Overbooked and Underpaid: Notes from a Yes-aholic: June 2011

Firstly, forgive the length of this post and feel free to skip it if you have never had a special pet. Lyra was so dear to us that it is hard to distill her life to 3 paragraphs.

Back in the Fall I wrote about our dog Lucky, a rat terrier who, despite bad teeth and an overdeveloped bark instinct brought our family joy and companionship for over 15 years. Having to put him to sleep was traumatic but we had the consolation of our Border Collie/Lab mix Lyra to help ease the pain.

Lyra was only 6 years old at the time and, what with the average lifespan of her breed being at least 10 to 12, we were settling in to enjoy her for several more years.

It was not to be.

A scant 4 weeks after Lucky's death I noticed a lump under Lyra's right eye. About the size of a small marble, I didn't take it that seriously at first. She had always been such a healthy and robust dog. Also, we had recently boarded her and I assumed she had picked up some sort of eye infection from other dogs. I had never heard of such a thing so I can't tell you why I thought that was what it was. But there it is.

After 2 more weeks her eye developed a teary discharge and we decided it was time to visit the vet. He diagnosed an abscessed tooth and we set her up to remove it.

When the swelling did not go down after surgery it became clear that we would need to see a specialist with an x-ray machine for jaws and teeth. This is when I learned that A) your average vet only has an x-ray machine for limbs and the digestive tract and B) specialty tooth x-rays are only available in a few places in each state and the fees begin at around $1200.

What were we to do? We had to know.

Very much money and anxiety later we had our answer.

Osteosarcoma.

At first I didn't know how bad that word is and what it means for dogs. The short version of what I would discover through my investigations into dog medicine is that osteosarcoma is a bone cancer that is aggressive and incurable. The younger the dog, the quicker the death. It typically strikes large breeds at around age 6 and the only treatments are palliative rather than curative. And, by the time you see the tumor, in most cases the cancer has already metastasized.

Which basically translates into a situation where you will spend thousands of dollars on a dog that cannot be cured and the treatments will give the dog a terrible quality of life. We decided not to pursue traditional treatments such as chemotherapy or radiation. My mother is a big believer in alternative medicines and sent me several remedies to try. I understand that there are many websites out there that claim to cure cancer with these remedies and I appreciated her efforts on our behalf, but they were not successful. I am unwilling, however, to dismiss them as having no benefit. Except for the discomfort she experienced as the tumor grew, Lyra remained bouncy and in good spirits the entire time and possibly lived longer than she would have without these remedies.

I have shared the above information in hopes that readers who notice any suspicious lumps on their dog's legs or face will seek veterinary attention immediately and also to be wary of the diagnosis of an abscessed tooth in large dogs. I don't know what the odds are, but the very day I took Lyra to the vet, a labrador with swelling much larger but in precisely the same location was coming out. That dog was also misdiagnosed and died shortly thereafter. But not before having a tooth extracted mistakenly.

But now I would like to share, not Lyra's death, but her life. It has taken me weeks to be able to do this because she was such a special dog and we were so close to her. Even today, as I went through the computer looking for pictures of her, it was difficult because each picture brings not only memories of her life but memories of the extremely painful process of taking her to the vet to end her suffering.

And I must confess, ever since that difficult day, my house has gone largely unvacuumed because cleaning up her shed fur has felt eerily as though I were erasing her.

Speaking of shedding, that is, perhaps a good place to start in the story of this dog.

I begin by telling you that I have never had a dog that could shed like this dog. I grew up with a variety of pugs and terriers. All smaller than 25 pounds and all with short prickly hair of the variety that weaves itself into your clothes.

Nothing prepared me for the notorious "double coat" of the Border Collie. Called a double coat because it has a smooth, mostly waterproof top coat and a fluffy, downy undercoat. As a puppy it looks like this:

As an adult it looks like this:

And, twice a year, for approximately 4 weeks, it looks like this:

And it gets everywhere. I mean everywhere.

We often referred to Lyra as "The Perfect Dog" but, as I reflect on her life I have to wonder what made us think of her this way.

Not only did she eat up our kitchen floor and our cove base when we went to Florida, her teething phase cost me the arm of my favorite oak chair, several of my best shoes, and the oak base of my stairway. (We're still trying to figure out what to do about that one if we ever try to sell the house.)

Never having owned a large dog before, I was also unprepared for the fact that she could reach, and eat off, the countertops and tables. When she was 7 months old we went to dinner at my parents. They had a Maltese and could not fathom why I kept putting the trays of meat on top of the refrigerator as we prepared the various courses. I tried to explain that nothing placed at a height under 6 feet was safe from this dog. My mother learned the hard way when, 35 seconds after leaving the dining room unattended we returned to see Lyra happily standing on the table eating the ham slices off of the platter.

As a chocolatier, I had to learn never to leave my products where Lyra could reach them. On three separate occasions she ate my deep belgian chocolate truffles - one time downing about 45 of them. I know chocolate is supposed to be poisonous to dogs but she could not seem to get enough of it. Maybe it was the labrador part of her stomach that allowed her to eat almost anything. Chocolate just made her act as if she was on cocaine.

She was completely freaked out by thunderstorms and would try to dig out of whatever environment she found herself in as the storm approached. This could mean working herself (all 62 pounds of her) under a bed (and getting stuck there) to systematically taking apart her wire cage.

And, while she understood the concept of being housebroken, her need to score off the cat led her to pee frequently in my basement (where the litterbox is.) Trust me, a dog this size has a bladder that holds a lot of urine.

So what made her so perfect?

Let me start by saying I have never in my life ascribed human traits to a dog.

Until this one.

She was the most "people-y" dog I've ever known. She actually seemed to have a sense of guilt. Whenever she did something she knew was forbidden (and trust me, she knew) she would put herself into our downstairs bathroom for a "time out" and shut the door.

And she could dish out the guilt, too. If you weren't paying enough attention to her, or not putting her outside when she wanted to go, she would lay down with a loud moan and sometimes a sigh for extra emphasis. You just knew she was saying "don't mind me, I'll be alright" like a neglected mother. Or Eeyore.

And she was great with my students and clients. She never bit anyone, (well, some little "herding" nips as I would run for the telephone - she was a sheepdog, after all).

She loved to go camping, though not swimming - not enough labrador, I guess - and all the regular things dogs love to do. After we saw the movie "Up" we would say "squirrel" and she would immediately bolt to a corner of the yard to do her squirrel removing duty.

She only barked when it made sense to bark (unlike the terrier) and she loved to cuddle even though she was too big to fit in my lap. She tried anyway.

And she had such a vocabulary that we spent an awful lot of time spelling around her.

And it was that last bit, the intelligence of her that made the end so difficult. Lucky was hard because he was so limited in intellect and so trusting. Lyra was even more difficult because she knew something was up that final day. I'm sure she could sense our anxiety. Whenever we even raised our voices at the children or each other, she would shut herself in that downstairs bathroom, so I know she could read our moods.

I'd like to end with a little photo gallery of her:

She loved to give "hugs"

This is what was left of the floor after 3 months of scraping away the chewed up vinyl floor and unearthing the original linoleum. This is the point at which we were taking out a wall and prepping for an entirely new floor.