by John Grogan
That night after dinner I brought him out again, and this time Marley no longer could afford the luxury of waiting. He had to go. He nervously paced up and down the cleared walkway, into the potty room and out onto the driveway, sniffing the snow, pawing at the frozen ground. No, this just won’t do. Before I could stop him, he somehow clambered up and over the sheer snow wall the snowblower had cut and began making his way across the yard toward a stand of white pines fifty feet away. I couldn’t believe it; my arthritic, geriatric dog was off on an alpine trek. Every couple of steps his back hips collapsed on him and he sank down into the snow, where he rested on his belly for a few seconds before struggling back to his feet and pushing on. Slowly, painfully, he made his way through the deep snow, using his still-strong front shoulders to pull his body forward. I stood in the driveway, wondering how I was going to rescue him when he finally got stuck and could go no farther. But he trudged on and finally made it to the closest pine tree. Suddenly I saw what he was up to. The dog had a plan. Beneath the dense branches of the pine, the snow was just a few inches deep. The tree acted like an umbrella, and once underneath it Marley was free to move about and squat comfortably to relieve himself. I had to admit, it was pretty brilliant. He circled and sniffed and scratched in his customary way, trying to locate a worthy shrine for his daily offering. Then, to my amazement, he abandoned the cozy shelter and lunged back into the deep snow en route to the next pine tree. The first spot looked perfect to me, but clearly it was just not up to his sterling standards.
With difficulty he reached the second tree, but again, after considerable circling, found the area beneath its branches unsuitable. So he set off to the third tree, and then the fourth and the fifth, each time getting farther from the driveway. I tried calling him back, though I knew he couldn’t hear me. “Marley, you’re going to get stuck, you dumbo!” I yelled. He just plowed ahead with single-minded determination. The dog was on a quest. Finally, he reached the last tree on our property, a big spruce with a dense canopy of branches out near where the kids waited for the school bus. It was here he found the frozen piece of ground he had been looking for, private and barely dusted with snow. He circled a few times and creakily squatted down on his old, shot, arthritis-riddled haunches. There he finally found relief. Eureka!
With mission accomplished, he set off on the long journey home. As he struggled through the snow, I waved my arms and clapped my hands to encourage him. “Keep coming, boy! You can make it!” But I could see him tiring, and he still had a long way to go. “Don’t stop now!” I yelled. A dozen yards from the driveway, that’s just what he did. He was done. He stopped and lay down in the snow, exhausted. Marley did not exactly look distressed, but he didn’t look at ease, either. He shot me a worried look. Now what do we do, boss? I had no idea. I could wade through the snow to him, but then what? He was too heavy for me to pick up and carry. For several minutes I stood there, calling and cajoling, but Marley wouldn’t budge.
“Hang on,” I said. “Let me get my boots on and I’ll come get you.” It had dawned on me that I could wrestle him up onto the toboggan and pull him back to the house. As soon as he saw me approaching with the toboggan, my plan became moot. He jumped up, reenergized. The only thing I could think was that he remembered our infamous ride into the woods and over the creek bank and was hoping for a repeat. He lurched forward toward me like a dinosaur in a tar pit. I waded out into the snow, stomping down a path for him as I went, and he inched ahead. Finally we scrambled over the snowbank and onto the driveway together. He shook the snow off and banged his tail against my knees, prancing about, all frisky and cocky, flush with the bravado of an adventurer just back from a jaunt through uncharted wilderness. To think, I had doubted he could do it.
The next morning I shoveled a narrow path out to the far spruce tree on the corner of the property for him, and Marley adopted the space as his own personal powder room for the duration of the winter. The crisis had been averted, but bigger questions loomed. How much longer could he continue like this? And at what point would the aches and indignities of old age outstrip the simple contentment he found in each sleepy, lazy day?
CHAPTER 25
Beating the Odds
W hen school let out for the summer, Jenny packed the kids into the minivan and headed to Boston for a week to visit her sister. I stayed behind to work. That left Marley with no one at home to keep him company and let him out. Of the many little embarrassments old age inflicted on him, the one that seemed to bother him most was the diminished control he had over his bowels. For all Marley’s bad behavior over the years, his bathroom habits had always been sure-fire. It was the one Marley feature we could brag about. From just a few months of age, he never, ever, had accidents in the house, even when left alone for ten or twelve hours. We joked that his bladder was made of steel and his bowels of stone.
That had changed in recent months. He no longer could go more than a few hours between pit stops. When the urge called, he had to go, and if we were not home to let him out, he had no choice but to go inside. It killed him to do it, and we always knew the second we walked into the house when he had had an accident. Instead of greeting us at the door in his exuberant manner, he would be standing far back in the room, his head hanging nearly to the floor, his tail flat between his legs, the shame radiating off him. We never punished him for it. How could we? He was nearly thirteen, about as old as Labs got. We knew he couldn’t help it, and he seemed to know it, too. I was sure if he could talk, he would profess his humiliation and assure us that he had tried, really tried, to hold it in.
Jenny bought a steam cleaner for the carpet, and we began arranging our schedules to make sure we were not away from the house for more than a few hours at a time. Jenny would rush home from school, where she volunteered, to let Marley out. I would leave dinner parties between the main course and dessert to give him a walk, which, of course, Marley dragged out as long as possible, sniffing and circling his way around the yard. Our friends teasingly wondered aloud who was the real master over at the Grogan house.
With Jenny and the kids away, I knew I would be putting in long days. This was my chance to stay out after work, wandering around the region and exploring the towns and neighborhoods I was now writing about. With my long commute, I would be away from home ten to twelve hours a day. There was no question Marley couldn’t be alone that long, or even half that long. We decided to board him at the local kennel we used every summer when we went on vacation. The kennel was attached to a large veterinarian practice that offered professional care if not the most personal service. Each time we went there, it seemed, we saw a different doctor who knew nothing about Marley except what was printed in his chart. We never even learned their names. Unlike our beloved Dr. Jay in Florida, who knew Marley almost as well as we did and who truly had become a family friend by the time we left, these were strangers—competent strangers but strangers nonetheless. Marley didn’t seem to mind.
“Waddy go doggie camp!” Colleen screeched, and he perked up as though the idea had possibilities. We joked about the activities the kennel staff would have for him: hole digging from 9:00 to 10:00; pillow shredding from 10:15 to 11:00; garbage raiding from 11:05 to noon, and so on. I dropped him off on a Sunday evening and left my cell phone number with the front desk. Marley never seemed to fully relax when he was boarded, even in the familiar surroundings of Dr. Jay’s office, and I always worried a little about him. After each visit, he returned looking gaunter, his snout often rubbed raw from where he had fretted it against the grating of his cage, and when he got home he would collapse in the corner and sleep heavily for hours, as if he had spent the entire time away pacing his cage with insomnia.
That Tuesday morning, I was near Independence Hall in downtown Philadelphia when my cell phone rang. “Could you please hold for Dr. So-and-so?” the woman from the kennel asked. It was yet another veterinarian whose name I had never heard before. A few seconds later the vet came on the phone. “We have an emergenc
y with Marley,” she said.
My heart rose in my chest. “An emergency?”
The vet said Marley’s stomach had bloated with food, water, and air and then, stretched and distended, had flipped over on itself, twisting and trapping its contents. With nowhere for the gas and other contents to escape, his stomach had swelled painfully in a life-threatening condition known as gastric dilatation-volvulus. It almost always required surgery to correct, she said, and if left untreated could result in death within a few hours.
She said she had inserted a tube down his throat and released much of the gas that had built up in his stomach, which relieved the swelling. By manipulating the tube in his stomach, she had worked the twist out of it, or as she put it, “unflipped it,” and he was now sedated and resting comfortably.
“That’s a good thing, right?” I asked cautiously.
“But only temporary,” the doctor said. “We got him through the immediate crisis, but once their stomachs twist like that, they almost always will twist again.”
“Like how almost always?” I asked.
“I would say he has a one percent chance that it won’t flip again,” she said. One percent? For God’s sake, I thought, he has better odds of getting into Harvard.
“One percent? That’s it?”
“I’m sorry,” she said. “It’s very grave.”
If his stomach did flip again—and she was telling me it was a virtual certainty—we had two choices. The first was to operate on him. She said she would open him up and attach the stomach to the cavity wall with sutures to prevent it from flipping again. “The operation will cost about two thousand dollars,” she said. I gulped. “And I have to tell you, it’s very invasive. It will be tough going for a dog his age.” The recovery would be long and difficult, assuming he made it through the operation at all. Sometimes older dogs like him did not survive the trauma of the surgery, she explained.
“If he was four or five years old, I would be saying by all means let’s operate,” the vet said. “But at his age, you have to ask yourself if you really want to put him through that.”
“Not if we can help it,” I said. “What’s the second option?”
“The second option,” she said, hesitating only slightly, “would be putting him to sleep.”
“Oh,” I said.
I was having trouble processing it all. Five minutes ago I was walking to the Liberty Bell, assuming Marley was happily relaxing in his kennel run. Now I was being asked to decide whether he should live or die. I had never even heard of the condition she described. Only later would I learn that bloat was fairly common in some breeds of dogs, especially those, such as Marley, with deep barrel chests. Dogs who scarfed down their entire meal in a few quick gulps—Marley, once again—also seemed to be at higher risk. Some dog owners suspected the stress of being in a kennel could trigger bloat, but I later would see a professor of veterinarian medicine quoted as saying his research showed no connection between kennel stress and bloat. The vet on the phone acknowledged Marley’s excitement around the other dogs in the kennel could have brought on the attack. He had gulped down his food as usual and was panting and salivating heavily, worked up by all the other dogs around him. She thought he might have swallowed so much air and saliva that his stomach began to dilate on its long axis, making it vulnerable to twisting. “Can’t we just wait and see how he does?” I asked. “Maybe it won’t twist again.”
“That’s what we’re doing right now,” she said, “waiting and watching.” She repeated the one percent odds and added, “If his stomach flips again, I’ll need you to make a quick decision. We can’t let him suffer.”
“I need to speak with my wife,” I told her. “I’ll call you back.”
When Jenny answered her cell phone she was on a crowded tour boat with the kids in the middle of Boston Harbor. I could hear the boat’s engine chugging and the guide’s voice booming through a loudspeaker in the background. We had a choppy, awkward conversation over a bad connection. Neither of us could hear the other well. I shouted to try to communicate what we were up against. She was only getting snippets. Marley…emergency…stomach…surgery…put to sleep.
There was silence on the other end. “Hello?” I said. “Are you still there?”
“I’m here,” Jenny said, then went quiet again. We both knew this day would come eventually; we just did not think it would be today. Not with her and the kids out of town where they couldn’t even have their good-byes; not with me ninety minutes away in downtown Philadelphia with work commitments. By the end of the conversation, through shouts and blurts and pregnant pauses, we decided there was really no decision at all. The vet was right. Marley was fading on all fronts. It would be cruel to put him through a traumatic surgery to simply try to stave off the inevitable. We could not ignore the high cost, either. It seemed obscene, almost immoral, to spend that kind of money on an old dog at the end of his life when there were unwanted dogs put down every day for lack of a home, and more important, children not getting proper medical attention for lack of financial resources. If this was Marley’s time, then it was his time, and we would see to it he went out with dignity and without suffering. We knew it was the right thing, yet neither of us was ready to lose him.
I called the veterinarian back and told her our decision. “His teeth are rotted away, he’s stone-deaf, and his hips have gotten so bad he can barely get up the porch stoop anymore,” I told her as if she needed convincing. “He’s having trouble squatting to have a bowel movement.”
The vet, whom I now knew as Dr. Hopkinson, made it easy on me. “I think it’s time,” she said.
“I guess so,” I answered, but I didn’t want her to put him down without calling me first. I wanted to be there with him if possible. “And,” I reminded her, “I’m still holding out for that one percent miracle.”
“Let’s talk in an hour,” she said.
An hour later Dr. Hopkinson sounded slightly more optimistic. Marley was still holding his own, resting with an intravenous drip in his front leg. She raised his odds to five percent. “I don’t want you to get your hopes up,” she said. “He’s a very sick dog.”
The next morning the doctor sounded brighter still. “He had a good night,” she said. When I called back at noon, she had removed the IV from his paw and started him on a slurry of rice and meat. “He’s famished,” she reported. By the next call, he was up on his feet. “Good news,” she said. “One of our techs just took him outside and he pooped and peed.” I cheered into the phone as though he had just taken Best in Show. Then she added: “He must be feeling better. He just gave me a big sloppy kiss on the lips.” Yep, that was our Marley.
“I wouldn’t have thought it possible yesterday,” the doc said, “but I think you’ll be able to take him home tomorrow.” The following evening after work, that’s just what I did. He looked terrible—weak and skeletal, his eyes milky and crusted with mucus, as if he had been to the other side of death and back, which in a sense I guess he had. I must have looked a little ill myself after paying the eight-hundred-dollar bill. When I thanked the doctor for her good work, she replied, “The whole staff loves Marley. Everyone was rooting for him.”
I walked him out to the car, my ninety-nine-toone-odds miracle dog, and said, “Let’s get you home where you belong.” He just stood there looking woefully into the backseat, knowing it was as unattainable as Mount Olympus. He didn’t even try to hop in. I called to one of the kennel workers, who helped me gingerly lift him into the car, and I drove him home with a box of medicines and strict instructions. Marley would never again gulp a huge meal in one sitting, or slurp unlimited amounts of water. His days of playing submarine with his snout in the water bowl were over. From now on, he was to receive four small meals a day and only limited rations of water—a half cup or so in his bowl at a time. In this way, the doctor hoped, his stomach would stay calm and not bloat and twist again. He also was never again to be boarded in a large kennel surrounded by barking, pacing dogs
. I was convinced, and Dr. Hopkinson seemed to be, too, that that had been the precipitating factor in his close call with death.
That night, after I got him home and inside, I spread a sleeping bag on the floor in the family room beside him. He was not up to climbing the stairs to the bedroom, and I didn’t have the heart to leave him alone and helpless. I knew he would fret all night if he was not at my side. “We’re having a sleepover, Marley!” I proclaimed, and lay down next to him. I stroked him head to tail until huge clouds of fur rolled off his back. I wiped the mucus from the corners of his eyes and scratched his ears until he moaned with pleasure. Jenny and the kids would be home in the morning; she would pamper him with frequent minimeals of boiled hamburger and rice. It had taken him thirteen years, but Marley had finally merited people food, not leftovers but a stovetop meal made just for him. The children would throw their arms around him, unaware of how close they had come to never seeing him again.