Bad news and a box of tissues

From the book Finding Winnie, by Lindsay Mattick

I’m sorry to be reviving the blog after so many years with bad news, but such is life. This is the story of how we learned about Captain's illness. This is the beginning of an end. 

(Sidenote: I accidentally posted this as an 'update' to a post I must have started in 2016, so for some reason that year is in the post's url link, despite updating the date of the post in blogger, which my perfectionistic side could not let go of and had to mention. In any case, this all started in February-March of 2020. I think we can all agree, 2020 is pretty much the worst.)

Late in February, Captain had 2 or 3 days where he barely ate, and highly uncharacteristically, he slept in our basement one of those nights. He’s had periods of not eating much before, especially due to stress, and he’s never been one of those dogs to gobble down food as soon as we put it out. Most days, breakfast sits until midday at least. So the eating concerned me somewhat less; it was the way he sat down in his bed with his head facing the wall; how he didn’t follow me around; the sleeping in a different room. The Velcro was gone. I remember laying down on the floor in our living room with him, sobbing, because he was acting so not himself, and I was worried about what that meant. “Don’t leave me yet, buddy.” I whispered. 

I took him to the vet, they did blood work, and nothing came back really abnormal. Some mild anemia, but regenerative, so not something the vet thought was indicative of a major issue. I kept worrying about a popsicle stick he had swallowed whole (a year earlier), but both our vet as well as a good friend of ours from college who is a vet kept reassuring me that was highly unlikely to be causing issues at this point. I bought Captain some special food, and he started eating more. Then my husband returned a few days later from travel for work, and he seemed back to normal, so we assumed it may have been just due to missing him. 

If I’m being honest with myself, though, I think I convinced myself of that, because I didn’t want it to be anything more serious. 

Then comes COVID. We’re all at home, all day, every day, since March 13 (The irony that our schools closed on Friday the 13^th was not lost on me). I joked that Vizslas masterminded the quarantine so they could be with their families 24-7. 

Some time into the quarantine, Captain stopped eating again. We could coax him with special treats, but essentially he would not touch kibble. We thought maybe it was his teeth, so we tried softening it with water, or chicken broth, or better yet the juice from hamburger meat. All this helped to some extent, but it was such a challenge to get him to eat that we called the vet. We had to wait nearly a week for an appointment due to COVID. 

When I took him to the vet, in this strange new world, I had to sit in the car. I wore a mask and gloves (the only ones I could find, my running ones) and had to speak to the vet over the phone. I called to let them know we’d arrived, and then did a “socially distanced” hand off outside. I waited in the car. Not too long later the vet called and said he found a mass in Captain’s belly that he believed to be a tumor. Honestly, I don’t remember the details of the call well, and I didn’t even an hour later. I think my brain went into a kind of fog. He mentioned we could expect a survival of only 3-6 months even if we did surgery and chemotherapy. I did not press on what the expectation was without those options, though I did express we would not want to put him through that, and just wanted him to be as comfortable as possible for as long as possible. I do remember very clearly the vet saying: “I just want to be clear we understand the prognosis here.” I nodded, despite being on the phone, and then said in a brave, calm voice, “Yes, I understand.” And we discussed x-rays vs ultrasounds and next steps, but I had such a hard time processing the news of hearing what I’d feared most, and trying to make decisions around it. 

A question hung in my head, one I could not bring myself to ask the vet. I knew it could not change anything now. But in my head, I was asking: “If I had brought him back in earlier, would the prognosis have been different?” The guilt. I pushed the question down. It stuck in my throat. 

The assistant, who must have been informed of our news, walked by the car and offered me a box of tissues. I smiled confidently and shook my head no thanks, waving to her. And then she turned away and I started crying into my running gloves, shamelessly blowing my nose into them.

A little bit later they brought Captain back out, and the assistant gave me a comforting look, and said through her face mask, “He’s such a regal dog.” My eyes filled with tears as I nodded, took the anti-inflammatory medication, and got Captain back in the car. And then I started sobbing. As we drove home, the conversation with the vet, and the details of the discussion, got hazier and hazier. 

I texted my friend from college who is a vet in New York. She walked through the most likely scenarios. Hemangiosarcoma was one. It did not have a good outcome. I managed to ask her the question I could not bring myself to ask earlier, essentially, was this my fault for not taking him in sooner. She said little was likely to have changed even if we had followed up earlier on; if this was the cancer we’d feared, it’s hard to detect early, and grows rapidly. She noted some of her oncologist friends used a Chinese herb to help with internal bleeding; I wish I had ordered it that day, but instead I waited until Monday, after the ultrasound….

Later that afternoon, I spoke to another vet friend, this time local; a parent from my daughter’s school. She was at home, too, with her two daughters, and responded to my email almost immediately, telling me to call her. She spent nearly 45 minutes on the phone with me, helping me understand the potential scenarios, and explaining things in a way I can only describe as motherly, comforting, and understanding, which is exactly what I needed in that moment. She and my vet friend in NY were the information and support I needed. I decided we had to get Captain in for an ultrasound to confirm what was going on, and so we scheduled it for that Monday, with her husband, who was also a vet (and who, we would learn, had the same calming and supportive communication style). Over the weekend, a pit sat in my stomach that I tried to ignore.

On Monday, it was my husband who took Captain to the vet, for the ultrasound that would give us more clarity. As I wrote on our Facebook page, I was reading a story to my girls just before my younger one’s nap time, called Finding Winnie. My husband had left a little earlier to take Captain to the vet. I was still hoping there would be a way Captain would be ok – with surgery, perhaps; or maybe the first vet was just plain wrong and it was something else, something easily fixable. Maybe it was just a lump that could be removed. Maybe it WAS the popsicle stick. I read this page:

And started crying. I guess I knew, deep down, that his story was ending. But I was so not ready for it to be over. The first vet had told me. His words rang in my head. “I just want to make sure we understand the prognosis here.” But I didn’t want to believe it, and I kept thinking there might be another version of the story. My girls looked at me, a little bewildered at the tears streaming down Mommy’s face, and I tried to pull it together. We finished the book, I coerced Nugget 3 into bed, and then went downstairs to put on Nugget 2’s kindergarten zoom class. I went back upstairs after hearing Nugget 3 talking to herself, playing with toys in her bed, which was incredibly adorable and so I was sneaking a video of her, when my husband called. Video of cuteness interrupted. 

“What did they say?” I didn’t want to ask. The words sort of choked out of my mouth.

His voice was heavy. He simply said, “It’s spread all over.” 

A weak, soft “Oh” escaped my body. I nodded, the tears again beginning to stream down my face, this time in confirmation of what I had feared but thought could avoid. I had been hoping it would just come down to a question of money, that we could fix this. Instead, it was too late. There was nothing we could do. 

My husband came home with two large packages of special treats for Captain. I think that image of him walking back through the door with those bags will be seared in my memory, because you see, I was always the one to spoil Captain.  It made me catch my breath. 

Later that night, I was sitting on the couch next to Captain and my husband, reading people’s Facebook comments on the post I’d left sharing the news. I started crying and then went into the kitchen, resolving to write my feelings. But then I just started sobbing, and my husband came in and said, “What are you doing?” and I said, between sobs, “Sitting in the corner crying and eating cake.” (The girls and I, for no reason at all other than it was a Monday during a pandemic, had made a cake that day.) We laughed a little at me and then he said to me “He’s not gone yet. Come cuddle with us.” And so I left the writing aside for another time, and tried to remind myself to soak up the time with Captain. And then I fed him the cake I didn’t really want to eat, which he thoroughly enjoyed, and it made me smile.

---

When someone you love is given a worst-case prognosis, you have two choices. You can break down sobbing every time you see them, or you can try to enjoy the time you have with them. I spent most of those first few days after the diagnosis doing the former. The only way I could do the latter was convincing myself of a different outcome, that he was going to be ok, or at the least, he’d defy the odds and live longer than the projections.   

But it was clear, I suppose, that he was growing old quickly, and that he didn’t have much longer with us. He was so skinny it was almost painful to look at him. We took him on a very short walk and a little girl in our neighborhood said to us: “Hey, is that the really fast dog?” My husband responded that he did used to run really fast, and she responded, “He looks too skinny now.” And he said yes, he had gotten sick. And then she scootered off. 

There were a few times over that week and a half period when he stumbled a bit as he was walking. It made me feel enormously sad, but also angry.  Angry at this stupid thing that took over his body from the inside. That was making him feel this way. That stole years from his life. I hate you, cancer. I hate you, I hate you, I hate you. 

It just wasn’t supposed to go down this way. Sure, cancer is common, but it’s something that happens to other people’s dogs, to other people. Captain has had such a healthy life. His face isn’t even white yet. I’ve seen plenty of other Vizslas, old, fully white/gray, covered in lumps. Why Captain? Why my Vizsla? Could I have done something differently? Did he get this because of anything I did? I couldn’t help feeling responsible. I am, after all, supposed to be the one who takes care of him in this world. I’m supposed to protect him, keep him safe, happy, and healthy. And I had no way to combat what was happening inside him. It sucks to feel helpless. 

The hardest part in all of this is imaging life without Captain. I can’t. It is hard to fully sum up everything he means to us. But you know. If you’ve had a dog, you know. It’s the greeting every time you walk through the door. It’s the cuddles on the couch (or your bed). If your dog is/was a Vizsla, it’s the following you around everywhere you go, the stare-downs (Vizsla mind tricks!), the wiggle butts, all the things that make Vizslas Vizslas… But it’s all the things that make Captain uniquely Captain, too. His little whines and nudges when he wants something from me. His back-and-forth runs between myself and my husband; it’s when he climbs in our laps; the way he looks at me; the way he lies in the sun, or leans up against me for a cuddle; his EARS (oh those ears!!); yes even his smell. Most of all it’s simply him with me, by my side. He has this strong, sweet personality that can calm me, make me feel better, make me laugh. I can’t imagine walking in the door and not having him here. I can’t imagine calling out “Captain!” and not having him come.  

Between my husband and myself, I’m more often the pessimist (or what I might describe as the realist.) But at every opportunity after Captain’s diagnosis on Monday, I blocked it away. I said “No” every time my husband attempted a “I don’t know…” conversation about Captain’s decline during that week. My Chinese medicine was coming and was going to fix everything. 

I did very little searching for information about hemagiosarcoma; uncharacteristic of me to not want to find out more. I googled it once. A brief description popped up, and my eyes honed in on the words “one to two weeks.” I sharply inhaled; I think might have also sworn. I scanned further and read that some dogs can live longer than that, for several months, and you see, there it was again. The catch. The sweet myth of hope in the face of intolerable sadness. That mixture swirled in my head, as we spent what would become our final days with Captain.