My Very Best Dog, April 1996 - July 2011

My Very Best Dog

I hadn’t realized how much Schnitzel’s breathing had become the background white noise on the boat. As the tumor in her nose grew, it pushed its way into her nasal cavity so that she alternately snored, rasped, and panted as her breath whistled and gurgled past that bloody lump. Her nasal passages filled up with the intruder and she began to sleep with her mouth open, her tongue bulging against what was left of her teeth while she sucked her breath in and out.

When the tumor bled, which was not constantly, the blood and mucus dripped from her tongue and pooled under her head as she slept. I’d sponge her jaw with a wet paper towel in the morning. Some mornings she would lean into the towel as I rubbed her jaw, as if it soothed her. The seepage didn’t seem to hurt, but it made an awful mess.

The worst part was that it clogged and distorted her once black button nose and cut off her keenest sense. She couldn’t see much and had been mostly deaf for some time. Being unable to “snuff her snuffs” must have been confusing and equivalent to a human going blind. The last few weeks she hasn’t been able to smell anything but fried grease. Her head would come right up whenever I fried chicken or made pancakes. The last few days she has been feasting on once-forbidden pancakes and syrup, bread and butter and honey, and other diabetes-instigating treats. What the hell.

But the tumor, messy and invasive as it was, didn’t kill her.

Her back legs have weakened steadily over the last four years and finally failed her. The same dying nerves caused her to lose feeling in her insides. As long as 18 months ago she didn’t realize she had to poop, and only much later, the last month or so, she has been unable to pee without help. For a short while, lifting her back end with the harness triggered the reflex and she was able to urinate, but over the last few days even that trick failed. She’d release on her bed, and while I didn’t mind gathering up the soggy dog training pads, she was constantly damp, either from urine or from her twice daily backend shampoo.

Her paralyzed back legs didn’t kill her either.

It was her liver, swelling up until it looked as though she had eaten a softball and hot to the touch that told me it was time to let go. I knew it wasn’t a fat stomach filled with what she ate, because she didn’t eat much. Mostly bits of Wal-Mart roast chicken infused with butter, another forbidden treat. Her insides were just shutting down, and instead of helping her release the toxins from her body, her kidneys and liver were storing them up. I could see that those poisons were bound to make her miserable, like having a worsening case of the flu, with all its attendant aches and pains. She slept 22 hours a day, sometimes running and barking in her dreams, something she hadn’t done it the waking world for months, if not years. When she woke up she was alert and herself enough to growl menacingly at other dogs from the safety of the little blue cart she rode in when her legs went limp. She never lost her spirit. Her little body just gave out.

Finally, after it being not right, not right yet, not now but maybe soon, it was time. So we put her on some towels on the front seat of the truck between us, where she has ridden thousands of miles over the years. We went to Burger King, where they prepared a small bag of salty hot fries hours before they usually do, just for her. She was wide awake, head cocked toward the fast food window. She knew those fries were coming. I cooled the fries in the draft of the truck’s air conditioner and fed her bit by bit and she gobbled them up as she always does. We drove to the vet and sat in the parking lot and waited, me feeding her those salty treats one by one.

The vet and the tech came to the car to give her the knockout shot. It stung and she whimpered a little, but it was over in less than 30 seconds. Then they left us and her attention was back on the warm French fries. She was scarfing them eagerly when she suddenly lost interest and went limp against my leg. Her breathing evened out and slowed. We waited as her body relaxed as it hasn’t relaxed in months, if ever, as she drifted deeper and deeper to the floor of consciousness and then sank through it.

I tried the handle of her harness. Usually no matter how deeply she is sleeping, she feels my tug and bursts awake. Now she hung limp as a rag dog. I handed her gently to her bed that was waiting on David’s outstretched arms and we walked her into the clinic. The techs had prepared the cold steel table with a brightly striped blanket. Maybe some who bring their dogs in don’t know that those operating tables are cold and hard. I was glad Schnitzel was sleeping on her own bed.

The vet was kind and solemn. She shaved part of Schnitzel’s leg and inserted the needle. She and the tech screwed in a vial of cheerful pink liquid and depressed the plunger. They followed with a vial of neutral clear liquid. Then the vet listened until Schnitzel’s heart stopped beating. Schnitzel never moved from her deep sleep. We stayed with her the whole time, our hands on her head and neck, combing her curls with our fingers. They said they’d dispose of the bed and her body.

I came home and bleached the bloody, urine-soaked towels and threw all her things in the dumpster.

I pretend that she is staying with friends for a few months. I imagine her chasing squirrels, 18 pounds of pure silver thunderbolt joy.

It is awfully quiet.