Ever by My Side (38 page)

“That’s right. Maybe the next day she’ll do the same thing, maybe not.”

Two for two. Now for the something magical.

“Okay, Dad, here’s what I need you to do. Tomorrow morning, when you go for your walk, if, as you head down the hill, Sasha starts to slow down, like she did when I was with you, I want you to give her a treat, preferably something sweet and sugary. Will you do that for me?”

“Aye, I suppose so. I’m sure I can find something. Do you want to let me in on what’s going on?”

“Just give her the treat and let me know how it goes. I’ll call this time tomorrow. Got to go.”

Perhaps it was unfair to keep him hanging like that, but most of what a magician does is about building up to a big finish. I wasn’t able to be with him when Sasha made her miraculous recovery, but I could imagine the look of amazement on my father’s face, the way it melted into a smile, imagine the bounce in their coordinated strides as they rushed home to tell my mom about what had happened. His
son had come through for his dog. His son had finally delivered. It was almost as good as being there.

What I had done was apply the finishing touch to a diagnostic trifecta with the wonderful name of Whipple’s Triad. In theory, for dogs with an insulin-secreting tumor, the clinical signs should resolve if the patient is administered a dose of intravenous glucose. Obviously, this was not possible on a hillside in the Yorkshire Dales, but I believed my father could do the next best thing by offering Sasha a sugary snack. To see the full effect using an oral route may take a little longer, but with luck, even before they got home, Sasha would be reinvigorated, even peppy, lying down the last thing on her mind.

A five-time-zone head start meant the test should have been concluded by the time I called the following morning.

“How’s it going?”

“Great,” he said, sounding buoyant.

I knew it. I had been right. But no sooner had I registered the rush of diagnostic success than I became aware of a responsibility infinitely more important. Getting to the bottom of a difficult problem can be a nice boost for the ego, but you need to direct the high into an explanation about what it all means for the patient and the owner. Rightly or wrongly, I liked to think I did a reasonable job of delivering difficult news. Here, for the first time, was my chance to show my father another facet of what it means to be a veterinarian, and hopefully, a chance for him to be grateful the news came from his son.

“So Sasha bounced back after you gave her the glucose snack on the walk?”

There was a pause, and then my father said, “What? Oh, that, no, it made absolutely no difference.”

I was speechless.

“You still there, son? Or do we have a bad connection?”

“No, sorry, I’m still here. But what about the blood work. What about Sasha’s blood glucose level?”

“Normal, son. Her vet called me this morning and said everything looked normal.”

Speechlessness topped with stunned silence. What on earth was wrong with this dog? Moreover, why did my father sound pleased?

“Thing is, unbeknownst to me, the vet did one more test on her blood. He found out her thyroid’s not working properly. Turns out Sasha just needs to take a daily supplement and she’ll be right as rain. You know, Nick, he’s just a new graduate, been out of vet school for less than a year, but he’s right smart, very conscientious, and now, because of his quick thinking, our Sasha has a permanent cure for her tiredness.”

All I remember was a pause, a moment in which I felt light-headed and vaguely lost.

“Son? Are you still there?”

N
early a decade has passed since I was comprehensively bested by a young veterinarian who had paid attention in class and remembered that “common things occur commonly.” Sure, I could blame my distance from the patient, point out that I was deprived of the feedback from Sasha’s normal blood work, or I could blame my years of focus on the physical practicalities of surgery for weakening any aptitude I had for internal medicine. But I won’t, because I was beaten fair and square by a doctor who reminded me how easy it is for clinicians not to see what is staring them in the face, to forget (which is not quite the same as overlook) certain characteristics of disease, and helped me to appreciate how we never stop learning so long as we never stop being receptive, no matter who’s teaching the class.

On a personal level, however, I was crushed. Naturally I told my father how pleased I was that
his
veterinarian had gotten to the bottom of the problem, playing down my diagnostic test as naive, a stretch, something to rule out, just in case. Dad never caught on to my disappointment and for good reason. If I told him how much it had meant for me to solve Sasha’s problem, to feel like I was the son
who had become the veterinarian and could finally help him out, it would have been an admission of how much I felt like I had let him down.

As I saw it, this opportunity had not been a complete waste of time. Even though I hadn’t delivered, my father had witnessed my commitment. When I was a kid, Dad was the one who said, “It doesn’t matter if you don’t win. It does matter if you don’t try.” This was never about a vain quest for validation, about needing my father and mother to feel proud. Their love for my sister and I had said it all our whole lives. No, for me, this was about sacrifice, their sacrifice, their ability as parents to let go, to tamp down and conceal their own loss because they love so much. This was about the practicalities of being so far away, and wanting to give them the kind of special attention that only comes from being nearby.

As with so much in life, it takes seismic shifts for us to see and feel what we should have appreciated all along. Perhaps that’s why the shape of life is better suited to a circle than a straight line.

Whitney, our eldest, went off to college and then moved three thousand miles away to California. When I confronted her with how she felt about leaving the dogs she told me, “I hated the fact that I couldn’t explain to them why I was gone. And it got worse because I would come home for a vacation, and then leave, come home and leave, over and over again. Sophie and Meg reacted in totally different ways. Meg is so sweet but she can be a little, you know, simple. She was all over me as though nothing had changed. Sophie refused to be around me for hours, sometimes the whole day. I could tell she was angry. Eventually she would forgive me and we would go back to being in love until it was time for me to leave again.”

Emily is in her senior year of high school. I am another parent who watched his children head off for the first day of kindergarten, blinked, and saw them tossing a mortarboard into the air. Here
I am, thirty years later, sitting in the exact same boat as my father and the boat hasn’t changed one bit. Like all the best rides, it’s over before you know it, but this time, when it’s time to get off, you and your child must head in separate directions. I think most parents instinctively want to keep their children in their lives. Now, finally, I get to see through my parents’ eyes. I wonder if I have what it takes to know that a child’s pursuit of happiness, whatever it involves and wherever it takes them, must always supersede a parent’s sense of loss.

No doubt, this is one more blessing, one more reason to give thanks for the animals in our lives. Their lives are like smaller, concentric circles within our own. Our pets are the kids who never leave home, and that’s absolutely fine by us because these kids don’t ask for the keys to the car, don’t turn up drunk at two in the morning, and don’t complain if you turn their bedroom into a home gym. Their presence in times of upheaval and transition acts as a touchstone, a reminder of normalcy, of comfort, and the certainty of a love that can get you through.

I would like to think our pets are not a replacement for the kids who leave home. Naturally I’ve caught my father talking to Sasha in a manner that sounds disturbingly like a two-way conversation by a bad ventriloquist, inducing looks of incredulity and head shaking from my long-suffering mother. But surely, that sort of thing won’t happen to me? From time to time, my wife points out a mannerism, an expression that is textbook Duncan (enough for her to occasionally label me as “Duncan Junior”). On some sort of subliminal, ordained level, are Meg and Sophie destined to step up and play the role of surrogate children in my life?

Though it pains me to admit it, in this context, over the last few years, I have become closer to our dogs, more mushy and attentive to their needs. The timeline for this heightened connection definitely
correlates with our children’s journey through adolescence, in other words, for me, the appeal of our pets is inversely proportional to the angst and isolation of the teenage years. The pets want to engage and in their eyes we are always cool. For the most part, pet moods are predictable and pets revel in the status quo. No wonder we find solace in their company. They never give us cause to want to be without them, and maybe, on some level, this makes their absence all the more wrenching. We should be grateful for all the teenage ’tude, the sullen, moody, and independent posturing. It’s just nature’s way of enabling parents to let go. If our kids were like our pets, all sweetness and light, on the day they left home most of us would be checking into an institution.

Inevitably, the more I notice about Meg and Sophie, the more I remember about the other dogs in my life. Sometimes, when I take Meg for a leash walk, I may as well be walking Patch or Whiskey, smiling away my embarrassment, pretending the foot of leather tethering me and my Labrador isn’t really all that taut. Occasionally Meg even manages to exhibit some antisocial shenanigans around other dogs. It is as if, by hanging out with a Jack Russell terrier, she has somehow become indoctrinated, “terrier-ized,” molded into an unpredictable tyrant. Oh, it’s just posturing—direct eye contact with another dog, mutual scratch and sniff followed by a show of hackles and a growl—but still, it makes me realize that for all my efforts to do a better job of socializing our dogs compared to the dogs of my youth, sometimes I didn’t do so well. Or maybe, more important, my father didn’t do so badly. Thank goodness Meg’s veterinarian makes house calls!

Every so often, I am pleased to discover something new and unique about Meg or Sophie, a special trait to share with the children, trying to turn my observation into a smile and a memory. Recently, when I thought I had seen it all regarding Labradors and
food, Emily made a startling discovery. As I have mentioned on numerous occasions, flavor is not a variable most Labradors care to consider. On this particular morning, Emily was in charge of feeding the dogs. Normally the mouth of “the Hoover” is placed over the dry food in the bowl, the waiter or waitress has time to blink twice, and presto, the bowl is empty. For some reason, Emily poured just a fraction of a normal kibble serving into Meg’s bowl, stood back, and watched. I would have put money on the reaction being snarf, gone, and a bemused expression that said, “Where’s the rest?” Instead Meg was stupefied. She looked at the offering, looked up at Emily, and refused to go near it. Let me state that again—Meg refused her food. As soon as the normal amount of kibble was added, the Hoover strapped on the feed bag and it was business as usual. When Emily told me I didn’t believe her.

“Meg. No way. Put a little Tabasco sauce on her tail and there’s a good chance she’ll chew it off.”

So I tried the experiment for myself and Emily was right. I got the exact same reaction in Meg. It was as though Meg was incredulous at the pathetic volume on offer, insisting we would have to do better, that she would not deign to ingest such a meager portion. What can I say; maybe Meg is fussy about her food after all.

Another unparalleled and enduring whim of my dynamic duo is their affinity for vacations. When we get away, they get away, their excitement palpable on the ride over to their “canine motel.” Emily has been crushed by the fact that Meg leaps out the back of the truck, then bounds across the reception area and straight through to the back of the kennel, where life is one endless game of chase or tag. Meg never looks back, the pause to say goodbye a waste of precious seconds. Meg is the kid who loves going off to camp. She is the kid who never gets homesick. Sophie, on the other hand, enjoys these furloughs because she acquires a new and invaluable purpose in life.
She’s too old and too smart for all those asinine Labrador games. Instead she prefers manning the front desk, spending her days politely interacting with the new guests as they arrive, in the manner of a Wal-Mart greeter. When we pick them up, they are always pleased to see us, but they always make me feel like I’m pulling them away from the party too soon, as though I was the first parent to arrive.

Sadly, these days, what I notice most about Sophie is how she is growing old. She’s fourteen, an age that gets your attention, an age at which you begin to wonder how much time she has left. She is no longer able to climb the stairs. It’s as though she understands her new frailty, unwilling to risk a slip or a fall. I catch her waiting at the bottom, head angled upward, front legs trembling ever so slightly, hoping to be picked up. Her vision is not what it used to be, and over the last few years it has become apparent that she can no longer hear. When I call her name, nothing happens. If she doesn’t see you coming, she flinches at your touch. I have stopped taking her for walks off leash because once she wanders off the only way to get her back is to physically chase her down.

Whitney has noticed too. When she comes home to visit, Sophie still rolls over and whinnies with the joy of seeing her again, but as I watch the two of them reconnect, the way Whitney cradles her first dog in her arms, the way Sophie settles into place, perfectly content, I watch a young woman’s expressions pass through delight and pride to concern and dread. After her most recent visit, Whitney confided, “I definitely say a little goodbye to her every time I leave. Even though she’s so tiny I think our house will feel really empty without her, and I hate to think how devastated Meg will be too.”