Oogy The Dog Only a Family Could Love (14 page)

A doctor who was present at Ardmore when I related this to him laughed and responded, “I don’t think
that’s
Oogy’s big hurdle in terms of becoming a show dog.”

When Oogy came to live with us, I assumed that with his short white fur there would be little shedding. I could not have been more wrong. There is Oogy hair over everything we own. In the cars, it looks like a dusting of some strange powder. Every week I have to rub him down with a hard rubber currycomb of the kind that is used for horses.

Reflecting the traits of his breed, Oogy loves hot weather. In the summer, he will lie in the driveway, soaking in the heat for hours at a time. When he comes inside afterward, he feels as warm to the touch as if he’s been in a toaster oven. He enjoys the snow, but he hates the feel of rain on his skin and will not voluntarily go out in it. Sometimes I will drag him out into the yard in the rain, hoping he will do his business, but he will just trot around the house to get back inside as soon as he can. During extended rainy periods, it is not unusual for Oogy to leave us a gift, ordinarily in some out-of-the-way location such as the basement or up in the weight room.

Watching Oogy interact with other dogs is fascinating once you know something about his breeding. His bulk and speed, the way he thunders across the grass with his powerful strides, make me think of a Percheron or Clydesdale running among other horses — if he were any heavier, the ground would shake. There are faster dogs than Oogy, there are heavier and more graceful dogs, but none are more powerful. He is a marvel of genetic engineering. He is designed to run relentlessly, and that is what he loves to do. He does not go after sticks and he does not go after balls, and dogs that want to do nothing else frustrate him. He wants to run and he wants to wrestle. And when he is running with another dog or other dogs, he never takes the lead. He always runs alongside the lead dog, just at or behind his front shoulder, and sometimes he’ll give the other dog a slight chest bump. He never tries to knock the other dog over, but something in his genetics compels him to make some contact. He will run until he is exhausted, collapse for a few minutes, and then be ready to run again.

Knowing the attributes of Oogy’s breed went a long way toward helping us understand his behavior and the nuances that were expressive of his character.

We’re used to coming home and finding Oogy asleep on the table in the kitchen or in the dining room. He likes to sit on the picnic tables at the dog park as well. I attribute that to the hunter in him. It seems logical that he would like to be up high to look for game. To give Oogy his due, there have been no jaguars or mountain lions in our yard since he came home with us. (Boars were never really much of a problem anyway.)

Oogy’s hunting senses allow him to be aware of another animal long before I can see it, and often I never do. I have learned that when we are out at night and he stops in his tracks and peers into some bushes or down a dark driveway, if he stands there completely still and concentrating, his ear up, looking across a field, another creature is definitely there, although in all likelihood I will never know what it is. Sometimes he drops his head and stares, motionless, alerted to another presence out there, trying to determine what it is, as though he is more likely to sense it rather than see it, his whole being telling him something I cannot know.

During his first couple of years with us, whenever we were out for a stroll Oogy would try to go after every squirrel or rabbit that caught his eye. This behavior was so common that once, when someone asked me where his name came from, I replied, “It’s Elvish for ‘squirrel’s bane.’” He never did catch anything. The breeding leaves him relentless, though. There are some chipmunks that live in the foundation of our patio. On a number of occasions, Oogy has stood out there and barked at them incessantly. Passersby would see a dog barking his fool head off at masonry. Oogy does not seem to care, no matter how many times I remind him that this behavior makes him look rather silly.

One of my favorite things to do, though I don’t get to do it nearly as much as I would like, is to stretch out on the couch, enjoying the luxury of free time, and have Oogy stretch out next to me. He will put his head in the crook of my arm or rest it on my shoulder, and I marvel every time at his regular and relaxed deep breathing. Just to feel the rhythmic beating of his heart is encouraging. I will routinely talk to him about different things. On more than one occasion, I have asked him what he would have been like if he had both ears. Would his personality or demeanor have been different? Would he love me just as much? Oogy will invariably look at me a moment, then turn his head away with the foolishness of the question, upon which he has so far refused to speculate.

“Do you talk to other Dogos?” I once asked him. “Can you somehow communicate telepathically? Is there a psychic Dogo connection because you are all so unique? If so, tell them you’re loved. Tell them that it worked out okay for you. Tell them,” I said, “that we love you like there’s no tomorrow.”

CHAPTER
8

A Special One

i
t has always been my belief that a pet owner has a special responsibility to do everything that can be done to make the pet’s life as fulfilling and peaceful as possible. That responsibility is yours the moment you make the choice to take an animal into your life. Indeed, just as with children, once the choice to assume responsibility for another life has been made, it can be carried out only one way if it is to have any chance of producing maximum results: all the way. It’s what Diane refers to as “above and beyond.”

Since Oogy was rescued and his face was stitched back together, his life has not been simply a never-ending series of pleasant experiences. He has had four more major operations. None of them, separately or cumulatively, have adversely affected his nature and temperament in the slightest. If anything, with each ordeal his trust in us has increased. He knows that we will alleviate his pain. He knows that we will do the right thing for him. His faith in us calms him and calms us.

The first of the surgeries became necessary as Oogy grew and the scar tissue where his face had been continued to spread. The expansion pulled the left side of his face upward. One result of this was that he could not close his left eye completely when he slept; it wept constantly in an attempt to lubricate itself and regularly issued a green, mucuslike discharge we needed to wipe away. His upper lip was pulled back in a perpetual grimace, a sneer that exposed some of his upper teeth. Because of the distortion caused by the scarring and leathery, reptilian texture of the scar tissue, he looked almost like a
T. rex
on the left side of his face. We sometimes called him “dinosaur dog.”

Once Oogy had come to live with us, it took no time at all for the scarring to become simply part of who he was; but seeing it through other people’s eyes was unavoidable. Those who caught only a glimpse of Oogy often had a difficult time accepting what their eyes told them they were seeing. One side of Oogy’s profile looked perfectly normal: a sweet, white dog face, a large, black nose, a floppy ear; the other side looked positively grotesque, with a nub of an ear, textured scar tissue instead of white fur, and an exposed upper canine. Often, people could do nothing more than stare at him in astonishment — and sometimes in horror — as we passed quickly away, leaving them to try to assimilate what they had just seen. Sometimes I would see the person who had caught sight of Oogy gesturing wildly to get the attention of others around him or her to have a look at “the creature” while we were still there.

And I would leave them behind, secure in the knowledge of the loveliness beside me.

But in addition to the deformities the scarring had caused, none of which should have presented any substantive health issues, it turned out that the spreading scar tissue had created a very real problem, one that I never would have detected on my own because of Oogy’s ability to tolerate extraordinary levels of pain. When Oogy was about two years old and had stopped growing, during one of his routine checkups Dr. Bianco informed me that Oogy was in chronic pain because the scar tissue had deformed his facial muscles. He explained that given Oogy’s genetic composition, he had not and would never have let on that he was suffering the kind of acute torment he was undergoing on an unrelenting basis. “Imagine that someone has grabbed you by your face and is pulling on it, twisting it out of shape,” Dr. Bianco said, seizing the skin of his face just below his cheekbone and yanking it upward with both hands to illustrate. “The pain may be bearable, but at best it is very, very uncomfortable.”

Dr. Bianco asked me to let him rebuild Oogy’s face. He informed me he had never before performed facial reconstructive surgery to the extent Oogy needed it, but at the same time, he had every confidence in his ability to successfully complete the procedure. Although the scope of damage and deformity presented a great challenge, Dr. Bianco assured me that when the procedure had been completed, Oogy’s life would be better than it currently was. Dr. Bianco also promised me that when he was done, Oogy would be the “Brad Pitt of dogdom.”

Our confidence in Dr. Bianco’s surgical skills was such that we had no doubt of the outcome — the operation would be a complete success. I think one reason we felt this way was that we knew the surgery was something Dr. Bianco
wanted
to do for Oogy’s well-being.

In what turned out to be a three-and-a-half-hour operation, Dr. Bianco first removed all the scar tissue down to the muscle. Later, he told me that after all the scar tissue was taken out, there was a hole in Oogy’s head the size of a softball. He held up a closed fist to give me some idea of the extent. Next, Dr. Bianco took off the remaining stump of an ear and all the skin surrounding it that had become embedded with scar tissue. He undermined the skin — removed its attachment to the underlying muscle — in order to allow it to reattach naturally instead of by adhering to the scar tissue. Dr. Bianco then pulled up a flap of skin from Oogy’s neck and joined it to the fur on the back of his muzzle with skin grafts he removed from the insides of his front legs. During this part of the surgery, Dr. Bianco’s chief concern was that there might not be enough skin to complete the reconstructive process, but there was. Next, because covering a natural opening might lead to problems with postoperative draining, Dr. Bianco located the spot where Oogy’s left ear had been and made a small hole in the side of Oogy’s cranium. He then created an artificial horizontal canal into Oogy’s skull from the little hole that was now all that was left of Oogy’s ear. This would help avoid infection postsurgery. Dr. Bianco did not bother to replicate the vertical canal that had been torn out when Oogy had been attacked, since Oogy would never be able to hear from this ear no matter what.

The day after the surgery, I was allowed to visit Oogy in the hospital portion of the building. This was a special privilege I was given only because the patient was Oogy. The left side of Oogy’s face was swollen and distorted, and he appeared bruised, as though he had been beaten. A black line of fine stitches ran down the left side of his face, which had been shaved down to his baby pink skin; a second, horizontal line of stitches helped stabilize the flaps of flesh that had been joined. There were blue gauze wraps on his forelegs, protecting the spots where the skin had been removed for the grafts. There was a Penrose drain in his head that ran from the upper left quadrant of his skull and came out the underside of his jaw. Blood and some clear, viscous fluid continually seeped out of the bottom of the drain. He looked more forlorn than any dog should ever have to be. He slept in the largest cage the hospital had, but it was still a cage, and I knew it created anxiety for him. Yet the accommodations were unavoidable, and although before the operation I could not have envisioned what he would look like, the surgery clearly had proved to be a complete success. He no longer looked terrifying (I’m not sure a dog with one ear can ever be described as normal-looking), but more important, the fact that the pressure that had been exerted by the expanded scar tissue was now eliminated meant he would finally be able to go through his days without chronic pain. We had to look at “the big picture,” and although I felt bad for Oogy in that moment, I knew that the experience would have no permanently negative effect on his disposition.

I was allowed to visit him every day, and each day he grew stronger. He wore an E-collar, a clear plastic protective device that radiated outward from his neck. (Its name is derived from the ruffs Elizabethan men sported atop their tunics.) This was to prevent Oogy from scratching, biting, and licking at the sutures. It made Oogy look like a 1950s-style space doggy. I would let him out of his cage and spend as much time as I could spare sitting on the floor next to him, trying to stay out of the way of the staff as they performed their duties. Oogy would curl up next to me while I read a book or magazine with one hand and stroked him gently with the other; it was the best I could do to try to encourage and to calm him. The fact that he was sedated with painkillers no doubt helped to reduce the stress that resulted from being away from us, from having to sleep in a steel box, and from the demands of the surgery itself. Although I could see in his face and read in his body language that he was miserable, he never indicated any anxiety or discomfort.