doggy-dog

Very soon this afternoon (if it's not started already) my dog will be having a liver biospsy that may convert mid-procedure into a more major surgery, if it looks like such a thing might help.  It's a very strange time in my life, this stretch of days with her suddenly sick, and not knowing what's going on or what the prognosis is.  I've been all over the place, but the main deal is that everything else is suddenly not important, even while it goes on, weirdly, like things will.

I take a whole lot fewer steps in a day when I'm not taking a buncha steps in a day with my dog.  So my phone tells me.  And I don't want to walk around my neighborhood without her.  I went to the gym and walked some, but my heel got to acting up pretty quick, so I spent most of my time in the weight room, which is where I spent many an hour in recovery from a shitty break-up some years ago.

As I wrote to my friend, I don't want to be able to go to the gym.  I want to have to go home to the dog.

Over on the tumblr I set up with a queue of old pix from my phone (set to roll out one a day in the older-first order)---about which I'd mostly been wondering lately how much to be censor-y about, in photos to review that would be coming up soon---it's just this past week come to the time when I adopted the dog.  So there are all these pix there with her young self, sometimes with the former friend who went with me to pick her up, as I had not yet by then settled for good on that person's list of the varyingly-mysteriously unworthy.  I thought that was going to be what was weird and poke-y about that series of photographic reminders.  Turns out it's actually, of course, that that little doggie is now very sick, and I might lose her, and my life really does revolve, in many ways, around my partnership with her, plus, in short and at heart and what it all boils down to, I love her.

Something I've only remembered this afternoon about that time, when she was new to me, is how the young furry one had been exposed to a pup with parvo on her rescue-wagon trip up here from Louisiana.  So even when I adopted her, I was bracing for the possibility that she might be about to get very sick, with a good chance of survival cuz we'd be right on it, me and the Humane Society, but with that vigilance and attendant emotions interwoven in the whole life-shaking-up that was just beginning, bringing her into my world, taking responsibility for her, and gradually building a relationship with her that, whatever-all else it's about, has loyalty in both directions such as I have rarely experienced, ongoingly, with another creature.  Maybe I do or don't deserve that in some relationships, and often deserving isn't involved at all, but with the dog it isn't even a question.  It's just how it is.

It may partly be anti-anxiety drugs and it may well also be my visiting her yesterday, along with who-knows, but my shaggy pal's been seeming more comfortable to the vetfolk since I was there, and more acclimated to being in the hospital.  Less stressed.  I hated to leave her there, again, of course, and I hate that I can't tell her what's going on and why she needs to be there.  Not that I even know, really.  But you follow.

Anyway, this is my world right now, and I'm hoping I'll be in this waiting-and-hearing-more mode for a good stretch of days, cuz that's what'll happen if they figure out how to treat her and she gets better.  Yeah, it's not super-Zen radical acceptance to root with all my heart for an outcome.  But screw that kind of radical acceptance.  Up with caring; rah for medical maintenance protocols and science and treatments; and Go, Dog. Go!