Oogy The Dog Only a Family Could Love

by Larry Levin

  I slept in the family room for the rest of the week, until the boys came home from camp. It was the only way to make certain that Oogy wouldn’t try to climb the stairs. I slept on the floor, not on a couch, because I knew that Oogy would climb onto the couch to sleep alongside me, putting pressure on the recently repaired joint. When the boys came home, they readily took over the job of sleeping downstairs with Oogy. They saw this partly as a responsibility that they felt they were better equipped to handle than their old dad and partly as a cool adventure. But when Oogy needed to go outside, he would go to the back door and start whining and barking. And I was always the one who heard him — the boys slept deeply — and the one who would accompany him. It was neither an imposition nor a demand. He needed me. And it enabled me to feel good about myself. I enjoyed being relied upon and being able to help.

  As it turned out, the boys’ willingness to sleep downstairs was the start of another phase of their lives. They never moved back upstairs into their own rooms. It didn’t take long for them to realize that it was actually teenage boy heaven down there. For years after Oogy had ruined the two Chesterfield sofas, there was nothing much in the formal living room, with its manteled fireplace and brass wall sconces supporting hurricane lamp electric lights, and we rarely used it. Then, slowly, it mutated into more of a recreation room than anything else. We put a ping-pong table in there, then a wide-screen TV that Jennifer was given as a gift for some environmental work she did for a client, and an Xbox 360 soon followed. There was also a wide-screen TV in the family room, and a DVD player in each room. What wasn’t there was just as essential to the downstairs experience: Jennifer and I were upstairs and could not listen to phone calls, ask about text messages, or tell the boys to turn off the TV or get off the computer and get to sleep.

  Upstairs, where both boys slept from the time they were three until they turned fifteen, their rooms have been frozen in time like broken clocks. The sports trophies they earned throughout their elementary and middle school years line the windowsills in both rooms. Bookcases are filled with books that haven’t been opened in years. In and on top of the dressers are clothes that will never be worn again and stuffed animals that have been abandoned. The only recent additions are some athletic plaques and awards from high school, as well as some newspaper clippings recounting their victories in sports.

  Following his ACL operation, Oogy was permitted only one form of exercise: walking around the yard. We did this routinely in the morning and evening, and I would come home at least once during the middle of the day for a third go-round; otherwise, his leg would stiffen up on him. Weekends, I added one or two more of these strolls. In addition, I massaged his knee every morning before work and every evening before bed. Ardmore eventually took out the stitches.

  Several weeks after the operation to repair his ACL, Oogy’s right knee became swollen and hot to the touch. He began limping again. He was running a fever and lost his appetite. Dr. Bianco examined the leg and determined that Oogy had developed a postoperative infection. I made an appointment for that same afternoon and took Oogy back to the surgeon, who ascertained that Oogy’s body had rejected the steel implants that were holding his leg together. The surgeon told me he could prescribe an antibiotic that would knock down the infection, but he was certain it would return as soon as Oogy stopped taking the medicine. He said the only sensible course was, unfortunately, to open up Oogy’s leg again, take off the plates that were in place, and use a different kind of support. That was going to cost another fifteen hundred dollars. I considered contesting the charge since I’d had nothing to do with the decision to put that type of plate on Oogy’s leg, but I realized it was not worth antagonizing the man who was going to perform the surgery. Besides, how could I prove that the decision had been medically unwise?

  Oogy spent another three days at the hospital, and when at last he returned home, we started the rehabilitative process all over again.

  After this surgery, Dr. Bianco advised that it was important to keep Oogy’s weight down to reduce stress on the repaired joint. He prescribed a diet dry food that was specially formulated to provide joint lubrication. Ever since then, Oogy hasn’t had a bite of canned dog food. Twice a day I’ve fed him half a cup of dry, all-natural dog food made from organic vegetables with some chicken added in, mixed with half a cup of the prescription dry food. Neither of these has any noticeable fat content. With breakfast, he also gets a pill that is an over-the-counter lubricant for his joints, fish oil for his coat, and Ester-C for his overall health. Dinner is the same food ration without the pills, but I sprinkle on some powder made of shark cartilage. This supplement is hailed as a joint lubricant, but it also makes me feel like a sort of witch doctor: I do not know for certain that it helps, but I want to believe that it will make things easier for him.

  When a month had passed, the surgeon announced that the healing had progressed to the point where Oogy could safely begin water therapy. He explained that swimming would allow Oogy to exercise his leg without straining it and would increase the rate at which his flexibility returned. The doctor told me there were two locations in the area where dogs could be taken to swim. His staff gave me the numbers, and I called both places. Knowing that Oogy disliked the feel of water on his body and that he also hated to be confined, I had a strong suspicion that he was not going to be an easy patient.

  When I arrived at the facility I had decided to use, a staff member greeted me and we walked into the building that housed the exercise pool. An older dog had just exited the pool, and his owner was toweling him down. The staff member explained in a quiet voice that the dog had a degenerative spinal disease.

  The staff member bent over and clasped an inflated vest on Oogy, pulling it on over his front legs. Velcro straps held the vest together on Oogy’s back, and we attached two yellow horse leads, each about twelve feet long, to rings on either side of the vest. Then we each took one of the leads and, with one of us on either side of the pool, slowly walked forward and drew a very reluctant Oogy down the steps and into the water. Oogy began to resist more actively. The staff member called over to say that Oogy would get used to it. As we guided him off the steps and into the pool itself, Oogy seemed instead to panic and flounder, inhaling large gulps of water, thrashing furiously. I saw that he was very afraid, and I could not allow that to continue. I had reached my discomfort level in seconds.

  “Let’s get him out!” I said, and we pulled Oogy back to the steps. Oogy was panting laboriously; he seemed exhausted and was clearly terribly shaken.

  I was told that many dogs reacted like Oogy the first time they went in. But it did not make any difference to me what other dogs’ experiences had been: I couldn’t and didn’t want to subject Oogy to further torment. However, because the surgeon had recommended swim therapy, I thought that we should try it at least one more time to see if there was any way to reduce his fear.

  There wasn’t. The second visit was my last. I knew I would have to try something else. Even if there was a therapeutic benefit to this experience from a physical standpoint, the emotional reaction it was causing Oogy would cancel it out, and he had already had enough of being afraid in his life. I could not allow myself to cause him any more fear. I remembered the promise I had made. I would just have to find another option.

  So I went back to Dr. Bianco, who recommended a recently opened facility nearby that provided grooming services as well as physiotherapy for small animals. I made an appointment and drove over there. My first impression was that it was a rather tony little spa catering to wealthy Main Line pet owners. But, as with so many things in life, only part of that picture was accurate.

  The facility certainly was, in part, a tony little spa catering to wealthy Main Line pet owners. It was also a superior rehabilitative facility. A vet who specialized in pet rehabilitative medicine assessed Oogy’s needs at the time of his initial visit. She prescribed a series of treatments involving electronic stimulation of his atrophied muscle as well as
hydrotherapy. The woman who administered these treatments had a specialized degree in pet physiotherapy. But actually giving Oogy the hydrotherapy treatments presented a problem. The hydrotherapy is administered in a clear Lucite box, open at the top, with a treadmill as the box’s floor. Warm water is gradually introduced while the treadmill turns at an incrementally increasing speed, so that the dog is eventually trotting with resistance that, over time, will build up the muscle without stressing it. Oogy, however, panicked when he was shut into the box, even a clear one without a top.

  After I explained what underlay this response, the therapist started very gradually to increase Oogy’s time in the box with each visit (without charging us for it). As soon as Oogy started to become afraid, she stopped the procedure, no matter what stage it was in, and let him out. She also quickly hit on the creative solution of putting another dog in the box with him. Since all the women who worked there had at least one dog — the therapist herself had two ridgebacks that, big as he is, Oogy could practically walk under — and all the dogs knew him, finding a companion dog was never a problem. After six visits, Oogy was able to embark stress-free on his course of therapy. The mass and tone of his leg returned, as did its resiliency.

  More than results matter in relationships with animals. How you get to where you need to go is critically important. The calm, loving approach exhibited by the staff at the rehab facility gave me a sense of confidence in the healing process. Oogy responded profoundly to the latter. And if I was late in picking him up, or a prior session was running late when we arrived, Oogy was used as a greeter to make other dogs feel welcomed. Here, as at AAH, the staff put the welfare of the animals in their care above any other consideration.

  One afternoon as we were leaving after Oogy’s session, the owner of a local rescue service was bringing in a dog. As it turned out, the spa also donated its services for dogs from his rescue and cleaned them up before they went to their new homes.

  As soon as he saw Oogy, he asked, “Is that a Dogo?”

  “Well done,” I said. “You’re like the fourth person I’ve met who recognized the breed.”

  “What happened to him?”

  “He was a bait dog,” I explained.

  “God bless you,” he said.

  “You know, I think that is the first time in my life anyone has ever said that to me without my having to sneeze first,” I replied.

  Right after Oogy’s operation, the surgeon had cautioned me that it is essentially inevitable that once a dog tears one ACL, he will tear the other, because he will favor the undamaged leg. A little over a year after his first ACL injury, Oogy started limping again. It was much less pronounced than it had been the last time, and Dr. Bianco could not find anything wrong even when, while Oogy was sedated for a minor operation, he manipulated the leg Oogy was favoring. The X-rays showed nothing, either. But the problem did not disappear. So after a few days of this, and realizing that just because he showed no pain did not mean he was not feeling any, I took Oogy back out to the surgeon. He merely glanced at Oogy’s gait when he came into the examination room.

  “He’s got a slow tearing of the ACL going on,” the doctor said with complete assurance.

  “You can tell that just from looking at him?” I asked somewhat incredulously.

  “I can tell that,” the doctor said. I appreciated his confidence because it underscored his expertise. And then he added, “I’m terribly sorry this happened. But now there won’t be any more.”

  He was trying to make me feel better instead of treating me impersonally, as though this were an unemotional business transaction. For the first time, he had expressed some sympathy and had made an effort to connect. I felt better about him as a result.

  Oogy had his second ACL surgically repaired — and again, he developed a postoperative infection that took him back to the hospital for several days of treatment to knock down the fever and treat the infection. The second surgery, however, was most memorable not for the procedure, but for a conversation I had with a technician there.

  When the tech who was bringing Oogy out so I could take him home entered the waiting room, I got down on the floor to say hello to my dog. The tech said to me, “This is a great dog. A great dog. He’s loving, he’s gentle, and he’s really, really smart.”

  While Oogy licked me repeatedly as if he were saying “Hello” and “Thank you for being here” and “I can’t wait to get home,” I said in an offhand fashion, “Isn’t that kind of a contradiction when it comes to dogs?”

  The tech’s eyes narrowed. “Listen,” he said to me. There was a real sternness in his tone of voice. “You don’t understand. I see hundreds of dogs each month, and every once in a while there’s one of them that’s really special. And you’ve got him.”

  When I took Oogy to Ardmore to have his stitches removed, I related this conversation to Dr. Bianco. Initially, I thought he might not have heard me. His attention remained on the task he was performing.

  Then, without looking up from his ministrations, he said, “But we already knew that.”

  CHAPTER 9

  Signs

  it sometimes feels like destiny that we were at the hospital that Saturday morning because of Buzzy’s illness, but Diane revealed to me years later that as soon as she was certain that Oogy would survive, once she had completed fostering him and knew he was adoptable, she had decided to call me to ask if I would take in this pup they had saved who had only one ear. So at some point, our phone would have rung and Oogy would have been waiting at the other end, not unlike how Noah and Dan had been waiting for us years before. The inescapable conclusion is that Oogy was meant to be here.

  There are other things that make me feel that Oogy’s involvement in our lives was preordained. Several likenesses of Oogy existed in our house for years before we actually met him. Long before the boys were born, when Jennifer and I actually had some disposable income as well as free time to travel, we happened upon an art gallery in Vancouver that specialized in Inuit art. Over three separate visits there in the next five years, we collected a number of Inuit prints for the house. One of them, which has been in our first-floor hallway for the past fifteen years, and had been in our old house for five years before that, is called My Dog Protecting Me. It shows two small white dogs in the foreground, each of which has the arm of an Inuit man in its jaw. In the background, two larger versions of the dogs in the foreground are standing on hind legs with their paws on two other Inuit men. In the center of these four figures is the face of another Inuit man. Each half of his face is looking in a different direction at one of the dog-man pairings. The two large dogs look exactly like Oogy. They have the same prominent snouts and stocky bodies, the same muscular rear haunches. They are standing on their hind legs the same way Oogy often does. I am not sure which dog is protecting whom, or from what, but my sense is that the four dogs actually represent one single dog and that they are protecting the man with two faces. This print has always spoken to me of the best of bonds between people and dogs, and looking at it has never failed to give me an appreciation of that relationship. Given the level of devotion Oogy exhibits toward us and the physical similarities he shares with the dogs in this print, it is almost as though he has stepped out of that picture and come to life — and perhaps this is why I felt I recognized him when I first met him.

  A second prescient picture cropped up years later in an entirely different context. When the boys were in seventh grade and Oogy had already been with us for a year, Dan did some research on our house for a school project. We live in the original farmhouse in our neighborhood, a part of which is about one hundred and fifty years old. Among the things Dan learned was that a former owner of the property, a veterinarian, began buying up small amounts of acreage from various neighbors until he owned about two hundred acres. During his research, Dan found a picture, which appears to have been taken in the 1930s, of the veterinarian’s son standing in front of a cornfield next to a white dog. The boy is wearing an Irish-
style cap, a plaid sweater vest, and knickers. And the dog looks exactly the way Oogy would if he had both ears. Something about that fact has always resonated with me — that before any of us was alive, a dog that looked just like Oogy lived here.

  These pictures, both strikingly similar representations of Oogy, one frozen in time eighty years past not far from where Oogy sleeps now, the other from an artist’s imagination twenty-five years ago, create a continuity of Oogy in our house, pre-dating his actual presence by decades. I hear Oogy echoing down the halls of time and back again like magic. He has been here for a long, long while.

  When he was just over a year old and we were having trouble coping with Oogy’s energy, we hired a trainer at the recommendation of a friend. The trainer, our friend told us, claimed to be able to talk to animals, but she herself was skeptical. The morning the trainer came for her first visit, I introduced her to Oogy, who was lying on his blanket in the family room. The trainer sat on the floor next to him for a full five minutes. Jennifer, Noah, Dan, and I stood just outside the doorway to the room, in the hallway, watching the trainer bend and put her head next to Oogy’s, watching her lips move next to his ear; then she would pull back a few inches and focus her gaze on him before leaning forward to whisper to him again. The four of us were exchanging skeptical glances with one another. We could not hear a word she said — or anything Oogy said back to her, for that matter. We had hired the woman to train Oogy, not to talk to him.

  When the trainer lifted her head after her discussion was complete, her eyes were brimming with tears. “Oogy wants you to know,” she said, “how much he appreciates the love and respect you’ve shown him.”

  We were not sure how to react to this statement. We could understand the truth of what she said, of course. It made sense he would have felt that way. But the statement presented a number of possibilities. Had Oogy actually communicated that to her telepathically? Or, because the trainer could see that Oogy was well loved and could also see he had been abused in the past, was she simply making a logical deduction? In the end, though, I realized that it didn’t matter — the important thing was that she had learned this about Oogy. Even if she was only stating the obvious, the obvious was noteworthy.