered in full. When Flop was three years old, my father had his first massive heart attack. True to form, Flop sensed how much he needed her. During his long days home from work as he recovered, she never left his side. My dad and his faithful companion would walk to the mailbox together and then around the neighborhood. She would bring him the mail or just cozy up next to him on the sofa while he watched All in the Family or the news. Flop understood that what my dad needed most was somebody to keep him company.
One terrible summer afternoon, while she was delivering newspapers with my brothers, a truck hit Flop, killing her instantly. I felt like I had lost a part of my heart. I had loved her with my soul. I was afraid I would never stop crying. For weeks, my brothers barely spoke. Dad couldn’t open the mail without tearing up. Mom left Flop’s food and water bowl where they had always been for over a month. My sister, Carol, and I picked fresh flowers from our yard weekly and placed them on her small grave until the first frost set in. The mayor of our town was so upset at Flop’s passing that he offered to buy us a new dog when we were ready. We were inconsolable.
During the nine years we were lucky enough to have Flop, she had become a beloved member of our family, as well as a member of just about every family in town. She taught me and everyone she came into contact with some of the most important lessons in life: that sometimes the unluckiest breaks in the world can turn out to be the luckiest, that the healing power of unconditional love is infinite, and that the simple act of being together and caring for each other through good times and bad are some of the universe’s very best medicines.
From the day we lost Flop, I dreamed of her often and wondered if I would ever have another animal in my life whom I would love and who would love me as much. In true flip-flop fashion, it would take another streak of really bad luck to find out the answer to that question.
This is the story of our beloved family rabbit, Bunny Boy, who suffered more indignities than any rabbit ought to have (including spending the first part of his life saddled with the name Fluffett), but whose bravery and joie de vivre taught us more than a thing or two about how to live life to its fullest.
Chapter 1
We weren’t old but we weren’t young; we weren’t rich but we weren’t poor. We hadn’t realized all of our dreams, but we’d seen more than a few come true and a few others dashed. We had come pretty far, but we still had some way to go. We were, in fact, right smack dab in the middle.
It was January 2001. My oldest child, Julie, was starting middle school, ready to jump into adolescence with both feet. Our accident-prone youngest, Chris, was about to make his first communion and had gone almost a whole year without needing stitches somewhere on his body—a new record. Ward, my husband, was in the middle of a merger that would quadruple the scale of his law practice. And I, at forty years of age, was in the middle of a remission from a mixed connective tissue disease and fibromyalgia, a remission long enough to let me hope that maybe it would last forever. Somehow, the Laracys had reached a place where life had come into perfect balance. And so, of course, I had to rock the boat.
It started with a simple conversation, as complicated things often do. It was a discussion my husband and I were both familiar with. We’d had it successfully twice before, so I saw no reason why anything should go differently this time. We had somewhat agreed from the start that we would have four kids. And while it was true that my illness had put things on hold, I was better now and didn’t see why we shouldn’t pick up right where we left off.
“Ward,” I said, sitting down next to him by a roaring fire after the kids had finally gone to bed, “I want another baby, honey.” Ward made a feeble attempt not to look shocked but failed miserably.
“Do you think that’s wise with your health?” Ward’s tone told me that this was purely a rhetorical question; to him, I must have been out of my mind to suggest such a thing after what I’d been through.
“I feel strong now,” I said confidently, but Ward wasn’t buying it.
“Nance, I don’t think it’s a good idea,” he said. I was startled at the resolution in his voice. He meant business. I suddenly felt my jaw set in the way it does when the iron will I inherited from my Irish mother starts to make itself known.
“Ward, you can’t just tell me no more babies. That would be like me saying to you that you can’t practice law any more. I’m a mom. I’m a nurturer. This is what I love to do. You can’t just say no like that.”
“No, Nancy. We have enough on our plate.” Ward was sympathetic but firm. “It’s just too much, for all of us. Let’s enjoy what we have.”
And that’s when I started to get mad.
Of course, I knew Ward was probably right. I had been in remission for a while, but there was no guarantee that it would last. My life was a roller coaster—it always had been, a series of unexpected twists and plunges since I was young. I could never be completely sure what was around the next bend.
When I was twenty-two, my dad died suddenly of a heart attack on his fifty-eighth birthday. Nothing could have prepared me for the sudden and profound loss of my father. Life seemed to crumble in front of me. My unwavering faith encountered a bump in the road. My emotions fluctuated from shock to grief to anger, and back to shock. The tears gushed like a mountain stream after a winter thaw, raging their way from the peak to the valley below, and I began to reach out to God in a way I never had before, in order to deal with the strength of the current. While I had shared with Dad a piece of his birthday cake earlier that fateful evening, I was not with him when he died.
A week after he left us, Dad appeared to me while I was sitting at my desk in my bedroom. He and two white angels slowly glided toward me like fog coming over the mountain. I recall my body freezing, and I felt damp and cold.
He spoke to me softly. “Everything is going to be okay. I am fine now.”
How could Dad possibly think everything was going to be fine? I had lost my rock. I wanted to speak to him, but no words came to my shivering lips. My father’s blue eyes seemed brighter than I remembered. They were filled with joy—not the sorrow or fear I had seen so many times when he was in the hospital with his first heart attacks. Suddenly, warmth swept through me as my father lightly placed his arms around my shoulders. I felt as if I had been wrapped in a large cape made of cotton candy. It was a miraculous, spiritual moment I will never forget, a pivotal point in my life. It was then that I established my own adult relationship with God.
The months and years that followed my father’s death were bittersweet. I missed his stability and good advice, but most of all his love. I moved forward with my studies, later meeting the challenges of an exciting career in executive recruiting. I met my first love, Ward; and when he finished law school, we married. Walking down the aisle on my brother Tommy’s arm to meet my future husban
d, I glanced up toward the stained glass windows in the church I considered my home and felt my father’s presence, watching over me from above.
More years than I would like to admit sped by, and suddenly I found myself as a stay-at-home mother with a beautiful child. During the third trimester of my fourth pregnancy (I had had two back-to-back miscarriages), we sold our first home, a sixties-style lake house forty minutes outside of New York City, and bought a larger house with oodles of character in an affluent neighborhood in northern New Jersey. I gave birth to our second bundle of joy by Caesarean section. With a six-week-old baby in one arm and a three-year-old toddler in the other, I packed endless boxes and moved into our Georgian side-door colonial. The years that followed were a blur.
Then, while I was hurtling through life full throttle, harsh reality stopped me dead in my tracks. A virus—parvovirus B19—struck when I was thirty-seven years old and wreaked havoc on my body for over a year, specifically my immune system, weakening it and causing a “glitch” in its normal operations. I developed a connective tissue disease—and then fibromyalgia about a year later. There was no cure for either disease. My connective tissue disease essentially meant that my body had not yet decided what I had—lupus or rheumatoid arthritis. Fibromyalgia, once thought to be rheumatism of the muscles, at least when I was first diagnosed, is now thought to be a disease of the central nervous system where the nerves in your body misfire. It is believed to be caused by a chronic infection, like the one I had, or a physical injury, emotional trauma, or chronic stress. In my case, parvovirus B19 was the etiological agent for my fibromyalgia.
In a strange way, I felt grateful that I never had to live with the stigma often associated with fibromyalgia. In my case, I fell sick so acutely and quickly from parvovirus B19 that, within a week of contracting the virus, I went from managing two children and a household to being nearly crippled with arthritis in all my joints and plagued with high fevers. In contrast to my very visible pain, most fibromyalgia patients typically develop pain slowly over the years from emotional stress or multiple traumas. As a result, they often find themselves having to answer to other people’s skepticism about their pain—is it all real? Sadly, you cannot always see the pain associated with fibromyalgia, save for extreme cases where patients finds themselves bedridden. Patients often hear the words, “But you look fine,” despite the agony they may feel. The invisible nature of fibromyalgia can be emotionally devastating.