My wife and have 2 dogs, no kids. Our female dog got her right rear leg amputated on Tuesday.
She’s 9 years old. She’s been active for years. One reason I’m crazy about her is that I went into the woods with her almost every day, and every winter I took her to the Adirondacks. She’s smart and capable in the woods.
A few months back she got a lameness. We tried to deny it for a while. The lameness came and went, she’d hold up her back foot. The vet said it was a growth on her toes. But it only got worse. The lump got bigger. We took her to my sister, a vet, and two other vets. I first heard the word amputation in April and denied it. I kept taking her for walks, but she lagged. She’d use three legs, only use the fourth when she really needed it. At night she’d bother the lump endlessly, trying to heal it with her tongue. The last vet came highly recommended, and he said, Your dog’s in a lot of pain, she doesn’t want to show it. You should take off the leg.
It upset me when I went to pick her up. They didn’t want to bring her out in the main waiting room. Didn’t want other people to see it. The tech was one I’d never met before. She was official with me then brought my dog out a side door into the sun. She was using a towel as a sling to hold up her back end. I kissed my dog but she was in a daze. I put her in the car and she just looked off. When I got her home I saw the cut and stitched part.It’s like meat, or a package of flesh you’ve never seen on a body. I couldn’t do anything that day. I put the dog on a pillow with our best sheet on it. I kept thinking about whether my dog will have any kind of life after this, whether she will still go hiking. Everyone has said to me, We see a lot of dogs running around on 3 legs. But I’d say the same thing to them, wouldn’t I? The business at the vet’s made me ashamed, and my other dog, her brother, seemed depressed. I made her go outside to relieve herself and she walked around a little and it weirded me out to see her defecate without a leg, strange, ugly. Then my dog went into the guest room she’s taken over, crawled under the bed. She had been there constantly over the last few weeks thru the pain, she’d made it her den. That afternoon it seemed she was angry at me. She knows she’s been dismembered, she thinks I’m the author of that.
My wife called soon after I got home and I nonchalanted it but she could tell I was freaked out. I got her from the train that night. When she got home she got down on the floor next to the bed and kept talking to our dog. Finally I brought her out to give her her next pill and my wife was shocked by the maimed meat part. She moved past it more quickly than I did. My wife is closer to the ground, to reality. She accepts what’s happened, I can’t. She says the dog’s gotten better somewhat already and we’re going to let her figure out what she wants to do from now on. “I just want my dog back,” I had said to the vet when we made the date for the amputation. I fear I’ll never have her back, in that old way. My wife is more accepting. Still, she’s afraid to touch the wound. She hasn’t picked her up. In that way, it’s a little like the Metamorphosis, the way the family is flipped out by Gregor Samsa’s change. A friend came by and cooed to the dog under the bed for a while, then said Everything’s going to be fine, and I couldn’t say anything at all. She said, You should take a picture. My wife said, Isn’t that gruesome?
I know, it’s just a dog, and it’s just been 3 days. Who knows, a few months from now. Still, the experience has opened my heart to the families of people maimed in Iraq. On the TV there are always inspirational stories about these people, getting better with prosthetic limbs and small-town parades and throwing out the first ball (Johnny Damon’s friend who lost an arm), the American ones anway. I’m sure that stuff is all true, I hope it’s true. Right now I see the grief, the loss, the shock, the shame, and the long shadow over the future.
