The Empty House

The house feels empty now, though John and Roz and I are still in it, along with Stormy and Lilyrose Serena.  Na’ilah was a big dog, usually stretched out in the middle of the kitchen floor or filling the hallway between the kitchen and the laundry room.  Her large presence absorbed sound waves and family tension; she sent out a calm energy, vibrations of unconditional acceptance.  The little dogs would skitter nervously when humans walked over them, but Na’ilah never blinked or raised her head. 

She’s not in the house now because Roz and I took her to be euthanized.  Bloody lymphatic fluid began dripping from her chin and from the node hanging below her collar this afternoon, staining her white neck and chest.  Actually, we had been worried that she wouldn’t make it through Saturday night.  When I’d taken her and Stormy for their walk on Friday and Saturday, she had walked very slowly.  A few hours after her Saturday walk, she stopped walking, probably because of pain.  Her breathing was very heavy and difficult.  We gave her a painkiller, and at midnight I managed to get her outside to pee, but she couldn’t walk up the three steps to get back in the house.  Desperate to get Na’ilah to her bed, I bent over, slipped my arms under her, and carried her up the steps to the laundry room, where we both collapsed.  At 3 am I came downstairs to confirm she was still breathing, and at 8 am I was relieved to find her alive and no longer in serious pain.  She walked outside to eat her usual big bowl of kibble mixed with half a cup of chunky stew, her canned food.  That meant I could go to church and postpone the decision over whether and when to call the mobile vet to put her down.

Driving home, I thought about the previous Sunday when I had driven her and Stormy to Will Rogers State Historical Park for their weekly hike on Inspiration Loop.  Maybe I could drive them there today and just let Na’ilah walk around on the spacious green lawn, sniffing for squirrels.  I ate lunch and weighed whether to take her for one last excursion; she loves the mountains and wags her tail excitedly, sniffing the air from her window as we near the park.  No, I decided; I’ll just walk her around the neighborhood like yesterday, down 14^th Street to Maple and back. 

As I put on my hiking boots and got the leashes, Na’ilah stood up and walked to the door happily.  Stormy ran circles around us.  But once outside, Na’ilah stopped before we passed even one house.  She lowered her back end to pee and turned back toward home.

“Okay, Na’ilah,” I said, looking at the opposite end of the block. “We’ll go the other way.”  My goal was now just to circle our block itself, no further, but she wouldn’t walk in that direction either.  She turned toward the front door.  An hour later as she lay near the back porch, her swollen glands started leaking all over her front fur.  It was time. 

I started to make calls, first delighting Na’ilah with a rawhide bone, but Dr. Jones had closed at 4 pm, and two mobile vets said they couldn’t come until the next day.  We realized that ASEC, the emergency clinic open 24 hours, would help us.  While we slowly led Na’ilah to the car, Stormy ran and jumped in the back before we got there.  She usually went with us to all Na’ilah’s appointments, keeping her company and worrying until Na’ilah reappeared after her chemo.

“No, Stormy, not this time,” Roz said to her.

“Why not?” I argued. 

“No,” she said firmly to me.  Because Roz is the dog whisperer in our family, I defer to her on these issues. 

John lifted Stormy out of the car after letting her say goodbye; Lilyrose was also put in the back to sniff her big sister, but she had no idea what was going on.  John stayed home with them while Roz and I drove to ASEC one last time. 

Roz began crying as two young women techs put the IV into a vein just above Na’ilah’s right paw. 

“It’s at her wrist, just like with humans,” I commented. 

“They don’t do this to humans!” Roz cried. 

“I know, I just meant—” I began, resting on my knees next to Na’ilah.  “You’re a sweet puppy,” I said, kissing her head and stroking her back.  I couldn’t take my eyes off her beautiful front paws, now become irrelevant.  They were still strong and perfect, symmetrical except for one white toe and nail on her left back paw next to all the brown toes with grey nails.  No lymphoma here, but soon her feet would never move again.

A kind young vet with gold tennis shoes came in and injected the first drug, a relaxer.

“And then your Propofol, just like Michael Jackson,” Roz murmured to Na’ilah.

Soon my tender-hearted daughter was in tears, but I don’t usually cry on these occasions.  All I could think was, “Roz, don’t ever do this to me.”  She’s been smoking for more than twenty years, and my worst nightmare is that I might be at her bedside when lung cancer or some other horror takes her. 

“I’ve done this before,” I explained to her later.  “With Typo and Corky and one of our cats.” 

“With Katy Kat!” she exclaimed.  “It was my birthday, and Dad and I were leaving to go to a Lakers game, about 2005.  “She couldn’t stand up, and we had to leave.  You took her to Dr. Jones.”   Then we reminisced about the beautiful goodbye to Mocha in our home a few years later with all of us present and a mobile vet officiating.

When we got home, Stormy was standing at the screen door waiting.  She sniffed at Na’ilah’s collar and leash, turning and looking for her.  John gave me a big hug. 

Everything about the house feels strange.  Cleo runs freely through the living room with no danger of attack.  I can walk up and down the stairs without needing to replace the gate that separated predator and prey.  I start putting a load of blood-stained bedding into the washing machine and later into the dryer.  For six years I have never turned the dryer on in the evening because it’s next to Na’ilah’s bed; the sharp noises of zippers and metal snaps rolling inside always frightens her, perhaps a reminder of the BBs and gunfire.  But tonight I can turn the dryer on. 

For months, 20% of my attention has been focused on this dog—it’s time to feed her, walk her, give her fresh water, check her butt, give her meds or a treat or a hug.  Best of all, I might bring Cleo down in my arms to let Na’ilah fix her hunter’s stare on the cat and plan her attack.  This evening my mind keeps turning to these caring tasks, only to be stymied.  “This is how widows behave,” I think.  “Like my mother when she no longer had my father to care for.”  A mind completely programmed for certain behaviors now needs to be reset.   

There’s no need to do anything tonight except run loads of laundry, vacuum, mop the floor, sort through the extra-large dog beds and blankets and food bowls to give them away.  I succumb to a frenzy of cleaning. 

Perhaps I have no tears because I’ve been reading too many Holocaust survivor stories.  Or because a well-known Christian feminist, just 37 years old, died Saturday morning after two weeks in the hospital with the flu and a reaction to antibiotics, leaving two toddlers.  Then there’s the news that a pregnant woman, a four-month-old girl, and a twelve-year-old boy were among those killed in Gaza today in renewed Israeli-Palestinian fighting. 

Perhaps tears will come later, but for now I have only the hollow feeling that the dog closest to my heart is gone.  The house is empty, and I will not be picking up any more abandoned dogs by the side of the road.  That was the kind of thing someone in her sixties would do, impulsively, but I am seventy now and it’s not a good time to take on more responsibilities

Last visit to the vet?

Na'ilah with enlarged lymph nodes at her neck and in front of her shoulder

Today Na'ilah went to visit Dr. Sue Downing, the oncologist at Animal Surgery and Emergency Clinic (ASEC) on Sepulveda in west Los Angeles.

She enjoys the ride in the car and has to look at everything we pass from an open window.

But she's in the final stages of the lymphoma we discovered last July, 2018.  She was probably around four years old when we got her in 2013, so now she might be about ten years old. 

It started in the left lymph node under her jaw, and now it's "bilobal mandibular 4-5 cm" and also in the lymph node at the intersection of her left front leg and her chest "prescapular 8 cm."

Last July we had to make a choice: no treatment, watching it progress until we needed to euthanize her, probably by September--or paying for expensive chemotherapy that could give her another year or more of life.  You can guess which one we chose.

Many thousands of dollars later, she is literally on her last legs.  It's getting harder for her to breathe because the increased lymph tissue is pressing on her windpipe from both sides.  Dr. Downing says the windpipe won't constrict or collapse, but it is getting twisted.

Her liver and her spleen are enlarged, and her abdominal muscles are weakened from the Prednisone she is getting twice a day.  When she stands, her abdomen sags and looks large.  Dr. Downing says the Prednisone causes "generalized muscle atrophy."

Na'ilah's anorectal tissue is also weakened and under pressure from growth of lymphoma in the tissue that lines the rectum, so she has a 2 cm prolapse there.  It bothers her, perhaps itches--she licks it and bites it sometimes.  Our job is to put on plastic gloves, get a dab of Vaseline, and push the rectum back in, wiping her tush carefully afterward to clean off the Vaseline and blood.

Ah, the tasks of a pet owner!  If it's not giving subcutaneous hydration to a dying cat, it's tending the butt of a sick dog.

When John and I got our first dog, a black Doberman we named Typo, we were poor and didn't go in for elaborate treatment after learning that she had cancer at age six.  We just held her paw while the vet at UC Davis put her down.  That was 1978.

But now we are retired and less able to put an animal's death into its proper place in the grand scheme of things.  Na'ilah is like a child, and we pay almost anything to extend her life.

Neither Typo nor Na'ilah was a planned acquisition to the family.  Typo was born next door--actually in the other half of our duplex-- in a litter of adorable puppies, so her admission to our household was inevitable.

Na'ilah was a forlorn ridgeback standing out on a rock pedestal in monsoon rain in northern Arizona.  The story of how I got her into my car and drove her to Los Angeles is the first post on this blog, August 25, 2013.

She wasn't the first abandoned dog I had taken in.  Back in 1984 in Daly City, I'd brought home a small scruffy street dog that turned out to be one-quarter coyote.  We named her Extra.

Neither Typo nor Extra cost us much money beyond the food, but Na'ilah turned out to be an expensive acquisition.  She weighed less than fifty pounds and had a few parasitic diseases as well as Transmissible Venereal Tumor, TVT.  It's one of the earliest known forms of cancer.  She also had two BBs in her hip and a few small rocks in her stomach from eating dirt.

Our vet, Dr. Kenneth Jones, fell in love with her, and she was also a hot topic at ASEC, treated by Dr. Downing.  Los Angeles vets don't often come across cases of this cancer because it's transmitted when dogs run in packs, as some do in the Navajo Nation.  I talked John into paying for chemo that didn't help and then radiation, which cured her.  Big bucks for this rez dog.

A few months after I brought her home in August, she attacked a cat that we encountered during a walk around the neighborhood.  The cat survived, barely, but we had to pay the $4,500 surgery bill at ASEC.  Thus we learned that Rhodesian ridgebacks were bred to hunt lions.

Later she killed another cat that ventured into our back yard, but we didn't hold this against her.  It didn't cost us anything except the embarrassment of returning the corpse to our neighbor.

In her last few months Na'ilah has the pleasure of hunting a cat who actually lives in our house.  Cleopatra is a refugee cat whose home burned down in last November's fire in Malibu.  John's sister and her family are homeless and living for the moment in the house of a director who is in New Zealand shooting a film.  The director has allergies to cats, so we are cat-sitting.

Beautiful, sleek black Cleo is the joy of Na'ilah's last days.  Occasionally we find Cleo on top of a bookcase with Na'ilah trying to climb up to her, but Cleo is supposed to live upstairs while Na'ilah is either downstairs or outside with our other dogs.

Most of the time Na'ilah maintains a vigil at the foot of the staircase near the gate, waiting for Cleo to appear.  She waits for hours and is usually rewarded by Cleo putting in an appearance, rolling and stretching just out of Na'ilah's reach.

Today may have been Na'ilah's last visit to ASEC.  Dr. Downing gave me a list of vets who do home visits, including the euthanasia of a pet.  We did this ten years ago with Mocha, our shepherd mix.

Stormy and Lilyrose Serena

I say goodbye to the staff at ASEC and realize I'm going to miss my twice-monthly visits, expensive as they are.

But we still have a corgi, Stormy, and a chihuahua, Lilyrose Serena, so chances are we'll show up again at ASEC with a case that Dr. Jones can't handle.