The Dogs Were Rescued (And So Was I) (2 page)

Since I had a few days at home with Seamus while he recovered, and because I rely on reading like I rely on coffee (I could not live without either of them), I began to read all that I could find on fighting cancer. I read like my life—and my dog’s—depended on it.

Though I wanted to avoid this answer, very quickly it became obvious that diet and exercise were essential foot soldiers in the assault on cancer I was about to launch. I’d never been good at either of these things. If I didn’t have Seamus, I’d never exercise at all. I’d celebrated oncology checkups at the Cheese Store of Beverly Hills. I considered potato chips and chardonnay a meal, and a darn fine one. Comfort food was macaroni and cheese, fettuccine Alfredo, or, of course, fast food—cheeseburgers and fries, burritos, nachos, all of it. I’d never been one of those girls who ate small, dainty foods in tiny, cute portions. The more carbs, cream, and fat, the better, as far as I was concerned. And as I’m nearly six feet tall, I’d always told myself it was okay that I ate like a guy. That guy may have been a linebacker, but whatever. I loved heavy, processed, fatty food.

I wasn’t that way as a child, though. As a kid, my favorite food was apples. That’s even what I gave up for Lent at the height of my Catholic years, and nobody accused me of trying to make it easy on myself. I wasn’t much of a meat eater, didn’t like candy, desserts, kids’ breakfast cereals, or Thanksgiving dinner (except the mashed potatoes and the cranberry jelly). I loved fruits, salads, and nuts. Somewhere along the line, that changed. And I couldn’t even recall when, let alone why.

By high school, I was living off fast food. Bacon cheeseburgers, meat-and-cheese burritos slathered in sour cream, chili cheese dogs, and French fries were constants in my life. That didn’t change in college, though pizza and potato chips joined the lineup. Law school did not improve my diet, unless one considered a tuna melt at the greasy diner down the street an improvement. (It wasn’t, and still, there were the fries.) Until I hit my forties, my metabolism kept up with all of this just fine, so I’d never been on a diet of any kind either. I simply never paid attention to what I ate.

And then along came Chris.

Chris had gone through Seamus’s and my cancers every step of the way. And he is a wonderful cook who loves food—all kinds of food. So when he moved in with me and began doing the cooking, my tastes shifted again to more of what he liked and prepared. He is a man who loves steak, hamburgers, a pastrami sandwich, hearty omelets, and anything with bacon. And so I began to eat red meat—steak slathered with blue cheese was a signature dish of Chris’s that I favored. He also made a phenomenal
paella
that became our traditional “Mas-Chris” meal (the weekend before the dreaded “Christ-mas”). I had my limits, though—I did not eat veal, venison, duck, lamb, or, as Chris claimed was my standard, “any cute animals.”

Fine. Diet is an obvious and important factor in this battle we didn’t ask for. My diet could certainly improve, despite my years of denial. So it was time I paid attention to that. Fine. And I’d pay attention to Seamus’s diet too. Though the surgery had been successful and Seamus recovered quickly, we’d been told the chances were high that the tumor would come back. It was just a matter of time. In the meantime, we administered eye drops twice a day.

Naturally, I started our nutritional boot camp with changes to Seamus’s diet. This seemed both easier and more immediate. I was right about the immediacy, less so about the simplicity.

There was, it seemed, a prescribed cancer-fighting diet for dogs. Many articles, books, and websites sang the virtues of certain foods as cancer-fighting and best for dogs all around. My problem was that they were gross. There were a lot of animal organs, bones, and raw meats involved. It was hard to imagine doing this. I ate meat, sure, but I preferred not to think of it as ever having been alive. “Organs” were just not something I wanted to touch. If it would help Seamus, I’d do it, but I hoped to find a better answer.

I found several dog food brands that sounded promising. But now the problem was that they were raw foods packaged and shipped frozen, so they were very expensive, as one might imagine shipping organs would be. And I didn’t have a very large freezer. Not like one of those in which you’d store, say, a year’s worth of venison you’d hunted and killed yourself. Eventually, I found a food that seemed perfect: human-grade, grain-free, whole foods. The ingredients were much the same as the abhorrent diet I’d prefer not to make myself, and because the food was dehydrated, I could afford to have it shipped. Now, where to find it? I checked the list of suppliers, but neither had it on their own websites. I emailed both companies and that evening had a response from a man named River. (No, not an old man.)

River was poetically effusive about holistic methods for fighting cancer and proudly stated homeopathy had been curing cancer since the 1600s. He proclaimed that every item his shop sold was toxin-free, safe for the environment and my animal companion. He also mentioned he spent his time caring for his farm, saving animals, and finding grace, so he hadn’t updated his site, but he was sure he could get me what I needed.

I was new to this concept of clean living and caring about the environment, so the cynic in me could only think,
Oh, forget the dog food. Please do tell me where one searches for grace.
Or, given that his name was River, perhaps Grace was his daughter or his wife, in which case, I hoped he found her, and Harmony, who no doubt lived on the sanctuary too. It was tempting to run off on one of the many tangents such an email offered a mind like mine, but I opted to stay with the dog food aspect. I emailed back to order the particular formula I wanted. I got this response:

Are you putting Seamus on a BARF diet?

Peace,

River

A
what
diet? And no, definitely not. Whatever that was, Seamus would not be eating it. That was not a river I was going down, River.

A winding, drifty, unfocused but enthusiastic ten emails later, I knew that a “BARF” diet meant a “Biologically Appropriate Raw Food” diet. I had ordered two four-pound boxes of The Honest Kitchen dehydrated food, and River had effused about things like alternating proteins and adding colostrums and probiotics, because, as he said, he was “a healer and messenger and my path is to end all the needless suffering that occurs. To have the knowledge I have and not share it seems selfish, esp. when it makes such a huge difference and can cure cancer, etc.”

I particularly loved the “cure cancer,
etc.
” You know all those things like curing cancer? He did that too. But I did love his passion. I could use some of that. Best to just start with the dehydrated food, though, especially since bottled passion was not listed on his website. On second thought, perhaps that was a different website entirely.

When the boxes arrived, shipped from his green corner sanctuary on the East Coast all the way across the country to me in California, I could not help but laugh. My research had not been thorough, and his “nontoxic to earth” statement was not quite accurate. The product was manufactured in San Diego, California—about sixty miles southwest of me. The Honest Kitchen had shipped eight pounds of dehydrated food to the East Coast, so he could turn around and ship it back to the West Coast. I didn’t know a lot about carbon footprints, but I was pretty sure I had some carbon karma points to make up. I was also sure that, sadly, it did not make economic or carbon sense to do further business with my new River friend when I could simply order directly from the company sixty miles away. It wouldn’t have been my style to just figure that out in the first place.

Seamus loved the food. Well, Seamus loved all food, so that was not a surprise, but he did seem pretty excited about this new feast. The hardest part for him—as it must be for any self-respecting beagle—was waiting the five minutes it took for the food to reconstitute after warm water was added. He howled and cursed at me for every second of the five minutes. (Chris and I had long ago given Seamus a human voice that was part Irish brogue, part Bill Murray’s Carl Spackler character in
Caddyshack
; consequently, he howled “
fooooooooooooook
” a lot.)

Spurred on once again by a beagle’s battle with cancer, I launched my own healthier lifestyle as well. I cut out fast food and was determined to limit glasses of wine throughout the week. (Notice my specificity! I should note here that Chris owns an online wine store that also has a tasting room retail location in Riverside, which kept him working long hours, eating [fast food] without me, and frequently bringing home his wine wares for us both to sample—
hey, it was a job requirement!
) And I walked Seamus more. The walking would be good for Seamus and me, I told myself. But then, I also told myself
Five
more
minutes
every time the alarm went off following my repeated hits on the snooze button. I did get up and walk him, though. A few times. On one of those walks, impressed by my three consecutive days of progress, I decided there was something more I could do. I would try a different kind of exercise. Fresh air does strange things to me.

I hate participating in sports, and gyms make me crazy—all that sweat and locker rooms harkening back to junior high are just not my thing. Well, who am I kidding? Exercise is not my thing. But yoga, I imagined, would not be sweaty and would not be a competition. It would, I hoped, be relaxing. I needed exercise, and stress relief couldn’t be a bad thing. Yoga seemed like a wise choice, shocked as everyone was to whom I mentioned it.

As it turned out, I shocked myself. I
liked
yoga. And the classes were
not
filled with dreadlocked hippies (we don’t actually have those in Riverside); Zenlike, lithe, blond women lifting their eighty-pound bodies into the air, balanced only on slender wrists with their legs wrapped around their ears (those were only the instructors); or men with hair longer than mine (and silkier…
bastards!
). No, these were average folks who, like me, were tired of being puffy, bloated, and, well, ravaged by disease. But I did sweat. Man, did I sweat. And while I liked yoga, the feeling did not appear to be mutual.

One Saturday morning, as the instructor demonstrated a particularly impossible and unnatural-looking pose, I burst out laughing. Hey, at least I was getting the stress relief down. The instructor looked my way, as did the rest of the class.

Hmmm. A yoga faux pas. “I’m sorry. I’m just pretty sure my body can’t do that. I don’t think I’ve ever been that flexible in my life.”

“No,” he agreed. “You’ll have to work on your flexibility. You may want to look at one of our stretching classes.”

Or
a
different
yoga
studio
.

I struggled through, chastened, and rigid in oh so many ways. Afterward I overheard a woman who had to be at least twenty years older than me explaining to the instructor that she really wanted to work on her flexibility. She wanted to know about the stretching classes too. “I mean,” she said, “I’m worse than her!” She pointed to me, the new standard for inflexibility.

My yoga hobby was starting to look short-lived.

On top of the embarrassment of my performance, I was terrible at sticking to a schedule and frequently missed classes. Yoga once a week was great, but it was hardly going to stave off cancer. To increase my chances of more regular sessions, I hired one of the yoga instructors—tall, thin, impossibly elastic, but very amiable Lauren—to teach private classes at my office, and I roped a few friends into joining me. If yoga came directly to me, I could not hide. And my friends were not likely to be much more flexible than I was. When it came to yoga, I mean.

Wednesday nights and Saturday mornings found my law office reception area covered in yoga mats with middle-aged women trying to Warrior Pose our way through to Corpse Pose—the only one we were any good at. One friend’s inability to achieve Happy Baby Pose (lying on your back, grabbing the soles of your feet with your hands, knees toward your face) caused us to dub the pose “angry baby” instead. And Lauren’s insistence that we hold Warrior Pose far longer than any of us felt necessary or attainable caused us to dub her “Yoga Bitch.” She was Zen enough to accept and wear the title proudly.

On Saturday mornings, I walked Seamus and then brought him with me to the office. He moved from person to person, checking our poses and wondering if we happened to have brought any food with us. By the end of the session, he could be found seated in Yoga Bitch’s lap, enjoying a belly rub and oblivious to my pain. I think Lauren snuck him treats so at least he wouldn’t think of her as Yoga Bitch. He thought of her as Snack Bitch.

On my little dog and I marched in our war against cancer. Chris looked on, mostly encouraging and definitely amused, but not participating in the fight himself. He’s twelve years younger than me and thus, perhaps, not as ready to look at his own immortality.

But springtime saw us launch new counterattacks. And I surprised myself as much as I did Chris.

My continuing research led me to a holistic supplement study for canine cancer that was sponsored by the National Canine Cancer Foundation. I immediately enrolled Seamus, and he was accepted into the group of “currently fighting cancer” dogs. He took the supplements twice a day, and we restricted his treats to one or two a day. Instead of the snacks he loved, we gave him apple slices or celery or broccoli, which were becoming my snacks too. As a consequence, there were chewed remains of spit-up greens dotting our kitchen floor regularly (some of them left by Seamus). I had even lost a few pounds and was only inches away from touching my toes in yoga class.

I continued my search for more ways to wage war on cancer myself as well.

Although in my precancer life I would have avoided both a “women’s conference” and a “health conference,” I now willingly attended a women’s health conference at a local hospital not far from where I had undergone my chemotherapy treatments. My search for weapons was going to be thorough, if a tad imprecise.

In the late morning I found I had two choices for the break-out session. One featured none other than the icicle of a woman who’d been in charge (albeit only on paper) of my chemotherapy—Dr. B herself, talking about who knows what, but I was certain I didn’t want to hear it and didn’t want to see her. By default, I headed to the other session.

I walked into the conference room and saw that the presentation would be by Julieanna Hever, the author of
The
Complete
Idiot’s Guide to Plant-Based Nutrition
. I seemed to fit the target market as I’d never even heard the term “plant-based diet.” I forced myself to keep an open mind. I’d told myself that I was going to explore all options for Seamus and me to fight our cancers, and a plant-based diet was certainly an option, just not one I thought I was capable of.

I was early, so I approached the table in the back of the room where books were stacked. I picked up the
Idiot’s Guide
and began to flip pages.

“Hi. Thanks for being here.”

I looked up and saw what can only be described as a glowing woman. Her skin shone, her hair shone—massively thick and dark, falling just below her shoulders—her eyes twinkled and her teeth gleamed from her…right…from her shining smile. I don’t think I’d ever seen anyone exude
health
like this woman did. Of course, I’d been spending a lot of time in oncology wards, so what did I know.

“Hi.” I put the book down and extended my hand. “You must be the speaker?”

She shook my hand. “I am. I’m Julieanna Hever. I’m so glad you’re here.”

“I’ll admit I know nothing about this. I am the complete idiot. But I’m also a cancer survivor, so I feel like I need to do something…more.”

We spoke for ten minutes; she was all sunshine and rainbows, and I was all clouds of doubt and rainstorms (give up
cheese
?). But
man
, I wanted to be like this woman. That doesn’t happen to me a lot. So I pushed on. I told her about Seamus, our book coming out, and my search to stave off cancer taking over our lives. She extolled the virtues of plants and mentioned the various studies that had been done, referring me to the documentary
Forks
Over
Knives
. She swore the plant-based lifestyle was easy.

I was feeling—what was that feeling? An unfamiliar…tingling…sort of…ins…inspi…
inspired
. I was feeling inspired! That was it! But wait…

“What about wine and coffee? Or, as I think of them, ‘water and air,’” I said.

She laughed. “Both are plant-based. You’re good. Everything in moderation, but that goes for any diet.”

Define
moderation. No, never mind. Don’t.

I bought her book and took a seat in the second row. I was two days away from my oncology checkup; what did I have to lose?

When Chris got home that night, I pounced. “I’m going to try a plant-based diet!”

“A what?”

“Plant-based diet. Just food that comes from plants. Not animals.”

“So vegan?”

I paused.
Huh?
“I don’t think so, no. Nobody said anything about vegan.”

“But isn’t that vegan? No animal products?”

Maybe. I grabbed the book and handed it to him. “No. It doesn’t say that. Vegan sounds way too intimidating.”

“Beans. Vegetables. Lentils. Tofu. What part of this does not sound vegan to you?” he said, flipping pages.

“Um, the cover of the book? The presentation I listened to today?”

He handed the book back to me. “You know this means no cheese, right?”

I’d already had to scrape the cheese off my vegetarian pasta at lunch, so yes, I knew that. “I said I was going to try healthier lifestyle choices to figure out what works. I figure if I do this—go cold tofu—and totally hate it, I can gradually add things back in and figure out the best balance. Maybe I go back to eating cheese, or fish, or eggs. Who knows? But it makes more sense to me to cut it all out and see how I like it. See how my body responds.”

“Because that’s harder, so of course that makes more sense to you.”

“It’s more logical.”

We both laughed. My greatest strength was logic, but overdone, I’ve been told it becomes a point of weakness. I am generally more logical than emotional, and this is sometimes a problem (um,
for
others
). I thought my logic here was sound. If I tried vegetarian or, as I’d been doing, just “eating healthier,” I’d still find a way to melt cheese on everything and pile on the cream, as I’d been doing for months. I’d be eating broccoli, but it would be dipped in ranch dressing, just as my salad would be swimming in blue cheese. This way I at least had a guide, a nutritionist I could talk to (Julieanna, it turned out, was infinitely accessible through social media), and some solid evidence that this was an appropriate diet for fighting cancer.

“I’m shocked. And worried. Yoga and now this. You’re still going to shave your legs, right?” Chris said.

“Yes. I’m just going to use an artichoke.”

“What?”

“Totally kidding. But here’s the good news: I haven’t completely lost my mind—wine is plant-based!”

“Oh thank god.” He moved toward the wine refrigerator. “I’m pouring the plants now.”

A day and a half later, having eaten nothing but surprisingly delicious plants—Julieanna’s “Easy Beans and Quinoa” with onion, garlic, corn, and cilantro; kale and broccoli salad; and a breakfast of almond butter on whole wheat toast with my old friend a red apple—and drinking a lot of water, I felt the effects. Not only did I have more energy, but I’d also lost two pounds. And I wasn’t hungry! This was a great start. Other than having to go to the restroom four times during the night (cleansing, anyone?), I slept soundly. That normally did not happen in the nights preceding my oncology checkups.

I was three years out from my cancer diagnosis by this point. I’d almost stopped even thinking of myself as a cancer patient except in the twenty-four hours or so preceding a doctor’s visit: it is hard not to think of oneself as a cancer patient when “oncology appointment” is on the calendar. Every six months, I’d been going for these checkups, and I’d always kept my date with NED (“no evidence of disease”). My anxiety decreased each time.

Then I was hit with Seamus’s new diagnosis.

It had only been four months since his surgery and our gradual diet and exercise changes. That probably wasn’t enough to discourage any cancer cells in my body thinking about making a comeback. Or maybe I was fooling myself and they’d long ago started the reunion, probably back when Seamus’s diagnosis came. This would be a great time for my logic to kick in, but it wasn’t happening. In my mind, our destinies were locked. The feeling that what happened to Seamus would happen to me was not logical, but when it came to dogs, and Seamus in particular, well, that’s where logic failed me.

And there really is no logic to cancer anyway.

Making matters more difficult, Chris would not be accompanying me to my appointment. When I was in treatment, he’d gone with me to every appointment, even my blood tests, and he’d humored and cared for me through it all. Since he’d opened Chris Kern’s Forgotten Grapes online wine shop and I was years out from my diagnosis, I began going myself. I much preferred his company, of course, but he had a business to run and I wanted him to succeed. He deserved it. Besides, there’d be no cheese shop visit for us this time.

I flipped magazine pages in the waiting room and tried not to look at the other patients. When I weighed in with the nurse, the scale showed a loss of four pounds. I wanted to boast about my seventy-two-hour-long plant-based diet, but in addition to that sounding nuts, I thought I might be answered with “weight loss is a sign of cancer,” which is actually even more nuts. But one is entitled to such thoughts during an oncology checkup. I’d had crazier thoughts.

A blood pressure check, an exam, and a blood test later, and the physician’s assistant said, “That’s it. You’re all clear.”

I sat up straighter in my paper-towel dress. “That’s it?”

“That’s it. You can get dressed now,” she said, closing my file. “Except one other thing.”

I knew it. I only had six months to live. Maybe less. Or just a general “there’s cancer everywhere” statement.
Because
that
happens
from
a
blood
test
. “One other thing?”

“We’ll move you to annual checkups now. You’ll still have your mammogram in October and then your checkup with us in April, so technically someone’s checking on you every six months still, but you don’t have to see us every six months.”

Huh. Okay, well, that would be good, right? Fewer oncology appointments can’t be a bad thing. And I’d found the lump myself the first time, so I certainly know what I’m looking for. Plus, now I had plant-based superpowers on my side!

Back at home I celebrated by cuddling with Seamus; making a mango, avocado, and black bean salad with lime juice, olive oil, and cilantro dressing; and going online to join Farm Fresh to You, a community-supported agriculture group that would deliver local, farm-fresh produce to my door every other week. I was feeling good and becoming a believer. Perhaps even an evangelist. My cancer wasn’t back! We were winning the war!
All
hail
kale!

Emboldened, I continued to arm us for battle. Though there was a misfire. Inevitable, I suppose. For Seamus, an important part of my troops, I bought a thirty-dollar, one-hundred-page, holistic canine-cancer-fighting book online that seemed to be everything I was looking for, and it was written by a doctor. When the book arrived, though, I soon noted that nowhere did it say what kind of doctor the author was. Technically, as I have a Juris Doctor degree, I am a “doctor” too. Please don’t ever take medical advice from me. Blood makes me pass out, as does the word “stitches.” (Hang on while I come to again…) And I’ve had no medical training whatsoever, except as a patient.

As I read the book, I began to question, as the author intended, not just the proper feeding of a domesticated dog, but also much of the traditional gospel of pet care. Could neutering dogs really increase the risk of cancer? Seamus was already neutered when I got him, so it hadn’t been my choice. Was adding apple cider vinegar to his drinking water really going to fight off fleas
and
cancer (
win-win!
)? But then the author started to lose me. He was adamantly against chemotherapy treatments for dogs or for anyone. This seemed too far outside the norm for me, especially since chemotherapy had been the only treatment available to both Seamus and me following our respective cancer surgeries.

When I read his “muscle testing” procedure for determining areas of health concern, he completely lost me. It seemed to be a version of the Ouija board where, instead of passing hands over an alphabet on a board to receive messages from a spirit, one passed their hands over a dog and asked certain true-or-false questions. “My name is Tippy St. Clair” would be a warm-up question to make sure I had the technique down. (And if I did, the circle I’d make with my index finger and thumb would easily break when I passed my other index finger through the point where the fingers touched since this was a false statement…or my middle finger would rise, something like that.)

I had wasted thirty dollars. Thirty dollars I’d never get back, and frankly I didn’t deserve to. I hadn’t done my homework once again.

• • •

Summer arrived. Our battle with cancer looked less like a war and more like a truce. Despite my misfiring, Seamus was thriving. He looked lean and muscular, and he was clearly enjoying his new food, supplements, and exercise. Chris was still the one primarily responsible for taking Seamus on the “serious” walks, but I like to think Seamus enjoyed the more casual walks with me, sniffing anything and everything as he pleased. And I was clearly thriving on my plant-based diet. In just over three months, I’d lost thirty pounds. It had not even been difficult. Sure, occasionally I looked longingly at what Chris was eating, and occasionally I accused him of eating my old favorites (steak and blue cheese!) just to tease me, but mostly, the effects of my diet were so instantaneous and rewarding, I stuck to it with relative ease.

I enjoyed the foods I was eating. I enjoyed preparing my meals. In the past I’d been a decent cook, as long as I was following a recipe. But it wasn’t something I was passionate about, and I was never one of those people who could look in the cupboard or refrigerator and say, “Oh yes, I have red pepper, dill pickles, and beef; therefore, I’ll make my delicious pepper-dill-steak casserole gourmet meal!” (See, I couldn’t even cook properly with words! Seriously, who would eat that?) I didn’t have any understanding of what flavors went with what or how, when, or why meats should be prepared, and I never liked looking at raw meat, let alone handling it. I just figured the kitchen wasn’t my forte. I left that to Chris.