by Nick Trout
Bess was in my arms, lost to a place where well-fed fat bellies and sleep rule. I watched as my mother crouched down and slowly lowered the contents of her blanket (which I noticed were covered in patches of milky puke) to the carpeted floor.
“Here you go,” she said, beaming in a way that was so surprising, so unexpected, it was all the more affecting. “Here’s Whiskey.”
And out trotted a golden retriever.
Whiskey was male, twelve weeks old and, to my way of thinking, more blond than golden. He too was christened by my father, on the basis of his most obvious traits.
“He was soft, gold, and had plenty of spirit.”
Unfortunately, the term spirit was being applied to behavior that most people would define as destructive or willful. Whiskey was endowed with a dangerous combination of good looks, rolls of squishy, cherubic puppy fat, unlimited tail-wagging charm, and a drive that kept him pushing forward, stopping at nothing when it came to inappropriate chewing, brawling with Bess, and general domestic destruction. He quickly asserted himself as the alpha to Bess’s beta, and you can get a sense of his curb appeal if I tell you that at our first meeting even Fiona rushed forward, picked him up, and cradled him in her arms, applying a lipstick bindi, a red third eye in the center of his broad golden forehead.
Hindsight is like an annoying colleague who always speaks up after the fact, tapping you on the shoulder with a cocky smile, a knowing look, and the phrase “Told you so.” Hopefully we learn from hindsight for the next time because, by definition, the time for its usefulness has already passed. Now, having spoken to a number of animal behaviorists, I know that some of Whiskey’s “spirited” personality traits were related to his age at the time of his adoption. Bad habits in puppies can already be deep-seated at eight weeks. They are by no means irreversible, but by twelve weeks the window of opportunity for meaningful correction is already beginning to close. These days, it’s unusual to pick up a puppy as late as three months from a reputable dog breeder. My father, a man with a less than stellar track record when it came to dog training and socialization, was already, unwittingly, behind the curve.
Whiskey required constant puppy patrol. We always had to be ready with a paper towel, and alert to possible household hazards—electric cables, telephone cords, VCR tapes, potted plants, the list goes on and on. Sure, I did my share of prying tiny teeth off chair and table legs, fed Bess and Whiskey, and shooed them into the backyard, eager to gush over a timely and appropriately placed bowel movement, but I was distracted by the academic demands of high school, given what I would need to achieve in order to have a shot at veterinary school.
“Feel free to give Bess or Whiskey the once-over whenever you want to get some practice,” said Dad. This was the first time he had used the term once-over and it would not be the last. I think Dad put it out there as something I might enjoy doing, good preparation, a useful learning experience. But part of me felt as though I now had an obligation, a new role to fulfill as his personal veterinarian. I had observed Ryan James performing his ritualistic physical exam dozens of times and Dad glowed as I tried to mimic his routine. I didn’t own a stethoscope, not that I would have known what I was listening to, but I could pry open their mouths, squeeze their bellies, and bicycle their limbs. Bess and Whiskey were in perpetual motion, running, squirming in my hands, resistant and mouthy. I didn’t know what I was doing, what I was feeling for, what was normal and what was not. For me it was an exercise in futility, but though my dad said nothing, the glint in his eyes told me he liked what he saw and, more important, what it would surely mean for the dogs in his future.
Whiskey had been with us for less than two weeks when the woman formerly known as my mother struck again.
“I’m going to take Whiskey to school with me. The kids are dying to see him and so is Mrs. Peacock.”
Mrs. Peacock was the school’s headmistress and if Mrs. Peacock and the kids knew about Whiskey, Mum must have been bragging about how impossibly cute and chubby and cuddly he was. The aliens had done a fine job.
Dad looked worried.
“I’m not so sure that’s a good idea. He’s not finished with his shots. I spoke to Mr. James and he suggests keeping them both away from other dogs and people who have dogs until he’s fully vaccinated.”
“Oh, Duncan, don’t be so silly, he’ll be fine.”
And with that she headed off to her car with a golden fur ball tucked under her arm.
We thought no more of it. Later Mum came home from her day at work sporting something akin to a golden retriever bounce in her stride, working hard not to gloat over all the admiration her choice of dog had reaped. Whiskey, on the other hand, seemed beat, content but exhausted after, what for him, must have been a big day, handling his fans, working crowds, and delivering pleasantries.
Two days later I was about to head out to school when we saw the first sign of trouble.
“Careful,” I said, reaching for a paper towel. “Which one of them has thrown up?”
Someone had deposited a silver-dollar-sized dollop of frothy, yellow-green vomit on the kitchen linoleum.
“I’m pretty sure it’s Whiskey,” said Dad and I noticed how he had instinctively turned down the decibels.
“Really,” I said. “Do you think it has something to do with his trip to …?”
Mum walked into the kitchen.
“What?” she said.
Dad and I were clearly busted, so I came clean. “Dad thinks Whiskey is throwing up because you took him with you to your school.”
I grinned. Dad grimaced.
“Oh, it’s probably nothing,” replied Mum. “You used to throw up at the drop of a hat. I’m sure Whiskey will be fine.”
If Mum was worried about being even remotely responsible for Whiskey’s first brush with sickness, she hid it well and to be fair, the fat little fellow seemed relatively chirpy. It wasn’t until I came home from school that I saw reality take a bite out of her apparent indifference.
“Mum, what’s wrong?”
I’d walked through the front door to find Mum speaking into the phone, tears drying on her cheek. Her mouth moved, emitting a slow series of yeses and noes, but the words weren’t connected to the panic dancing in her eyes.
“Thank you,” she said, and hung up. Mechanically she turned to face me.
“Whiskey is at the vet’s. That was Mr. James. He says Whiskey needs emergency surgery. Right now!”
5.
The Weight of Healing
The news went from bad to worse. It turned out Dad had checked in on Whiskey at lunchtime, found him listless and unresponsive, and rushed him straight over to see Ryan James. In different circumstances, office manager Arthur Stone might have quipped over the novelty of my father failing to create chaos in the waiting room with one of his pets, but any temptation to say something impish vanished as soon as he saw the pathetic creature Dad carried in his arms.
“He’s dehydrated, Duncan,” said James. “He’s got a fever and his belly’s very tender to the touch. Any chance he got into anything he shouldn’t?”
Dad thought about the house, the ever-present possibility that an inquisitive puppy could get into trouble if he or she tried hard enough. And then he thought about the trip to the school. Who knew what Whiskey might have gotten into in a kindergarten classroom?
“Don’t know,” he said. “Don’t think so.”
Ryan James must have noticed the hesitation, the uncertainty. He backed up from the examination table on which Whiskey lay wrapped in a towel, unresponsive to his touch.
“Leave him with me. He needs some intravenous fluids and I’m going to want to take an X-ray of his abdomen. See if there’s anything amiss inside.”
A couple of hours later, Mum received a phone call telling her Whiskey’s X-rays appeared to confirm that he had swallowed a ball.
“You can see it in his stomach,” said James. “I’m pretty sure that’s why he keeps being sick. The only way to get it out is surg
ery. And it’s not going to be easy putting him under anesthesia. He’s very weak and he’s very young but I don’t think we have much choice.”
Mum had given her consent. James promised to call back when it was over. There was nothing left to do but wait, and—though Mum, Dad, Fiona, and I never said it out loud—pray.
There is no end to nightmare scenarios that will leave a surgeon breathless: operating on the wrong patient; operating on the wrong leg; operating only to find there is nothing to find.
They call this last one the “negative exploratory,” as if, by giving it a label, we can put some kind of a positive spin on an event that might otherwise be perceived as a disaster.
Invariably, it is nobody’s fault. You take an X-ray and see something is clearly wrong with the intestines—a corn cob or a peach pit blocking a loop of small intestine. You take the dog to surgery and by the time you open your patient up, the obstruction has moved on, disappeared into the large intestine, the colon, from which it will be dispatched by the patient without a hitch. Time to call the owner and try to explain how the surgery turned out to be unnecessary.
Even in this era of fiber-optic endoscopy, our ability to insert a camera into the body and have a Fantastic Voyage–style look-see is restricted to only a small fraction of the very upper or lower portions of the gut. Sometimes veterinarians are forced to make a judgment call based on the limited available information, essentially what they see and feel, and faced with a deteriorating situation, they need to act, even if they risk being wrong.
I never saw the actual X-ray that sent Whiskey under the knife but I have a pretty good idea of what it looked like. Angle the X-ray beam just so, place the patient in a certain position, get the correct amount of fluid or solid in the outflow portion of the stomach (the area called the pylorus), and in cross-section a tube becomes a round, opaque structure identical to a solid ball. If this was what Ryan James saw when he held up his black-and-white image to the light, he was not the first to get it wrong, and not the last. In fact, he was probably one of hundreds, if not thousands, of veterinarians who, during this era, were seeing puppies succumbing to a mysterious, aggressive, and debilitating malady that frequently began with vomiting. These dogs were undergoing exploratory surgery and the veterinarians were finding distended, gassy loops of bowel and generalized intestinal inflammation, but nothing specific to account for the sickness. In many cases, if they had only waited a few more hours as the clinical signs progressed, they would have had their answer and a needless surgery would have been avoided.
Sometimes it feels like new diseases are a godsend for today’s media, an opportunity to generate fear and redeem a slow or silly news day. SARS, chicken flu, swine flu, whatever the next pandemic scare, you can guarantee the twenty-four-hour news networks will be busy working on ways to make you panic and believe the apocalypse is happening now. On the whole, veterinary medicine doesn’t pack the same media punch as its human counterpart, so back in 1978 the discovery of a new virus called canine parvovirus gained little attention. It took several years before this highly contagious virus got busy with Britain’s canine population, but when it did, it had a field day, spreading easily by direct contact and indirectly via dog poop. At the time there was no vaccine, no herd immunity against an aggressive virus ready to attack a virginal unprotected canine population. Our Whiskey was destined to be one of Ryan James’s first cases.
It is not the fever or the vomiting that clues the clinician in to a case of parvovirus, it is the bloody diarrhea. Sometimes it can take a while for the virus to have its way with the lining of the guts but once it does, what comes out of these wretched creatures is unique. Veterinarians, nurses, and kennel staff the world over will tell you nothing, and I mean nothing, smells quite like the stench of a dog with parvovirus diarrhea.
“It’s not a ball in his stomach after all,” said James, speaking to my father via telephone. “It’s a new disease called parvovirus. I’m pretty sure of it. He broke with a horrible case of diarrhea.”
“Can you treat it?”
“Not really. There’s nothing we can actually do to stop the virus. The disease has to run its course. All we can do is provide intravenous fluids, stop him from getting dehydrated, and give him antibiotics to offset the possibility of infection.”
Dad looked up, saw Mum and I hanging on every word of this one-sided conversation. He deliberated for a moment before asking, “Where would he have got it from?”
I felt Mum bristle next to me.
“Other dogs. The environment. From what I understand, the virus is tough and resilient, able to hang out in contaminated fecal material for a year, maybe more. Get it on your shoe and who knows how far it will spread. We’re only just starting to see cases in the UK. This is the tip of the iceberg.”
Dad had to sense Mum straining to overhear the answer. He closed his eyes and shook his head as if to let her know this had nothing to do with her. If he wondered about the day trip to school or the recent acquisition of Bess, a dog of unknown provenance, he never mentioned it out loud.
“What are his chances?”
Ryan James came straight back at him.
“I’ll be honest, Duncan, they’re not great. Untreated it is almost always fatal. I’m hoping we got to him soon enough to give the little man a fair shot. The next few days will be critical.”
This was the line my father delivered—uncertainty, an uphill battle, but there was still a chance. The cost of all this care was never mentioned. Why would it be? Whiskey had been with us for little more than a week but he was already family.
For the next few days my father was our conduit to a drama playing out in a small cage, in a small veterinary hospital a couple of miles away. An innocent creature had been taken down by an invisible killer, attacking him from the inside out, sucking the life from a dog who wanted nothing more than to play and engage and be happy. Dad spoke to Ryan James at least twice a day, sometimes more, getting an update, riding the emotional seesaw of a disease that kept you bracing for the worst and hoping for the best. The hospital was not a twenty-four-hour facility, but Ryan James would check on Whiskey in the middle of the night, make sure his fluids were running on time, change the bloody and soiled bedding, dropper some fresh water into his dry and parched mouth. Dad even had James’s unlisted home phone number and was invited to call for a final update every night before bed.
That week all of us were on tenterhooks every time the phone rang and then one morning a call came in before I left for school. We were all gathered in the kitchen when Fiona picked it up.
“Just one minute please,” she said. And then, “Dad, it’s for you. It’s Ryan James.”
Ryan had never called at this early hour. In fact it was always the other way round, Dad calling him.
Reluctantly Dad picked up the handset and, as if he already knew what he was going to be told, he braced for the worst, his words softening, decelerating before they fell out of his mouth.
“Yes. Yes. Yes. I understand. This afternoon. Yes. Thank you for everything.”
It must have been the state of shock overwhelming his speech, because he looked up and was taken aback when he saw the angst and disappointment written all over our faces. Only then did he smile and realize his mistake.
“It’s okay. He’s rallied. Whiskey’s going to be fine. Mr. James says we can pick him up this afternoon.”
The news of Whiskey’s recovery instantly erased the pall that had hung over all of us. I’m not suggesting there was fist-pumping or high fives or that Duncan cracked open the champagne. But it was definitely more than relief. It felt as though we could finally allow ourselves to let this dog into our hearts and imagine a future with him.
Dad and I drove over to Ryan’s practice, thrilled to be reclaiming our golden retriever, having not seen him for over a week.
Nothing could have prepared us for what we found when we got there. We hadn’t known Whiskey for very long, but the Whiskey we had first met, the
chubby, love-handled, boisterous, fresh, golden ball of terror, was gone. He was no more. In his place was a gangly, leggy, dazed, and tentative creature that bore him no resemblance whatsoever. In the moment he wobbled into the waiting room to greet us I saw how close we had come to losing him, how beating parvovirus had sapped every ounce of energy and fight this ballsy little puppy possessed. All that was left was a golden husk still in need of significant nursing to get him back to full strength.
“I didn’t think he was going to make it, Duncan,” said James. “But one thing’s for sure about this new dog of yours, he’s a lion-hearted little fellow. No two ways about it.”
And as Dad pumped Ryan’s hand, I witnessed a mixture of gratitude and pride welling up in my father’s eyes, triggered by the shock of what his dog had become, and by the fitting label “lion-hearted little fellow.”
Here, for the first time, in this moment, it seemed all so personal, this business of healing pets, the way veterinary medicine can have such a profound effect on both humans and animals. Naturally, hanging out with James, I had observed the response of countless grateful owners, but here, with everything so close, with my dad and Ryan James, it was as if I could straddle both sides of the doctor–patient relationship, breathe in the sense of accomplishment, the power of what James had done, completely tangible and within reach. It was awesome. I just stood there speechless and ate it up.
Lion-hearted little fellow!
It wasn’t long, though, before remnants of the old Whiskey began to resurface—trying to steal Bess’s food, barreling her out of the way in order to be first through an open door, and, as testosterone began to kick in, a tentative experiment in meaningful mounting.
Unfortunately Whiskey’s resurgence coincided with the appearance of some objectionable traits related to male dominance and what worried me most was the way his early brush with death was being used as some sort of a defense for his most unsavory misogynistic behavior. In short, my mum and dad were acting like the ineffective parents of a kid trapped in the terrible twos, crying out for a Supernanny makeover. While I was lost in the nuances of quadratic equations, organic isomers, and Faraday’s law of electromagnetic induction, they were enabling their new “golden” boy to get away with murder. Whiskey may not have possessed the same protective streak as Patch, but his manners were already on a slippery slope, and he was likely to wind up with similar social foibles if we weren’t more careful.