Decoded Dog

by Dianne Janczewski

He pulled away just far enough to look me in the eyes. “I’m concerned about your well-being.” He acknowledged the inevitable in a pause. “Maybe if you spend a few hours a day in the lab next week you might be more organized when they come back and then maybe, you could pace yourself better when you decide you have to be involved in CRFS.”

  “Okay. I’ll try to go in by ten, home by two.” He gave me a half-hearted hug, knowing that my decision to be involved was made months ago.

  I headed to the kitchen and spent the next hour lost in the simple pleasure of preparing a meal, finding comfort in the scent of curry and garlic. My canine audience sat anxiously watching behind the invisible line over which they may not cross, one of the rare bits of training that actually stuck. We gathered for an early family dinner at the dining room table, the dogs catching a quick nap since the girls, no longer toddlers, rarely dropped any food worth scavenging. I was reminded of how the girls filled a room with life as they regaled us with stories on the latest movie, music, and teenage gossip. Their chatter was like a smile in the room.

  The sound of the house phone, rarely heard, startled us. I would have ignored it except for the faint buzz I heard from my cell phone a minute later. Someone was trying hard to reach me. I excused myself from the table. “Sorry” I said, as Chris gave me a wistful look as our family time was over.

  “That was Anna,” I said, heading to the closet to get my coat. “She wants me to come by now. She says that she has something she urgently needs to show me.”

  “She couldn’t tell you on the phone,” Chris stated more than asked.

  “Something is going on. She sounded … distressed, not herself. She said I have to see for myself.” I hurriedly shoved on my boots, hat, and gloves, and braced myself for the cold.

  “Sounds odd. Need me to do anything?” Chris offered.

  I stopped and came back to the table, moving in close to him as he stood. “Just take care of the girls, don’t know how long I’ll be there. Sorry again about leaving our dinner,” I said as I rounded the table, giving each girl a quick hug, not lingering enough to let them pull me back into their lives.

  “Mom, you’ll let us know if her patients are okay?” Tess asked. “We’ll do the dishes.”

  “I will, my love. Thanks. Sorry to run off.”

  Chris reached out to offer an embrace but I didn’t want it, didn’t want contact. I wanted to remain unemotional, disconnected, rote.

  “You need this.” He pulled me toward him.

  I melted into his arms, let him envelop me. My lungs felt like they were burdened by an August day in Virginia, like I was inhaling water. I opened my eyes, inhaled deeply and pulled away. “Thanks.”

  “My pleasure.” He smiled. “But – Is there anything I can do to help you stop taking on the weight of the world, including Anna’s world?”

  “No. I appreciate the sentiment. I have this ominous feeling that this is going to be heavier than anything I’m carrying right now.”

  Diane jumped in and threw her arms around me. “Go save the dogs, Mama,” she whispered. I kissed her head—which I suddenly noticed was almost at the same level as mine.

  Rushing to the car, numbed by the cold and the mechanics of opening the door, I settled into the driver’s seat, pushed the button to start the silent engine, shifted into reverse and locked eyes with myself in the rearview mirror. I paused for a moment to take in the confusion on my face. Anna’s voice had an ominous tenor to it, a finality. “I need you to come here. I need to show you what I have.” She was never one to be overdramatic or emotional. But she also didn’t say whether it had to do with Addison’s or with CRFS. Whatever it was, she obviously knew it was significant to our work. I backed the car out, confident that Anna would point us in the right direction.

  There were no cars in the parking lot—strange, as she said she would be open again right after New Year’s Day for people to pick up their boarded pets, and she typically stayed open until seven to cater to her working clients. The doors were locked and the lights were off in the waiting room. As I took out my cell phone to call her, I saw the sign: Due to a rising concern for our dog patients’ health, we are temporarily closed for regular appointments. For emergencies, please call the following number. Anna locked eyes with me through the glass door; her keys jangled as she tried to find the keyhole. She let me in and hurriedly locked the door behind me.

  “Hey, come on back,” she said. She moved stealthily, as if we might be seen, as if a secret might be discovered. “I don’t want anyone to see that I’m here.”

  “That bad?”

  “Yes, everyone thinks their dog has CRFS, everyone needs me to calm them down. People are panicking and I’ve run out of comforting words, and frankly, out of patience.”

  “I see you’ve run out of heat too. Why is it so cold in here?”

  “I’ll show you.” I hustled to keep up with her as she switched on lights in front of us and off behind us.

  We walked through the hall between the four exam rooms, each equipped with a steel exam table at bar height, and decorated with cheerful colors and abstract pictures of bright yellow cats with pointy ears and blue dogs with thick red collars.

  Through the double doors, we entered a narrow chart room, running perpendicular to the hall. Computers and microscopes filled the counters, glass-doored cabinets packed with gauze and gloves and other disposables above on one side, and a bank of light boxes for viewing radiographs on the opposite side. Computer screens that would normally reveal images of chunks of tennis balls lodged in a small intestine or a fractured pelvis from a hit-by-car case were dimmed, keeping their latest diagnosis to themselves. The refrigerator whirred. It was oddly quiet in the clinic. Usually there was a dog or two barking, but all I heard was the machine hum.

  I followed her through the second set of double swinging doors into the main exam room—the room they take your pet to when the vet says, “we’ll just take him back there for a minute,” and when he returns, your pet is beyond grateful to see you and be freed from that scary world.

  It’s the largest room in the clinic, surrounded by cabinets, full of more gloves, needles, boxes, catheters, thermometers, and with countertops covered in various equipment. A row of exam tables, stainless steel, sparkling clean, run down either side, ten in all. Down the center, a wide aisle, wide enough to push a rolling exam table through on the way to the surgery or x-ray rooms or to the glassed-in recovery room in the back where they keep watch on surgery patients as the technicians and vets hurry throughout the day.

  I knew this room, I’d been in the back numerous times. But it was darker than usual. The windows, placed high up to keep prying eyes from distracting the animals, offered only diffused street light through closed blinds. There was an odd smell. Not the medicinal smell of scented antiseptic, but a stale smell, acrid, distasteful. Anna flipped on the light. The two rows of exam tables, all the counters that frame the room, and an extra row of mobile exam tables down the center, were all full. Covered with dead dogs.

  A tan and white Jack Russell Terrier, a black lab, a mutt with a speckled face, several golden retrievers, a little brown chihuahua, two poodles, one white mini, and a black standard with unbrushed curls, like my Ania. All victims of CRFS, no longer just stories I read about in the news.

  Silence, dead silence. I looked at Anna. Her hand was still on the switch as if prepared to turn the lights off if I couldn’t handle the scene. But it was too late. I had seen and will never get that picture out of my mind. She walked over and put her arm across my shoulder. I stepped away to the center of the room, turning slowly to imagine their lives—a child’s best friend, a family watch dog, a hunting partner, an elder’s companion. My heart ached for them all, owners and dogs.

  How many were there? Why were they all here? I knew that when animals died at the clinic, the bodies were placed in cold storage until they were picked up either by the company that provided cremation services, or the one that disposed of the remains. Thos
e services usually came every two or three days. I was confused and maybe a bit angry that Anna hadn’t warned me.

  “Why are they here?” I asked. “Why aren’t they in the cold room?” My eyes darted around the room, not daring to focus again on any one of them, or her.

  “There’s no more room,” she said, her face expressionless.

  “Oh my God. When are they picking up?”

  “Not for another day. With the holiday and this happening in a number of clinics, they are so overwhelmed, they can’t keep up. I have 139 dogs, close to 30% of my practice, and it’s climbing. I have to just hold on to them until they can be picked up, but I can’t practice medicine with them here. I’ve given all of my staff a few days off, my receptionist is coming in to help field phone calls, but I will only take emergencies right now, which when it’s a dog, usually just adds one more to the room.”

  “I’m so sorry, Anna. You must be—” I turned to face her. She had been talking matter-of-factly, staring across the room. She couldn’t have warned me; she herself was in shock. We locked eyes and she dissolved.

  I enveloped her in my arms. “Oh Claire, I don’t know what I’m going to do! I can barely keep it together. Everyone is looking to me for answers, everyone is coming to me to save their dog, and when they die I have to stand calm, sympathetic, unemotional, walk them to the door after they agonize through their goodbyes, and then I carry their baby, their security, their family member back to this! I don’t know how much more I can take.” She was sobbing and shaking. I was the stoic one for once, trying to keep it contained while I processed the horror in the room. The nightmare of her practice.

  We fell silent. I let her sob but only briefly. I knew her and her way of dealing with emotion was to let it take control for only a few minutes, then grab hold of it roughly, shake it violently and toss it aside.

  “Goddamn it, this should not be happening. There has to be an explanation. We, you, I, have to do something. I want to show you something.” She spun around and stormed through the side doors that led to the lab. I paused to switch off the light. Equipment for analyzing blood and urine sat silent. The shelves were filled with manuals and protocols, post-it notes were stuck on the cabinet doors, reminding staff about chemical orders and problem workarounds, like make sure to hold down the top of the centrifuge when you lock it. Glassed-in cold boxes and incubators held steady their temperature-sensitive contents. At the far end, the walk-in cold room’s stainless-steel door failed to lock in the sadness.

  “Obviously, I have a ton of blood samples for you,” Anna said. She opened the freezer next to the cold room to reveal neatly arrayed racks of tubes, color-coded and individually labeled with the victim’s name, breed, and number. “I’ve assigned each patient a number, and I’ve been cataloging as much information as I can on each of them.”

  “You’ve done a lot of work.”

  “One of my technicians has. I don’t have much other work for her right now, but she is a whiz on the computer, so I asked her to pull all their records, and start populating spreadsheets with some of the clinical data starting with when they got the disease, and how long it took them to succumb.” She paused. “And I noticed at least one interesting trend.”

  “Really? With just that preliminary information?”

  “Yes, but don’t get too excited. I haven’t a clue what it means, but maybe it will give you some new directions to explore.”

  She shut the freezer and moved to a computer, shaking the mouse and bringing it to life. With her face illuminated, Anna looked tired, puffy-eyed, drained.

  “Stop looking at me,” she hissed.

  “I just −”

  “Stop it. The best thing is for us to help solve this thing. So here’s what I have.” A chart appeared. “This is a bar graph of the 139 dogs that have died, plus another thirteen that are suspect, but they came in early on and I don’t have as detailed notes.”

  “I trust your instincts.”

  “Data, not instincts, my dear.”

  “Oh, aren’t we Miss Scientific Integrity?” Sparring, our emotions dropped away, refocusing our thoughts, and our clinical personas emerged.

  “The progression of symptoms is similar for all of them. They stop eating, they become depressed, they fade away.”

  “Like Addison’s.”

  “Yes, but this time instead of Addison’s being the great pretender that presents as some other disease, it is CRFS that mimics Addison’s.”

  “You think it’s related?” The pounding of my heart grew stronger.

  “Not at all, but since it presents in a similar fashion, I’m starting to think that it affects the adrenals in a similar way.”

  “Why wouldn’t you just know?”

  “The dogs are too sick to run an ACTH, and every organ becomes affected very quickly. They die so quickly it’s hard to tell what is cause and what is symptom. But there does seem to be an interesting correlation in the progression of the disease that is different in Addison’s dogs that get it.”

  “Addison’s die quicker?” I asked, proud of my deductive capabilities.

  “No—slower,” She revealed, curiously. “I think that the adrenals are the first organ targeted. Think about it. We supplement Addison’s dogs with corticoids because they have non-functional adrenals.”

  “Yeah.”

  “So, if a disease starts by first destroying the adrenals, the Addison’s dogs would show no signs since they are supplemented. But, the other normal dogs would start spiraling downward in an Addison’s-like crisis, making them more vulnerable and killing them quicker.” Clicking on another spreadsheet, she brought up bar graphs compiled on all the dogs, labeled intake and TOD—time of death.

  “Wow. You don’t even need to tell me which are Addison’s and which are normal.”

  “It’s stunning, right? It’s three to five days before they die rather than twenty-four to seventy-two hours. I don’t have anything else though. Cindy is putting all of their data – vaccination records, owners’ demographics, surgeries, other animals owned − into an Access database so we can search and compare every which way.”

  “Any thoughts on why now? Why is your private practice being hit with so many?”

  “I was wondering the same thing,” she said. ”And why it happened over the holiday. I can’t seem to find anything that correlates. Some were boarded while their owners were away, but most weren’t.”

  “Maybe all the owners are feeding them contaminated turkey,” I half joked.

  “I thought of that too.”

  “Really?”

  “Well, not exactly that, but I did glance at the information on what owners had been feeding them.”

  “And?”

  “Nothing that I can see correlates.”

  “Seen any signs of this being contagious?”

  Another mouse click and another chart appeared. “No. I haven’t seen owners who lost one dog come back in with another a few days later. Except one breeder that had two die after a local show, but none of hers that stayed home became sick. In fact, now that you mention it, I should run the data to confirm that there is no pattern with those that have multiple dogs just to confirm my observation.”

  We both stood and stared at the screen. I bundled my coat tighter around me, feeling the cold from all sides. “You should head home,” Anna said quietly. “I will pack all the samples and drop them off at your lab whenever you are ready for them. I’m emailing you the spreadsheets now.” She pushed send, and closed down all the files.

  “One more thing.” She looked me dead in the face. “I’ve sent duplicate samples off to CDC according to the AVMA protocol.”

  “Good. So I don’t have to split up the samples.” Her expressionless face said there was something else. “But you haven’t sent them your data on observations about the Addison’s dogs, have you?”

  “No. And I haven’t sent them the pre-CRFS samples I’ve maintained for these dogs. I’m giving you sixty days after your st
udents return.”

  “I don’t—”

  “Sixty days. If I send them my thoughts now, they’ll swoop in with a pile of researchers, maybe even press, and we’ll be out of this. I’ve thought a lot about this. It’s really not a lot of time if you think about what has to be done. And I don’t think they’ll be able to move as quickly as you nor will they have the insight or instinct, frankly. If you don’t find anything earth-shattering in those few weeks, you’ll still have a pile of data to hand over to them that will help narrow the search.”

  “You’re putting a lot of faith in me. I’m not sure I agree.”

  “My samples, my rules, my responsibility. You accept?”

  I nodded, just barely.

  She closed down the computer and turned off the lights as we headed to the door. I stood in the shadows. “Why did you need me to come here? Why didn’t you just tell me on the phone or ask me to meet you at my lab? You could have brought the samples there.”

  She pondered the question, slowly shaking her head. “I don’t know really. It was a gut feeling. Maybe I needed to share this with a friend so we would be starting from the same level of desperation?”

  “You, desperate?” I couldn’t let her falter now. “I’m going to assume that you needed me, your collaborator, to grasp the magnitude of the situation.”

  She smiled weakly at me and stroked my arm, her fingers lighting on my hand momentarily, as she closed her eyes, probably, I thought, to make it all go away.

  “Hey,” I said, trying to pull her from the bad dream. “What are you going to do this evening? You can’t stay here—it’s too distressing.”

  “And creepy,” she tried to joke.

  “Come on, grab your coat. Let’s go get a drink.”

  Her taillights faded and disappeared. We’d only had one drink, but the steering wheel had gone cold. I turned the car on but didn’t want to move. As the seats were heating up, my breath made foggy patterns on the windows and I watched a few people scuttle across the street through the clouds. I pulled one glove off and pushed the center button; my phone glowed as it came to life. I had no choice but to swallow my pride and make the call.