by Kari Lizer
Lastly, there were the requirements regarding your animal. On the day of your visit, your dog must have been bathed and groomed within a twenty-four-hour period. You had to keep your dog six feet away from the other therapy dog at all times. You may not let your dog so much as greet the other dog at your visit. They are at work; this is no time for play—try explaining that to a Jack Russell terrier.
My dog Cabot is the gentlest giant of a golden retriever that ever lived, but I was frankly shocked when he passed the therapy dog test. He’s not really a “pay attention and follow instructions” kind of guy. Sometimes he’s not even that well behaved. He mounts strangers and humps them; he pulls on his leash when he sees a squirrel, dragging me helplessly across the park; and he’s obsessed with food. But on the day of his exam, he transformed into a model citizen. He passed with flying colors, and when he earned his therapy dog vest, he was proud. He was made for this work.
When he wore the vest, it was like he knew he had a job to do. He tiptoed around the old people, never made a peep when he spied the other dog volunteers, didn’t steal food off hospital trays, let the sick kids pull his ears, and even ignored the squirrels in the parking lots.
The final requirement was your visit balance. You must maintain a visit balance of three visits per month. You can do more. You may not do less. Period. Most of the volunteers are retired. Some work part time. I didn’t meet any other volunteers who still had children at home. When I started, all three of my kids were still in the house. My career ebbed and flowed, but when it flowed, it gushed. Sometimes three visits a month was extremely challenging.
And that’s why I got on the Friends on Four Paws shit list.
I had managed to keep a zero balance, just keeping my head above water with the minimum three visits per month for the three years I’d been in the program. I worked with people who had more than two hundred visits in their account. I didn’t even know how that was possible. Were they doing three visits a day, seven days a week? My visit balance had dipped into the negative a few times when I had scripts due or during the kids’ soccer seasons, and I had to work like mad to bring my balance just back to zero. There are no excuses for not visiting—not sickness, business, vacations, death—it doesn’t matter; the clicker keeps on clicking away. So last year when I was shooting a TV pilot and all of the activities surrounding Dayton’s senior year in high school were happening at the same time, I starting getting in arrears, and it snowballed.
And nothing I said to my team leader about extraordinary circumstances seemed to get me any leeway because every time I checked the website, my negative balance continued to grow.
I understand why the policy is there. I’m sure there are a lot of people who like the idea of being a volunteer but flake out when it comes time to make the actual commitment. And they can’t have that. You’ve got sick kids and old people counting on you. You can’t have a bunch of ancient and confused people sitting in the lobby of the depressing old folks’ home on visiting day, clutching at their cardigans, their rheumy eyes scanning the empty parking lot, asking the nurses over and over, “Where are the dogs? I thought the dogs were coming! Did the dogs forget about us?” But I’ve been a model volunteer. Except for that one nick on my record for the missing two-foot traffic leash, I’ve shown up for my visits on time, my dog bathed and groomed, my uniform pressed and standard issue, and my visit materials in order, even in the midst of production and pilot season when the stress of deadlines was waking me up in the middle of the night in a cold sweat, ripping at my nightgown—feeling like someone was trying to drown me. But still, I showed up, driving through rush hour traffic, taking notes on scripts as I made my way to keep my promise to babies and veterans and stressed-out college kids. I kept my visit balance in the positive column for three straight years. But the last six months, it slipped. It went from negative three to negative twelve. Then I had to take Dayton to visit colleges, and it just kept going.
The woman in charge of the program, Joy—a misnomer if ever there was one—called to remind me if it stays in the negative for six months, Cabot and I would be booted out of the program. I asked what I could do to stop the bleeding. Maybe a short leave of absence?
She said they don’t give leaves of absence to anyone, ever.
“Ever?” I asked. “Even if someone is juggling a lot more than the average volunteer?”
“What would happen if we made an exception for you?”
“Nothing!” I promised. “Nothing would happen. Except maybe I would stop having a mild panic attack every time I went on the website and saw my name with a sad doggie face next to it and a big negative check mark. I’m not used to being a disappointment to people,” I tried to explain. “I grew out of that. I’m a Goody-Two-shoes now. I’m an underachiever who somehow miraculously became an overachiever, and that sad doggie face on my profile page makes me feel I’m slipping back in the other direction. Please, Joy, there’s got to be something I can do!”
Finally, Joy, out of the goodness of her heart, offered me a solution. She said she was aware I was a writer and she had been unhappy with the descriptions of the facilities on the website for years now. She offered me this barter: if I would rewrite the facility descriptions, she’d “pay” me one visit for every ninety minutes I spent writing. One visit for ninety minutes of writing? And while I was doing this, I asked, would the negative visits stop accruing?
“Of course not, because…” I know. There are no leaves of absence! So let me get this straight: My negative balance was now up to twenty-three. At ninety minutes for each visit, I could write a novel in the time it would take me just to get to negative six. I mean, I wouldn’t write a novel, but the fact is, I could. I could certainly write more than descriptions of elder care facilities visited by dogs. Not to mention, as I was erasing the negatives that already exist in my account, more negatives would continue to accumulate because I still wouldn’t be completing my visits.
It was like one of those nightmares where you had homework to finish, but every time you turned the page more pages would appear.
This was outrageous. I was a professional writer. I was almost indignant to the point of shouting, “Do you have any idea who I am?” Thankfully I stopped short of that.
That would not have been a proud moment. Joy said she completely understood if it was too much for me and it was certainly my choice. She would be sorry to see Cabot and me go, though, since we were two of the most popular volunteers in the program. Wait, what? Popular? With whom? I liked that. Joy said we were one of the most requested teams, which was surprising since we were also the most underachieving.
Underachieving? Popular? I was enraged and flattered and ashamed and confused.
“Well, maybe I could try to write the descriptions,” I told her.
“Great,” she said. “See how far you get, and if it’s too much, let me know.”
I agreed it would be worth a try. She said just to write about my experiences at the places I’d visited with Cabot.
I decided to start with my experience at the Silver Palms, a memory care facility in West LA. I would write about Smitty. My visits there were the third Saturday of every month. My regulars, Sue, Nancy, Richard, Smitty, and Vera, were always waiting for me in the lobby. A semicircle of wheelchairs and walkers. They loved spending time with Cabot. And I loved spending time with them. The residents were all in various stages of Alzheimer’s and dementia. A visit to Silver Palms was a little bit like the movie Groundhog Day.
Cabot would lie on his back while they scratched his tummy and asked the same questions over and over:
“How old is he?”
“Nine.”
“Have you had him since he was a pup?”
“I sure have.”
“Does he like coming here?”
“He loves it.”
“How old is he?”
“Nine.”
“Do you think he likes coming here?”
“I do.”
“How old is he n
ow?”
Maybe I liked it best because it took the spook out of what lay ahead for me with my own dad’s journey into Alzheimer’s. I’d been going there for three years, and I’d seen people deteriorate. Many had died. My favorite of all the residents was Smitty, a feisty and funny white-haired flirt. When I first started coming to Silver Palms, Smitty was still pretty sharp. He and his wife, Vera, were in the independent section of Silver Palms, part of the group waiting for me in the lobby. He took great care in his dress—always in a short-sleeved dress shirt with a bow tie and black slacks. His full head of white hair combed. His brown eyes twinkled when he teased his wife, who didn’t speak anymore but smiled at Smitty when he squeezed her hand.
When Smitty saw Cabot coming through the lobby, he’d call out his name, like Lou Costello used to call Bud Abbott, in a booming voice: “Cab-ot!” Even when his memory didn’t hold much else, he always managed to come up with Cabot’s name. When I asked if he wanted me to take a picture of Cabot and him with the giant Polaroid camera, he’d joke that would cost me twenty-five cents—a lot of women were trying to get their hands on pictures of him. One Saturday I came to Silver Palms, and Smitty and Vera were missing from the lobby. I asked some of the other residents if they knew where they were. They didn’t know who I was talking about. That’s maybe the saving grace of Alzheimer’s—when someone goes missing, you forget they were ever there.
When I asked the nurses about them, they told me they’d been moved to the VIP section. The VIP section houses the residents who can’t live independently anymore. The access doors are locked with a code to get in so they don’t wander. It’s more depressing than the main area. Residents shuffle around, some in terribly anxious states. They can’t go outside or close the doors to their rooms. I was shocked.
Smitty seemed okay just a few weeks ago. They said it was Vera. She wasn’t doing well, and Smitty insisted on going behind the locked doors of VIP with her.
When Vera died, Smitty took it hard. When I visited Smitty, he only talked about Vera and their years together. He asked me if I was married yet. I said, “Not yet, Smitty. But I’m okay. I’ve got my dog.” I didn’t want him to know I was divorced. I cared what he thought of me.
He patted my hand and said, “Oh, don’t you worry. You wait until someone who deserves you comes along. It’ll happen. You’re too wonderful to pass up.” Then he held my hand for the rest of my visit.
The next two times I visited, Smitty wasn’t there. He’d been taken to the hospital. He was failing, and it didn’t look good. I thought I’d never see him again. I was surprised when I came a few Saturdays later and Phillip, one of the caretakers, told me Smitty was back from the hospital. They expected that he was going to die anytime now and asked if Cabot and I would go see him in his room.
I took Cabot to Smitty’s room. A picture of Smitty and Vera was hanging outside. Smitty, a young man, six foot two in his air force uniform, one of the prized Airedales that he’d told me about so many times, stood next to him. Vera, feisty and pretty, was on his other side, looking up at Smitty with stars in her eyes. I entered the room with Cabot. Smitty was in his bed.
He didn’t look like himself. His hair was a mess, and he wasn’t wearing his big glasses or his usual pressed short-sleeved dress shirt and slacks, just a rumpled hospital gown. He would hate to be seen like this. He looked small. Above his bed were at least twenty-five Polaroid pictures of Cabot and Smitty that I’d taken from my visits over the years.
I led Cabot over to the bed and called out to Smitty. He was moaning softly. I lifted Cabot up so he was standing and placed his front paws onto the bed so that his head was level with Smitty’s. Cabot stayed there, even though it probably hurt his hips; he knew what he was supposed to do. I said, “Hey, Smitty. Look who came to see you. It’s your best pal, Cabot. He missed you.” I placed my hand on Smitty’s cheek and just watched him for a moment. Cabot licked Smitty’s forehead, and he opened his eyes.
When Cabot came into focus, Smitty smiled weakly and said, “Cab-ot!” Then he just closed his eyes. I lifted Cabot off the bed. He laid down on the floor next to the bed.
Phillip looked at me. He said, “That’s the first time Smitty’s talked in two days.”
I kissed Smitty’s forehead, and then I bent down and kissed Cabot right on his dog lips.
I sent the story to Joy.
An email came back less than thirty minutes later. “Thanks for this, Kari, but try not to make it about you. I’ll look forward to reading more.”
I wanted to find something that gave me perspective and purpose. Something to keep my feet on the ground in Hollywood. Well, Friends on Four Paws did that. They stole my looks, my authority, my heart. They don’t even like my writing. They brought me to my knees. With nothing else to do, I buckled down and continued my penance. I whittled away at that shameful negative number, but when I was down to a mere minus eleven, the clock ran out. Like a prisoner on death row, out of appeals, my six months in the negative column was up, and Cabot and I were booted out of the program.
Never mind that I had spent 1,260 minutes writing for the organization—rules are rules. And unlike Hollywood, where the rules change depending on who you are, the rules are the same for everyone in Friends on Four Paws. There was something oddly satisfying about that. My last contact with Joy was this: “Kari, please return your materials via FedEx within seven days, or we’ll come after you for the cost of replacement. It’s been a pleasure working with you. Joy.”
Isolationism
Last week I was diagnosed with inflammatory breast cancer. I diagnosed myself by googling the words unexplained breast bruise, and there it was. Even though none of the images looked at all like my unexplained breast bruise, I consulted enough blogs to know anything that appears anywhere on the bosom of any shape, color, frequency, or duration is most likely definitely cancer. My results were conclusive: this was the end. Further research on some lady’s website who posted pictures of adorable kittens to honor her niece, who succumbed to my disease, told me that IBC is aggressive and largely untreatable, given that by the time it presents itself with any symptoms, it’s often too late. “But I just had a mammogram!” I typed into the WebMD message board. Doesn’t matter, I was told by Wikipedia. This crazy cancer can’t be detected by a mammogram. Which explains why when Hartford Tanbaum, my radiologist, performed not only a mammogram last month but even an ultrasound because of what he called my “dense breasts”—I think he was flirting with me—found nothing.
Dr. Tanbaum reads my mammogram, then squeezes cold jelly on my chest and rubs the ultrasound wand around in it, staring at an incomprehensible gray blob on the screen before announcing everything looks good. Then he uses his hands to palpate my breasts, and he always waits until this moment to ask me how our mutual friend, Allan Rice, is doing. Allan is the son of his good friends, the Rices, and was a writer’s assistant on my show, The New Adventures of Old Christine.
He’s young and smart and delightful, but it makes me feel icky to discuss him with Dr. Tanbaum’s hands on my slimy boobs.* Anyway, the whole experience is all very strange—medicine mixed up with work mixed up with nudity—and when I leave, I feel like I did something naughty with Allan Rice and I can’t look him in the eye when I get back to the office. But now I’m dying, and none of it matters. I can’t believe I’ve wasted time on meaningless things like watching endless back-to-back episodes of International House Hunters and experienced endless back-to-back episodes of road rage.
I called to make an appointment with my internist because it’s always good to get a second opinion to the internet. The lady who answered the phone said Dr. Ghim didn’t have anything until next week. I told her it was kind of important to see him sooner rather than later, but he was out of town at a breast cancer conference. “Ironic,” I said to her with a brave laugh.
She said, “So do you want the appointment next Wednesday or not?” I took it, then got to work googling alternative treatments in Mexico. Just f
or the record, I’m not a hypochondriac. Except when it comes to cancer.
It’s because fifteen years ago when I had vague symptoms and laughingly said to Dr. Ghim, “The internet says I have cancer,” he didn’t laugh.
Instead, he said, as he was feeling the lump on my thyroid without a smile, “Let’s get a biopsy.”
“Are you serious?”
He said, “It’s probably just a nodule. They almost always are. If it was anything to worry about, I’d be very surprised.”
Dr. Ghim did the biopsy and told me I’d have the results in four days. I didn’t think about it much; I had three-year-old twins, a six-month-old, and a pilot in production. I didn’t have time for drama.
When he called me four days later, I had honestly forgotten about it, but Dr. Ghim sounded upset. “Wow, Kari, I really didn’t think this would happen. It’s malignant. I’m really surprised.”
I told him, “It’s okay.” Then, “Hey, you thought of the biopsy, so that was good!” Trying to comfort him.
I didn’t know what else to say, so Dr. Ghim continued. “We should schedule surgery to remove your thyroid. They’ll look at the lymph nodes at that time and see if it’s gone there. If it has, those that are involved will have to be removed as well. After surgery, we’ll schedule you for radioactive iodine treatment. It’s targeted radiation to remove any abnormal cells that have traveled elsewhere in your body. You’ll have to stay away from your kids for ten days because you’ll be radioactive, and you don’t want to expose them to it. Do you have any questions for me?”
I had pulled over to the side of the road so I could process the information, and I said, “I don’t think so. Thank you so much.” Then, because he’d never actually used the word, I had to ask, “So I have cancer?”
Dr. Ghim said, “Yes, you do, but if you have to have cancer, thyroid is the kind to get.” Then he added, “If it came back after surgery and radiation, I’d be really surprised.” I wish he hadn’t said that thing about “really surprised”—that’s what jinxed us the first time.