Gene's Blog

Today I want to talk about dogs

Yes, I still intend coming back to the books. In a way this is that. It is, I think, no coincidence (and readers of the books will know that God says there is no such thing as a coincidence, that nothing, no thing, happens here without a reason known and approved by God – paraphrasing but that is darn close) that when you reverse the letters in dog, you get god. Actually, I think maybe dogs, get God, better than humans do. They certainly ACT as if they do.

Why I want to talk about this now, well, there are two reasons. One, naturally, is my Cisco, my legacy grandchild, the last living piece of my youngest son, his “daddy”. Brandon wanted only one thing for his 20th birthday and that was a dog. We picked him out together, and a year and a month later, Brandon was gone and Cisco and I were on our own as we have been for the last 10 years. They told us he’d probably top out at 65 pounds or so, he is a lab/shepherd cross, who looks all lab, but has three inch long hair that is about the thickest coat a dog can have – when I take him to his puppy spa for a shampoo and nail trim (he does NOT appreciate my largesse by the way, the moment we enter the place he sits down facing the door back OUT, giggle), I get charged for “extra brushing”. I try to take him there when he is in full molt which he does twice a year, mid-February to May, and then again late August until November. The rest of the time he just sheds. Anyway, that 65 pounds stuff was hooey, he topped out at 115 when he was 7 months old. Not 115 chubby pounds either, he is a tall dog, 115 pounds of muscle as a youngster. He darn near dislocated my shoulder a couple of times when I’d be talking to someone and he’d see something interesting and leap off at full speed. And he’s knocked me down more than once when we’d run together. Our running days are behind us now, both of us, me cartilage, him age.

I guess I sort of have always thought he’d live to 16 to 18 or so, large mixed breeds we had on the farm did, well, one, anyway. So two years ago during his annual trip to his veterinarian, I told her that he’d been having difficulty moving his bowels, constipated always, and she found an enlarged prostate. She said neutering him would probably fix the problem. I had never had that done because Brandon was against it and I sort of just intended to do what Brandon wanted, I’m Cisco’s grandpa, not his dad, lol. But when it became a health issue, I said yes. That seemed to help, but the next spring the problem recurred, and her examination then revealed a tumor. We set up a biopsy for the following week and for a few days I thought, for the first time, I was going to lose him, and I was not nearly ready for that. I hadn’t thought about it at ALL, really. The tumor turned out to be non-cancerous, but inoperable anyway. I could not pin her down on what that really meant. She prescribed an over the counter stool softener which I used until last fall when it stopped working. We switched him to Benefiber, which is odorless, colorless, tasteless and mixes unobtrusively into anything. I put it in his water, it works beautifully.

But about a month ago he began having incontinence problems, not always, once every few days, then last week, twice in one day. He felt SO bad when that would happen so I called his doctor and took him back in, $331 later, I found out that his white blood cell count is elevated which indicates an infection, which can cause incontinence. So, he is on antibiotics for two weeks, at which time we’ll redo the bloodwork and see what has happened. If that isn’t good, then an xray to see if perhaps something, a cancer, is growing in him. The thing is, he is so good around me, he doesn’t seem to be in pain, he seems like my regular guy, but sometimes, when I am out of his sight (like children, they think if they can’t see us, we can’t hear them) he will make a noise I’ve never heard him make before. So I’m not sure what is happening. He’s lost 24 pounds in the last 10 months. Last year he was at 116, last Friday at 92. She said that isn’t unusual in older dogs and he is still a VERY big boy. I knew he’d been losing weight, has been for several months. He has sort of gone off his feed. When we switched to Benefiber, we also switched him to the highest fiber senior dog food we could find in the pet supply store which turned out to be the senior version of what he has eaten for most of his life. The not eating part started before the switch. His routine has been the same since he’s been with me, one bowl a day, every day. He’s always self-regulated, I’d fill the bowl and he’d eat a few mouthfuls whenever he felt like it, mostly at night while I slept. He has this quirk, when I am gone during the day at work, he does not eat or drink. Honestly, I fill both bowls every morning and when I get home both are untouched. I take him out, he comes back in, drinks half his water dish and eats a few mouthfuls of food. During an evening he’ll drink a bowl, I refill it before I go to bed and he empties that overnight, he used to clean out his food bowl every night too. He stopped doing that a few months ago. He’ll go a few days eating maybe a third of the bowl (and he gets NO grandpa food anymore – I want him only on what is good for him) and then he’ll finish off a whole bowl and do that for a couple days, but then back to the third, if that.

So, I am a little nervous about all this. He doesn’t seem to be in pain. I won’t have that. But 24 pounds gone, despite what his doctor says, in 10 months, and I KNOW almost all of that is in the last four months or less, worries me. I am not being unrealistic, I have now had time to get used to the idea that he won’t be with me forever. But, I keep thinking, not yet, just not quite yet.   I know he’ll be there at the Rainbow Bridge when I cross. But I’m not ready to be done knowing him on this plane of existence. So there is all that.

But that is the personal part of this story and I did say there were two reasons I wanted to talk about dogs. The other is this: Loyal and trusting, dogs are our heroes. It is article by a man named Tim Bugansky that I hope you will take the time to read. It was in the Sunday StarTribune 2/17/2008. It is a wonderful story about dogs, one the author knew, and others he’s read about. So, I’m not going to talk specifically about the dogs in the story, I’ll let you discover them yourselves but there are a couple things he says that I DO want to mention here. He says there is in every dog a quiet nobility and an unspoken pact with the human race. He’s right. He believes dogs know something about us that we don’t, that they have an innate wisdom about us that eludes our own minds. They know, within everyone of us, lies a vast potential for goodness and they try their best to bring it out of us, to show us to ourselves in a way. He talks about how his dog intervenes in family disputes, lol, he’ll put himself squarely between whomever is having at it, neutral, but on everyone’s side at the same time.

He says that at night, he will see his dog rise and make his rounds, checking windows, sniffing at beds taking attendance, being sure his flock is well. He says that when he is stressed, his dog will lay his head, sometimes his whole body in his lap, shielding him from himself. He says dogs see the best in us. That the world would be a better place if we could meet their expectation of us, just as they will strive to the end to protect and love us.

He tells of a day when he was young and he and his mother knew his dog, Rickey, was near his end, his hindquarters paralyzed, and they’d gone a quarter of a mile into the woods to dig a final resting place for him. He said that they could hear a familiar jangling as they worked, and looked up to see Rickey dragging his huge body with just his two front legs to them, where he then lay down, next to his own final resting place to watch over them one last time.

All dogs are like that. Cisco is like that, absolute unconditional love. No matter where I am when I am home, he is somewhere near, he moves from spot to spot, but he is always in a place where he can see me. I’ll glance up and not see him, but I can FEEL him so I look around and he’ll be somewhere, peering directly at me. I used to joke that I was his television, but I know that when that final day comes and I sit in this house alone and no longer feel those eyes on me, I will feel for the first time in my life completely alone. I don’t want it to be yet. much love, :^) gene

If today brings even one choice your way
choose to be a bringer of the light :^) gene