Ever by My Side

by Nick Trout

  There can be few things more unpleasant than waking up to the pungent aroma of puppy diarrhea and trying to scoop a brown and sloppy liquid into plastic shopping bags while working your way through mounds of paper towels and Lysol. And it was everywhere, as though Meg had thought it might be less noticeable if she had spread it around the kitchen island, under the kitchen table, and in front of the back door. When I was finished I had two bags precariously full of biohazard and I didn’t want to touch anything with my hands for fear of contamination.

  My plan had been to double-bag my collection, toss it in the trash in the garage, go check out Meg, and keep her away from food for the morning, giving her GI tract a break. Later, she could have something bland for dinner, maybe scrambled egg and rice or boiled chicken and rice. But to my horror, Meg had decided to find an alternative breakfast. She had correctly assumed that her usual dry food was off the menu and had therefore gone for the only alternative readily available, one of her own backyard turds!

  There I stood in my boxers at the back door, diarrhea-laden bags in hand, screaming her name to absolutely no avail. I couldn’t put the bags down. What if they leaked? What if they toppled over? Only one thing to do: run outside, carrying the bags, and shoo Meg away from the breakfast of champions.

  I’m pretty sure that if what followed had been recorded on video and downloaded onto YouTube, it would have gone viral overnight. You see, it wasn’t that I slipped or tripped, it was the fact that I was charging toward Meg, trying to make her stop by swinging one of the bags in her direction, only to find her focused if not mesmerized by her prize, holding her ground, remaining perfectly still as the bag bumped into her back end and, like a brown paint bomb, exploded, covering me with an enormous splash of the diarrhea I had just finished cleaning up.

  It had the desired effect. Meg did desist from eating a stale poop. In fact she skittered away from the paralyzed, half-naked man who looked as if he had just emerged from a mud-wrestling contest.

  “God damn it, Meg!”

  “What’s going on?”

  The question came from Kathy, who stood at the back door in a bathrobe, coffee cup in hand, and in that speechless moment, I could see her trying to fathom the scene, her husband wandering the backyard in his underwear, his face a pinched mask of revulsion, and what on earth was he doing with those plastic bags?

  Meg trotted over to greet her, apparently seeking the sanctuary of a sane member of the family, and like the Swamp Thing or the Creature from the Brown Lagoon, I inched my stiff body toward them, wincing with every slick, squishy crease in my joints, trying to hold my breath.

  “I can explain,” I said, hearing the whine for vindication in my voice.

  But Kathy was petting a remarkably unsullied Meg, and to my horror, for an instant, I thought I saw the two of them staring back at me, unified by their disgust, appalled by my unhygienic indecency, as though they were in collusion, as though, as I advanced, this crafty Labrador had whispered, “How do you live with this guy?”

  I have heard it said, “Never trust a veterinarian who doesn’t own a pet.” I’m not sure I agree with this observation, but I will say, having a pet of your own does offer the veterinarian a different perspective, a view from the other side of the examination table, if you will. Sometimes, spending your working days with other people’s cats and dogs can feel a bit like being a tourist in a far-off capital city. Sure, you tick off the major sites, you get a taste for what it is like, but ultimately the experience can only ever be superficial, a taste, a smattering of the highlights. Having your own pets is like living in this foreign city for an extended period of time. It is your chance to integrate, to immerse yourself and discover all the fine details, all the magic you might otherwise miss or overlook. There is no shortcut. Buying the T-shirt and mailing off the postcard just isn’t the same.

  One of my biggest failings as a veterinarian who shares his life with cats and dogs at home is a desensitization to their everyday health-care issues. And please, I choose my words carefully. Desensitization is not the same as negligence or avoidance when it comes to looking after the family pets. You can get so caught up in the big stuff at work, you become inattentive to the little stuff at home.

  “Dad, Sophie’s been scooting on the rug for days. When are you going to empty her anal sacs?”

  “Don’t forget to bring the nail clippers home!”

  “What do you mean you never noticed the skin rash on Meg’s belly?”

  I know for a fact, many of my colleagues are a little slow on the uptake when it comes to their own pet’s health. And it’s not just veterinarians. Take my sister, Fiona, and her husband, Pete, a nurse and pediatrician, respectively, who live in Western Australia with their four kids. Recently their eldest, Jack, injured his knee playing Australian rules football. Pete reckoned his son would be fine with a bag of ice and a couple of Advil. It was not until the afternoon of the following day that they finally went to the emergency room, where an orthopedic surgeon remarked, “Your son has one of the most severe knee injuries I’ve seen in twenty years.” If I’d have done the same thing with Meg, the women in my household would have eaten me alive, and using the line Pete employed—“Ah, Nick, we breed ’em tough down under!”—would certainly not have got me off the hook. Thankfully, when it comes to our pets, each and every member of my family provides real-time, in-your-face Post-it notes that will not wane, be silenced, or tuned out until the crisis, however trivial, has been averted or resolved.

  Over the years, relative to so many of my clients, I realize we have been remarkably lucky with respect to our pets’ health. I find myself constantly checking out Meg’s hips, elbows, and knees, ensuring there are no early markers of orthopedic weakness. In fact Meg’s most troubling medical disorder to date resulted from that meddlesome, unstoppable impulse, so rampant among her breed—oral curiosity.

  It occurred shortly after the war-paint-diarrhea incident. With the trash can emptied every night and turned around, making it truly inaccessible, Meg turned elsewhere for relief from her craving for midnight munchies. I imagine she tried the refrigerator in vain. However, one night, among the various kitchen cabinets, Meg discovered a lazy Susan. Unbeknownst to us, the opening to this revolving shelf, unlike the cabinet doors with small porcelain handles, was amenable to a strong, persistent muzzle. To Meg it must have seemed like she had come upon one of those carousel snack-vending machines, only she required no cash and there were no plastic windows holding her back as the samples spun around before her awestruck eyes.

  Unfortunately for Meg, the lazy Susan predominantly stored baking ingredients—flour, baking soda, brown sugar, confectioner’s sugar—most of which were safely sealed inside large plastic containers topped by sturdy lids. Ultimately Meg’s choice of snack may have been dictated by a lack of amenable alternatives or the only unfamiliar olfactory stimulant to her curiosity. Whatever the reason, Meg singled out two items, chewed open their plastic wrappers, and devoured their contents—a two-pound bag of ground coffee and a one-pound bag of semisweet chocolate chips!

  Yes, of course, I realize both items should have been locked away in a dogproof container, but we had seriously underestimated Meg’s oral fixation. Both chocolate (containing the stimulant theobromine) and coffee (naturally packing caffeine) are common household poisons for dogs, with the potential for seizure, coma, and death. If you know or suspect your dog has ingested either item, you should call your veterinarian. And there’s the rub when it came to curious Meg. Those who could help her, those who loved her, including a veterinarian only a matter of vertical feet from where she stood, all slept peacefully, totally unaware of the poisons trying to take hold of her body.

  When I went downstairs the following morning, the absence of Meg’s greeting had me bracing for another trash-can disaster. But what I discovered was very different. Meg stood trembling by the back door and all across the hardwood kitchen floor were lakes of brown vomit.

  Even in his sleepy haze
it didn’t take Sherlock long to discover the remnants of the chocolate-chip and ground-coffee wrappers and realize what had happened.

  “Come here, girl, let’s have a look at you.”

  You know that feeling when you’ve seriously overdone your caffeine habit, that jerky, jumpy, unpleasant shakiness and heightened sensitivity of all your senses. Well, multiply this level of agitation by a factor of ten and you have a rough approximation of where poor Meg was at—the worst trip ever with no chance of relief.

  A few weeks earlier I had seen a ten-week-old pit bull puppy come through Angell’s emergency service with an equally dangerous caffeine-related poisoning albeit from a more palatable source. His owners had passed out drunk in their apartment. They had been working their way through an assortment of beverages during the evening and, clinging to a measure of civility, had opted for a nightcap of Bailey’s Irish Cream. Unfortunately the liquor had a powerful sedative effect, husband and wife falling asleep on the couch, the bottle of Bailey’s toppling over on its side, and the sticky, milky brown liquid pouring from its neck, irresistibly sweet to a curious puppy. For those who have tried the drink, the manufacturers have overpowered the stimulant punch of the coffee flavor with a traditional depressant—alcohol, and plenty of it. The result was a couple of drunks turning up with a drunken puppy who required twenty-four hours of intravenous fluids and supportive care for alcohol toxicity.

  When it came to Meg, I had no idea how long the various toxins had been in her system; however, she had managed to vomit, and based on the amount of artwork scattered across the floor, an awful lot of what she had swallowed had come back up.

  She was trembling and her heart was racing, but her color was good and her pulses strong, and when I listened with a stethoscope I heard no abnormal rhythms or dropped beats.

  “What did you do?”

  Meg tried to look innocent but her eyes were so wild she could only manage manic.

  I let her out into the backyard and she instantly turned into a greyhound, charging around, unable to stop, as though it was a relief to blow off some steam. I began cleaning up the mess in the kitchen. There was no way of knowing if she had purged everything. After vomiting, a dog is supposed to be fed activated charcoal to deactivate the poison. I didn’t have any on hand, but I could get it easily enough. Then again, I wasn’t sure at this stage whether it would make any difference. What to do, what to do? The critics’ corner would be waking up soon. If anything happened to this dog because I provided substandard care there would be hell to pay.

  I went outside to check on the patient. It was a brisk morning and I sensed Meg preferred to be outside, finding the cool air soothing. By now she had transitioned from a relentless gallop to intermittent bursts of energy, zipping across the lawn sprint-stop, sprint-stop, as if she was beginning to calm down but still unable to settle.

  “I’ve got something that will help,” I told her, heading back inside to my “stash” and returning with a sedative. I popped the pill in her mouth.

  “You stay out here and I’ll keep checking on you. I need to make sure you don’t get dehydrated, and that means plenty of water and no more Red Bull, you hear me.”

  She was pathetic, with that look I had seen so many times when Emily was a kid, the pained expression that begs “Please help me.”

  For the rest of the day Meg stayed in the backyard, occasionally darting inside, scrambling for traction on the hardwood floor before bolting back outside. It took a good twenty-four hours for her to come back down and, to some extent, it would have been a whole lot easier to have taken her to work and have her admitted for a day. Emily stood vigil over her dog, her doctor at her beck and call, no variation in her condition too small to necessitate a consult. And there was no way to try sliding past her. I discovered there’s only one thing more dangerous than having your own pet sick—dealing with this sick pet’s owner.

  In the end, I received little to no kudos for my nursing care of Meg.

  “I think Emily blames me for Meg’s caffeine experiment,” I said to Kathy. “And she’s probably right. I mean it’s not as though a dog can suppress her curiosity.”

  Kathy offered another possibility.

  “I think Emily never felt as though her dog was in any real danger. I bet she’d be different if Meg had been snatched from death’s door.”

  Meg was watching us, curled up on her bed, tail beating the floor as I came over to give her a pat.

  “You hear that?” I said. “Next time a little more drama might be helpful if I’m ever going to impress my daughter.”

  Meg just offered me her goofy smile, happy for the physical contact. Soon after, another incident would prove Meg had been listening, confirmation of that most powerful Labrador trait of all—“We aim to please”!

  I have to credit my wife with taking on the biggest burden of living with a Labrador—the provision of adequate exercise. They may not be border collies or Australian cattle dogs or Irish setters, but they can run and run to the degree that you feel like you might never fully satisfy their desire to exercise.

  Over the years I have met a handful of Labrador owners who have astounded me with one confession over all others, that being “My Labrador doesn’t like to swim.” (You really thought I might say, “My Labrador’s never hungry!”) When I think about Meg and water I find it hard to imagine how any relative of hers, regardless of color, would not share the Labrador’s innate ability and desire to swim. They make it look easy, their position in the water low, their movement economical and perfectly natural. Meg views an open body of water, no matter its size, as she does food, the attraction magnetic, irresistible, and steadfast. It could be a paddling pool, swimming pool, or a frozen lake in February—give her access and she will find a way to get her body wet.

  Swimming has become an integral part of Meg’s exercise, though it never felt as though we had much choice. When Meg was a little more than one year old, Kathy took her down the street to walk a footpath next to a large lake near where we live. Naturally, as soon as Meg was off her leash, there were playful forays into the water, little doggy paddles out maybe five or ten yards before turning for shore, followed by a shakedown and a mad dash to catch up before another dip proved irresistible.

  There were no other dogs and no other people around; however, Meg discovered some new and strange aquatic playmates, the likes of which she had never seen before—two majestic adult swans.

  They glided into her peripheral vision from behind some reeds, moving horizontally, keeping their tight formation despite a strong wind whipping up a choppy surface.

  Kathy saw them too late, and saw the yellow blur charging down the bank. With a leap, limited air time, and a booming belly flop, Meg was in the water and paddling their way, eager to introduce herself.

  “Meg. No. Come back, Meg. MEG!”

  At that moment, screaming at Meg to return to shore was about as effective as asking her to chew more slowly, and in her defense, she had no idea who she was up against. The swans saw this lumbering yellow dog advancing toward them, glanced at one another, and set off toward the horizon. I don’t know if swans can be mean spirited, whether they were simply trying to make good their escape or wanted to teach Meg a lesson, but the two white birds set off while maintaining a taunting distance between their tails and Meg’s smiling snout.

  Kathy continued to scream, but Meg had locked on to her target, either eager to play their game or incredulous that they wouldn’t stop and say hello. Kathy stood on the shore, the lake stretching out before her, dense forest on all sides with a tiny island about a quarter of a mile off in the distance before the water disappeared around a corner. Meg was swimming into the wind, determined and unruffled. It’s hard to imagine she could have heard much of anything at water level, and Kathy was hoarse from shouting. By the time Meg was five hundred yards out, all she could see was a yellow dot bobbing among the white caps.

  For several minutes she felt certain that Meg would turn around
any moment, that she would realize the futility of her mission, until it dawned on Kathy that both the swans and Meg had disappeared, the twinkle of the bobbing yellow dot extinguished.

  Kathy didn’t hesitate. Her mind focused immediately on Emily as she pulled out her cell phone and dialed 911.

  “My dog’s gone chasing swans and she’s disappeared and I’m pretty sure she’s drowned. It’s my daughter’s dog …”

  This was where she began to lose it, the guilt beginning to trickle in as she imagined Emily’s reaction when she broke the news.

  “… my daughter has an illness and … the dog means … I guess I was hoping you could help me recover the body, so at least she would have something to bury.”

  Kathy had been patched through to the local fire service, a fine group of men and women who knew Emily professionally, having whisked her away to the hospital in the middle of the night when she came down with a bout of the croup. They assured Kathy they would be right there, and in under five minutes two fire trucks had arrived.

  “Any sign of her?”

  The question came from an older gentleman, barely clinging to enough gray hair to make his military crewcut worthwhile. He appeared to be in charge, perhaps a captain, and he exuded unruffled calm, efficiency, and, most of all, empathy. Whether he was a dog owner, dog lover, or just someone who knew the importance of a dog to a sick child was never clear, but he approached Meg’s situation with the exact same measure of professionalism he might demonstrate for a drowning child.

  Kathy shook her head in response to his question.

  “I’m guessing it’s been about fifteen minutes since I can say I could definitely see her.”

  The captain pondered this detail and turned to his crew, ordering them to get set up. From the back of one of the trucks emerged an orange inflatable boat, a Zodiac, and Kathy watched as a couple of the men began pulling out wet suits, gearing up with scuba equipment.