Gone to the Dogs
I started wanting a dog when I was about seven years old. I used to sing “Only You” to my grandmother’s schnauzer, and he would get so excited that it just sent these tiny injections of joy directly into my heart. But, up until recently I had such a busy lifestyle that getting a dog wasn’t really feasible. Things changed in the winter of 2007, which was a particularly difficult season. I was lonely, stressed out and overburdened. I was sick of my hectic lifestyle and in desperate need of some dog love, so I offered to watch a friend’s chocolate lab over Thanksgiving break.
Shortly after he arrived at my apartment I came down with the stomach flu and a fever. I felt really guilty that I couldn’t walk the dog, but he didn’t care. He climbed onto the couch, wedged himself between the cushion and my body, and draped his paw across my stomach. Apart from eating and going outside to pee, that dog did not leave my side until the fever broke. Later in the week I felt better and we were out walking. As I watched him prance to and fro with little droplets of snow on his nose, I knew I needed a dog of my own.
I immediately began to draft a strategy for what I called, “Puppy Plan 2008.” I researched breeders and put a deposit down on a yellow lab months before she was even born. I read umpteen books on dog training and marked them up with a highlighter and sticky notes. I watched hundreds of hours of dog shows on Animal Planet. By the time I brought Nellie home as a puppy, I had a full Excel spreadsheet detailing, down to the minute, when she would eat, sleep, poop, practice leash training and commands, and participate in “bonding” exercises.
I was surprised to note that Nellie was a sentient being who had her own ideas about when to eat, sleep and poop. Those early days of her puppyhood were adventuresome and trying. I still lived in an apartment at the time, so potty training was especially athletic. Whenever I saw Nellie crouching on her hind legs, I’d dive across the room, scoop her up, tuck her under my arm like a football and run down three flights of stairs to put her on the grass. We did this approximately 437 times a day.
While she was a perfectly pleasant during the daylight hours, Nellie experienced a complete personality transformation at about 8:00 PM every evening and became what a friend of mine termed, “Demon Dog.” Just as we approached the staircase after her evening pee, Nellie would start protesting, bucking like a staillion and resisting the leash. By the time I got her up the stairs and into the apartment I was scratched and bleeding out of puncture wounds from her tiny needle teeth. Then she would go completely schitzo, run around the apartment in a frantic rage, and repeatedly launch herself onto the couch until I took her down like a sumo wrestler.
Nellie needed constant supervision. Once, I left the room for 30 seconds to start a load of laundry and came back to discover that the puppy was no where to be found. “How far could she have gone in a one bedroom apartment?” I asked myself, opening and closing kitchen cabinets. After an extensive search I found that she had fallen into a crevice between the couch and the end table. She was just sitting there, listening to me call her, while peacefully chewing on a copy of “How to Raise a Puppy You Can Live With.”
I had a lot of rules for my dog in the early days, most of them centered in Cesar Milan’s (Dog Whisperer) philosophy that canines need humans to be leaders, not overly-sentimental basket cases. So, I was determined that I would be a calm, assertive pack leader. I would not baby talk to my dog, and I would certainly NOT refer to myself as her “Mommy.” I would not give her any affection until she had received a structured, disciplined walk, and absolutely, positively, under no circumstances was the dog allowed to sleep in my bed.
It’s difficult to determine when these rules started to disintegrate, but the more I grew to love Nellie, the less structured things became. I couldn’t wait until she had been walked and put through a 20 minute training regime. One look at her fuzzy widdle ears and her tiny wet nose and I simply had to suffocate her with hugs and kisses. Also, I didn’t use baby talk with my dog – it was something much worse. I spoke normally when other people were around, but as soon as they left me alone with Nellie I began to sound like some kind of escaped mental patient with a speech impediment. I said nonsensical things like, “You need go ow-sigh and go potties?” and “No bites. That hurt Mommy.” I felt ashamed that the State of Colorado was trusting me to educate America’s youth.
After two months only one rule remained steadfast: Nellie still did not sleep in my room or in my bed. Then, one night, I watched the movie “Into the Wild,” which was not (empirically) considered a horror film, but I have an overactive imagination and the sight of Christopher McCandless’s corpse in that abandoned bus was enough to haunt me for several nights in a row.
“This is just silly,” I thought to myself on the fourth night of insomnia. “I’m laying here in the dark, afraid, when I have a little puppy who is perfectly capable of distracting me.” So, I moved Nellie’s crate into my bedroom, thinking her mere presence would provide enough comfort. But I couldn’t see inside her crate in the dark, so it was almost like she wasn’t even there. Shortly thereafter, she was out of her crate and sleeping on a doggie pillow on the floor next to my bed.
About a month later, I was feeling particularly lonesome and found myself, again, unable to sleep. So, I piled some blankets on the floor next to Nellie’s pillow and tucked my arm into her soft fur. I slept with her again the next night, and the next. My back hurt so much after two weeks of sleeping on the floor that I finally gave up and put the dog in my bed, which is where she sleeps to this day.
If you asked my friends to describe my personality, they would probably say something like “structured to the point of insanity” or “considerably anal.” And that’s if they were being nice. I’m not just type-A. I’m a capital “A” in bold, 24-point font. But having a dog has helped me let go of some of the structure in my life, and that’s not frightening – it’s totally freeing. More importantly, though I made up all these rules for how I was going to raise Nellie, they all went out the window as soon as I loved her. She taught me one of the most important lessons about love: there simply are no rules. True love is unstructured, undisciplined, and completely disarming.
Yesterday, Nellie went to the vet for her one year check-up and booster shots. The night before her appointment, I made a list of things I wanted to ask the vet about, such as Nellie’s occasional dry cough, excessive panting after exercise, and the fact that I had missed her heartworm preventative two months in a row. Stupidly, I decided to Google all of these symptoms in order to prepare myself for the possible prognosis. After about an hour of surfing the web, I determined that Nellie was suffering from heartworm, hip dysplasia, cancer, heart disease, and lung conjunctivitis.
I felt the worst about the heartworm, because it was I who had forgotten to give her the preventative medication during the months of January and February. Heartworm is a parasite carried by mosquitoes, and it can only be treated with a very dangerous drug that contains arsenic. I read blog after blog in which dog owners wept over the dangers and painful side effects of this medication. I clicked on photo after photo of parasites eating the hearts of dogs from the inside out. Not good bedtime reading.
By the time I stumbled into bed at midnight, I had worked myself into a state of absolute, irrational hysteria. I was convinced that the next day I would take Nellie to the vet and she would say, “Well, Alice, your dog is going to die. You should have remembered the heartworm preventative. C'est la vie.” I ran into the bathroom, thinking I might vomit. Then I came out to find Nellie sleeping peacefully on my pillow with her paw tucked under her chin. “Look at her!” I exclaimed to absolutely no one. “How could I not have noticed she was in such a weakened state?” I wept into her furry tummy and begged God to let my dog live. Nellie rolled over and yawned.
Mysteriously, the anxiety disappeared as quickly as it came. “It’s unlikely she was bitten by a mosquito in the dead of winter,” I told myself, and eventually I, too, fell asleep. The next day I told the vet the whole story about my paranoia the night before, thinking we would both have a good laugh about it. She chuckled, but she also looked a little afraid. “My mother always told me I was overly imaginative,” I attempted to explain.
“Yeah, well. Nellie’s perfectly healthy,” the vet replied with her hand on the doorknob.
“I won’t forget her heartworm preventative again. I put a reminder on the calendar in my cell phone!”
Before I knew it the vet was out the door, “Sounds good, Alice! See you next year!” she said, briskly heading down the hall. Hopefully, I wasn’t the only freak she had to deal with that day.
It’s true. I do have an overactive imagination. It’s both a blessing and a curse. But, more than anything, this experience frightened and amazed me because I never realized how deeply attached I am to Nellie.
Dog love is difficult to explain.
This is all I can say: my dog is devastated when I leave the house and she’s elated when I come home. She’s equally elated when she gets to chase a crunchy-looking leaf blowing in the breeze. I can buy her treats and toys, but she’s perfectly content with a stick and a sunbeam. She has no yesterdays, and no tomorrows. It’s as though that dog is in tune with something about God – the universe – eternity – that I will never fully comprehend. I envy that.
Shortly after he arrived at my apartment I came down with the stomach flu and a fever. I felt really guilty that I couldn’t walk the dog, but he didn’t care. He climbed onto the couch, wedged himself between the cushion and my body, and draped his paw across my stomach. Apart from eating and going outside to pee, that dog did not leave my side until the fever broke. Later in the week I felt better and we were out walking. As I watched him prance to and fro with little droplets of snow on his nose, I knew I needed a dog of my own.
I immediately began to draft a strategy for what I called, “Puppy Plan 2008.” I researched breeders and put a deposit down on a yellow lab months before she was even born. I read umpteen books on dog training and marked them up with a highlighter and sticky notes. I watched hundreds of hours of dog shows on Animal Planet. By the time I brought Nellie home as a puppy, I had a full Excel spreadsheet detailing, down to the minute, when she would eat, sleep, poop, practice leash training and commands, and participate in “bonding” exercises.
I was surprised to note that Nellie was a sentient being who had her own ideas about when to eat, sleep and poop. Those early days of her puppyhood were adventuresome and trying. I still lived in an apartment at the time, so potty training was especially athletic. Whenever I saw Nellie crouching on her hind legs, I’d dive across the room, scoop her up, tuck her under my arm like a football and run down three flights of stairs to put her on the grass. We did this approximately 437 times a day.
While she was a perfectly pleasant during the daylight hours, Nellie experienced a complete personality transformation at about 8:00 PM every evening and became what a friend of mine termed, “Demon Dog.” Just as we approached the staircase after her evening pee, Nellie would start protesting, bucking like a staillion and resisting the leash. By the time I got her up the stairs and into the apartment I was scratched and bleeding out of puncture wounds from her tiny needle teeth. Then she would go completely schitzo, run around the apartment in a frantic rage, and repeatedly launch herself onto the couch until I took her down like a sumo wrestler.
Nellie needed constant supervision. Once, I left the room for 30 seconds to start a load of laundry and came back to discover that the puppy was no where to be found. “How far could she have gone in a one bedroom apartment?” I asked myself, opening and closing kitchen cabinets. After an extensive search I found that she had fallen into a crevice between the couch and the end table. She was just sitting there, listening to me call her, while peacefully chewing on a copy of “How to Raise a Puppy You Can Live With.”
I had a lot of rules for my dog in the early days, most of them centered in Cesar Milan’s (Dog Whisperer) philosophy that canines need humans to be leaders, not overly-sentimental basket cases. So, I was determined that I would be a calm, assertive pack leader. I would not baby talk to my dog, and I would certainly NOT refer to myself as her “Mommy.” I would not give her any affection until she had received a structured, disciplined walk, and absolutely, positively, under no circumstances was the dog allowed to sleep in my bed.
It’s difficult to determine when these rules started to disintegrate, but the more I grew to love Nellie, the less structured things became. I couldn’t wait until she had been walked and put through a 20 minute training regime. One look at her fuzzy widdle ears and her tiny wet nose and I simply had to suffocate her with hugs and kisses. Also, I didn’t use baby talk with my dog – it was something much worse. I spoke normally when other people were around, but as soon as they left me alone with Nellie I began to sound like some kind of escaped mental patient with a speech impediment. I said nonsensical things like, “You need go ow-sigh and go potties?” and “No bites. That hurt Mommy.” I felt ashamed that the State of Colorado was trusting me to educate America’s youth.
After two months only one rule remained steadfast: Nellie still did not sleep in my room or in my bed. Then, one night, I watched the movie “Into the Wild,” which was not (empirically) considered a horror film, but I have an overactive imagination and the sight of Christopher McCandless’s corpse in that abandoned bus was enough to haunt me for several nights in a row.
“This is just silly,” I thought to myself on the fourth night of insomnia. “I’m laying here in the dark, afraid, when I have a little puppy who is perfectly capable of distracting me.” So, I moved Nellie’s crate into my bedroom, thinking her mere presence would provide enough comfort. But I couldn’t see inside her crate in the dark, so it was almost like she wasn’t even there. Shortly thereafter, she was out of her crate and sleeping on a doggie pillow on the floor next to my bed.
About a month later, I was feeling particularly lonesome and found myself, again, unable to sleep. So, I piled some blankets on the floor next to Nellie’s pillow and tucked my arm into her soft fur. I slept with her again the next night, and the next. My back hurt so much after two weeks of sleeping on the floor that I finally gave up and put the dog in my bed, which is where she sleeps to this day.
If you asked my friends to describe my personality, they would probably say something like “structured to the point of insanity” or “considerably anal.” And that’s if they were being nice. I’m not just type-A. I’m a capital “A” in bold, 24-point font. But having a dog has helped me let go of some of the structure in my life, and that’s not frightening – it’s totally freeing. More importantly, though I made up all these rules for how I was going to raise Nellie, they all went out the window as soon as I loved her. She taught me one of the most important lessons about love: there simply are no rules. True love is unstructured, undisciplined, and completely disarming.
Yesterday, Nellie went to the vet for her one year check-up and booster shots. The night before her appointment, I made a list of things I wanted to ask the vet about, such as Nellie’s occasional dry cough, excessive panting after exercise, and the fact that I had missed her heartworm preventative two months in a row. Stupidly, I decided to Google all of these symptoms in order to prepare myself for the possible prognosis. After about an hour of surfing the web, I determined that Nellie was suffering from heartworm, hip dysplasia, cancer, heart disease, and lung conjunctivitis.
I felt the worst about the heartworm, because it was I who had forgotten to give her the preventative medication during the months of January and February. Heartworm is a parasite carried by mosquitoes, and it can only be treated with a very dangerous drug that contains arsenic. I read blog after blog in which dog owners wept over the dangers and painful side effects of this medication. I clicked on photo after photo of parasites eating the hearts of dogs from the inside out. Not good bedtime reading.
By the time I stumbled into bed at midnight, I had worked myself into a state of absolute, irrational hysteria. I was convinced that the next day I would take Nellie to the vet and she would say, “Well, Alice, your dog is going to die. You should have remembered the heartworm preventative. C'est la vie.” I ran into the bathroom, thinking I might vomit. Then I came out to find Nellie sleeping peacefully on my pillow with her paw tucked under her chin. “Look at her!” I exclaimed to absolutely no one. “How could I not have noticed she was in such a weakened state?” I wept into her furry tummy and begged God to let my dog live. Nellie rolled over and yawned.
Mysteriously, the anxiety disappeared as quickly as it came. “It’s unlikely she was bitten by a mosquito in the dead of winter,” I told myself, and eventually I, too, fell asleep. The next day I told the vet the whole story about my paranoia the night before, thinking we would both have a good laugh about it. She chuckled, but she also looked a little afraid. “My mother always told me I was overly imaginative,” I attempted to explain.
“Yeah, well. Nellie’s perfectly healthy,” the vet replied with her hand on the doorknob.
“I won’t forget her heartworm preventative again. I put a reminder on the calendar in my cell phone!”
Before I knew it the vet was out the door, “Sounds good, Alice! See you next year!” she said, briskly heading down the hall. Hopefully, I wasn’t the only freak she had to deal with that day.
It’s true. I do have an overactive imagination. It’s both a blessing and a curse. But, more than anything, this experience frightened and amazed me because I never realized how deeply attached I am to Nellie.
Dog love is difficult to explain.
This is all I can say: my dog is devastated when I leave the house and she’s elated when I come home. She’s equally elated when she gets to chase a crunchy-looking leaf blowing in the breeze. I can buy her treats and toys, but she’s perfectly content with a stick and a sunbeam. She has no yesterdays, and no tomorrows. It’s as though that dog is in tune with something about God – the universe – eternity – that I will never fully comprehend. I envy that.
posted by Alice | 3:58 PM
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