Dog Lived (and So Will I)

by Rhyne, Teresa J.

  “What happened?” I couldn’t imagine—I didn’t want to imagine—such a conversation.

  “It doesn’t matter.”

  “It kind of does.”

  “No. It doesn’t. They’re fucked up. I’m not listening to them.”

  It was my turn to head to the bar. I stood up, but I only made it halfway across the room before I turned back to face Chris. “I knew this would happen. I fucking knew this would happen. Every. Single. Time. This always happens to me.”

  Chris’s face fell. And then it tightened. “You know, this isn’t about you.”

  “How is it not about me? We’ve been together for a year and a half now. They must have just thought you’d grow out of this. That somehow, I’d just go away, and in the meantime they’d fake being nice to me. All along they were thinking you’re better than me? They’re better than me?”

  “Trust me. It’s not about you. It’s about me and my parents. You could be anyone and they’d be objecting.”

  “They wouldn’t be objecting if you were dating someone of your own kind.”

  Chris ran his hand through his hair and then leaned forward, toward me. “That’s the thing…you are my own kind. You’re the only one who is my kind. They just don’t understand that because they don’t understand me. I’m not breaking up with you. You need to know that.”

  Chapter 7

  TOXIC

  I busied myself buying new toys for Seamus, feeding him anything and everything he wanted to eat, sharing all my food and then some, cleaning up the carpet, and ignoring, as best I could, the holiday season and a certain looming issue. I was also rapidly becoming an expert in mast cell tumors and cancer treatments as I researched and prepared for Seamus to start chemotherapy. Chemo scared the bejeezus out of me but was still easier to think about than Chris’s parents’ wholesale rejection of me—that, I tried hard not to think about.

  At the Veterinary Cancer Clinic, I had been assured Seamus would not lose his fur and that medicine could control much of the nausea. The most likely side effects would be loss of appetite and a decrease in energy. This was hard to imagine. Seamus could lose four-fifths of his appetite and still consume the daily food intake of a linebacker mid-season. How would I know if he lost his appetite?

  Within the first few months I had Seamus, my sister-in-law Jennifer sent a package to me, which the mailman delivered by tossing over the fence into the courtyard. By the time I came home, all that remained was blue, green, and yellow cardboard confetti bits and a few telltale plastic wrappers. I found one wrapper that had something in it: four shortbread cookies with the Girl Scout logo. Jennifer had mailed me the boxes of Girl Scout cookies I’d ordered from my niece in Missouri. Seamus had eaten two and a half boxes of them and was in the process of burying the rest of the stash when I interrupted. Thankfully, I don’t eat chocolate so none of the cookies consumed were of the dangerous chocolate variety. I had to call Jennifer to find out how many boxes had been sent so I knew how much digging I’d have to do to find Seamus’s stash. Jennifer was incredulous (she’d sent five boxes), but my niece McKinzee thought it was hilarious and promised to send Seamus cookies every year.

  It wasn’t that long ago that Seamus had climbed onto the back of the couch, jumped from there onto a barstool, walked from there onto the kitchen counter, and strolled over to the stovetop to lick out the hardened bacon grease left in the frying pan from that morning’s breakfast.

  And now the oncologist was telling me Seamus’s appetite would decline in chemotherapy? I wasn’t sure I’d be able to identify this side effect. Would he now eat only a box and a half of Girl Scout cookies? Just a box? The peanut butter sandwich cookies but not the shortbread? And I suppose a lack of energy would make the bacon-flavored obstacle course off limits?

  I read the paperwork the clinic had provided. The patient information contained the following notes: “Chemotherapy for cats and dogs causes very few of the symptoms seen in people. If Seamus refuses to eat after a treatment, try bland but well-liked foods such as white rice or pasta, flavored with cooked chicken, lean hamburger, low-fat cottage cheese, or nonfat sour cream…. If diarrhea occurs, add white rice to Seamus’s regular food. For vomiting, remove all food and water for four hours, then offer small amounts of water or ice cubes. Switch to the bland foods listed above.” In light of Seamus’s usual appetite, this was hard to imagine, but I memorized the information nonetheless. Then, I studied his pathology report. Some of it was overwhelming. I struggled to glean any information from the reports.

  From Seamus’s immunohistochemistry report:

  “The AgNOR value in this case (2.1) is intermediate. In one study…no dogs were euthanized due to mast cell disease with AgNOR counts less than 1.7. In another study…mast cell tumors that did not metastasize had a mean AgNOR count of 2.3, and those that did metastasize had a mean count of 2.8.”

  This seemed good: 2.1 is less than 2.3, so this says that chances are this hasn’t metastasized, right? I kept reading.

  “This pattern of KIT expression (pattern II) has been associated with a 14% rate of local recurrence, 31% rate of distant metastases, and 25.6% mortality due to mast cell disease.”

  I tried to find comfort in these statistics. To me, these odds were in his favor. Not great, but in his favor. So the chemo was necessary. The chemo would be good, I told myself. The chemo will give him his best chance at survival. These were just odds. Nothing was certain. We could still beat this.

  Then, I turned to the Internet.

  I read that pumpkin pie filling can ease constipation in a dog, which is also a possible side effect from the steroids given to prevent the nausea of chemo. Then I read that mast cell tumors like Seamus’s could be fed by carbohydrates and it was best to limit the dog’s diet to mostly proteins. This one sent me reeling. Seamus and I had established a morning routine in our year together. We woke and walked, he got breakfast, I got coffee, and then we shared toast. Seamus’s favorite food in the world was toast. The moment he heard the toaster lever slide down, he began his toast dance at my feet. And when the toast popped up, he howled and continually bayed and herded me to hurry and sit and commence with the crust distributions. I don’t like crust (blame my grandmother and her crustless dainty sandwiches while I was growing up), so it was a nice symmetry; I tore off the crusts and fed them to Seamus and enjoyed my crustless toast with no cleanup required. I’ve since watched enough Dog Whisperer to figure out that I’d probably merely taught Seamus the basic school math of toast = guaranteed crusts for Seamus. Hence, to Seamus, toast had become like the trashy girl in high school who puts out. It might not have been his actual favorite, but toast was a sure thing.

  I’d been feeding Seamus crusts nearly every morning. And this was feeding his tumor? And the Girl Scout cookies? Death in brightly covered cardboard! The sourdough loaf? Yeasty baked cancer! I’d given my dog cancer! My spiral of guilt was launched, sucking me down into the vortex. I went back online and did more research to find an all-protein kibble and fed him that, even though it cost more than twice what I’d been spending. I stopped giving him toast. Then, when I could no longer take the whimpering pleas, I stopped eating toast myself.

  I could research canine cancer treatment on the Internet. I could not research “what to do when your boyfriend’s parents object to your very being” or “how to become un-divorced and younger” or “how to prove you are not trailer trash.” I focused on what I thought I had control over—the cancer attacking my dog, rather than the attack on my relationship. Somehow, the odds against Seamus seemed more favorable. But I had little control over Seamus’s treatment. While I knew he was to start chemotherapy, and he had recovered well from the surgery, I had yet to be able to schedule the chemotherapy. I left several messages for Dr. Sorority Chick and finally got a call back.

  “We’re waiting on the pathology report,” she said.

 
“We have the pathology report. We had that two days after his surgery. It said the margins were clear.”

  “I know that. I’m not talking about that report. That report is a preliminary report. I need the report back from New York.” She said this as though we were waiting for the latest fashion news and of course that could only come from New York. As though California didn’t have pathologists (or fashion) and everybody knew we had to hear from New York. Everybody but me.

  “Preliminary? What’s preliminary about it? The surgeon said the margins were clear. The pathologist said the margins were clear. Why is that preliminary?”

  I heard her exasperated exhale. I don’t think she was trying to cover it. “We need the report from New York. The New York lab is the best there is. That report will tell us everything we need to know.”

  She was not moving without the New York report. I gave up pressing her. “How much longer?”

  “A couple of days.”

  Three days passed without word from Dr. Sorority Chick. I resumed my game of phone tag with her, becoming victorious when she called not my cell phone as I’d instructed but my office at 6:40 p.m. (no doubt hoping for voice mail) and I answered.

  “There’s been an unexpected delay,” she said.

  “Yes, I know that. It’s been over a week now, and we haven’t even scheduled his first chemotherapy session.”

  “I mean with the New York lab. The mail is taking longer than usual so we won’t have the results until early next week.”

  “Early next week? It will be Christmas by the time we start his treatments! This is ridiculous. Aren’t we just wasting time here? Shouldn’t the dog’s treatments begin as soon as possible? I told you I wanted to give him the best chance possible, and it just seems like we’re wasting time waiting for some mythical pathologist in New York.” I admit I mocked the way she said “New York” with such reverence.

  “He’s not mythical, and a week isn’t going to make any difference at all.” She spit back at me the myth in mythical. “This is the top lab in the country. This report will tell us everything we need to know.”

  “Yes. I know. You’ve said that. Repeatedly. But what else, exactly, do we need to know?” It’s not that I was looking forward to chemotherapy for poor Seamus. It’s just that the anxiety of waiting for something as horrible, as frightening as chemotherapy was nearly unbearable. The unknown, I hoped, was more frightening than the known. Plus, I couldn’t help but envision these big, bad cancer cells coursing through his body, attacking and trying to kill him while Dr. Sorority Chick sat around waiting for the fall issue of Vogue. “The Los Angeles pathologist said clear margins. From everything I’ve read—from everything you’ve said—the protocol is chemo. Why can’t we just schedule the chemo? What’s the downside?”

  “If the report came back that this was metastasized and chemo was contraindicated, would you still want to proceed?” She said this with the same tone an eight-year-old uses when she thinks she’s won an important battle. The “neener-neener” tone. Not the tone a doctor should use when suggesting a patient might die.

  I resorted to the same tone in my reply: “If it would give him a chance at surviving, yes, I might do that. You’re the one who said dogs tolerate chemo really well.”

  At home, I repeated the conversation to Chris and then stormed around the house, slamming cupboard doors and yelling, “She is the worst fucking doctor! What a bitch.”

  Chris was sympathetic but also storming around the house yelling about his parents. “Fuck them. Seriously, just fuck them. Who do they think they are? Fuckers!”

  And not to be outdone, Seamus was also regularly howling, Foooooooooooood! Fookers! Get me foooooooooooood!! Toooooooooooooast! Where’s my fookin’ toooooooooooooooast?

  This was, of course, the worst possible time for Chris and me to further discuss what his parents had said. But I couldn’t help myself.

  In our talks before his mother outed him, Chris and I had contemplated a number of scenarios about how his parents might react. I could certainly understand that a twice-divorced, forty-something woman who lived sixty miles away in Dowdy-town was not the first choice any self-respecting Newport Beach parents of a private-schooled, Princeton-educated, oldest child would make for their son, and I assumed this would be the focus. And that things would not go well. I’m generally a glass-half-empty kind of person.

  Chris, at least initially, thought that his mother would appreciate my sense of style, my education, and my extensive community volunteer credentials. He thought, or rather hoped, his father would appreciate that I was a lawyer and businessperson. Chris is generally a glass-half-full person. Neither one of us anticipated that his parents would set forth an edict. We had amusingly enough thought the choice was his to make. Not being parents ourselves, we had underestimated the parental instinct for protection of their young. And of course, we had failed to understand that a thirty-year-old could still be considered “young” to his parents.

  But when they’d staged what I referred to as “the intervention” after Thanksgiving, it weighed heavily on Chris. And on me. I didn’t have faith he’d stand up to his parents. I’d lost out to both of my mothers-in-law in battles large and small and had extremely low expectations as a result. Chris needed me to believe in him so he could believe in himself. I like to think that had the intervention come at another time, at a time when my dog did not have cancer, when chemo was not looming on the horizon, when I had a tighter grasp on my sanity, we would have handled it better. But that was not the case.

  We argued.

  And argued.

  “Look, your mother says that she will never—NEVER—get over my two divorces. So, that’s it then. There’s nothing I can do about it. I don’t even have to fight. There is absolutely nothing I can do to erase my two divorces, so there’s nothing I can do to change her mind.”

  “You’re missing my point. I told them I wasn’t going to break up with you. I just need to know you are going to support me. That we’re going to stand together against them.”

  “I’m not going to have anything to do with them!”

  “Well, you can’t take that position. They’re my parents.”

  “What happened to ‘fuck them’?”

  And then we’d repeat variations of the same script.

  I redirected my anger to the Veterinary Cancer Clinic. When I called again to follow up on the New York lab report, I didn’t even bother to ask for the doctor. I spoke to the receptionist.

  “It’s been two weeks. We’re waiting for the New York lab test results. Are they in?”

  “Two weeks? It doesn’t take two weeks,” she said. “Let me check.” After a short time she was back on the line. “The slides weren’t sent until just a few days ago so we should have the results in another day or so.”

  “The slides were sent a long time ago. They apparently took a long time in the mail.”

  “I don’t know. This is a new thing. We haven’t sent a lot of these out, but I don’t think we mail them. They’re slides and all, so I don’t think they go in regular mail.”

  “Can you check and see exactly when these slides were sent out?”

  She left me on hold for a few moments again. “Okay, so we overnight the slides by FedEx. That way we can track them. And yours went out four days ago.”

  That’s when I remembered the FedEx charge on my bill. So Dr. Sorority Chick had forgotten to even send the slides and then just blamed the US Post Office. And this is a new thing—this New York lab. Did I even need the New York results? Did I need to pay for that, or was I just up-sized in the sale of veterinarian procedures?

  “Please let the doctor know I called and ask her to call me immediately about that FedEx package.”

  The doctor did not call for two more days. She did not mention the delay, the late mailing of the slides
, or in any way acknowledge that I’d called. She gave me the lab results—clear margins, precisely what the other results had shown—and nothing else. I tried to understand what this information gave us that we didn’t already know and to find out if this was an “optional” report. She dodged me again. Which, in a sense, was all the answer I needed. I hoped whatever research Seamus had just participated in was worthwhile. At least we could now schedule his treatments.

  Seamus would start chemotherapy on December 17. It seemed inevitable to me that I would have another crappy holiday, filled with doctors and medication and looming heartbreak. I filled the prescriptions for prednisone and doggie Benadryl. I stocked my household with chicken, rice, cottage cheese, high-protein dog food, dog toys, and pumpkin pie filling. I cooked and stored chicken for Seamus. I let him sleep on my bed, on the couch, on my lap. I talked incessantly to Seamus but almost no one else—until Chris came out to my house five days before Seamus was to start chemotherapy and we picked up our discussion of his family and our holiday plans.

  “I’m not going anywhere. My parents are both out of town for the week, and I’m obviously not welcome at your parents’ house,” I said.

  “They didn’t say that.”

  “Uh, they kind of did. I’m not welcome in your life.”

  “Okay, fine. I’ll just go over there for Christmas Eve, and then I’ll be back here with you and Da Moose for Christmas.”

  In hindsight, I can see I wanted his parents punished for daring to not approve of me. And I can see I was angry about a lot of things. Perhaps I was feeling a tad sorry for myself. “Seamus has his second chemotherapy on the twenty-third, but sure, you go spend Christmas Eve with your family and leave us here alone. That will certainly show them! Boy, they’ll know you can’t be pushed around.”

  “That’s not fair.”

  Fair? Fair? When did fair enter into anything?? And around we went again. Until finally we agreed to take a break from arguing. Chris tossed and slept in fits in my bed upstairs, and I cried, silently and alone, on the couch downstairs. Seamus, only days away from starting chemotherapy, moved between us all night—up and then down the stairs and then up again. A little before six in the morning, Chris came downstairs to me.