A very gutsy story
Throughout the 11 years, Maris was a really healthy dog that gave us no issues. Basically, she went to the vet once a year for her shots, and there were maybe four or five extra vet visits for miscellaneous ailments… for example, getting a small splinter out of her gums. We were always protective of her, though, because she was born with a heart murmur. Jeff and I made sure that she played just enough to make her happy but that she would not overdo it and overheat. For so many years, we were able to control her activity levels, but we knew that her heart would give her trouble some day. We always thought that we would lose her to heart failure or some sort of pulmonary condition. Never in our minds did we consider that she would suffer from cancer and leave us completely heartbroken.
The truth is that I am not handling her illness too well. It is hard to see her body deteriorate. Her energy level is still very high (for an 11 year old dog!), but the cutaneous lymphoma expresses itself on the outside, so I can plainly see the progression of the disease. The biggest tumor on the skin is on the left side of her snout, and it is so big that it oozes and bleeds from time to time. This means that sometimes I have to chase her around to put pressure on the tumor until the bleeding can clot, and that I now own an industrial sized carpet cleaner. She wears a big inflated donut around her neck so that she cannot scratch this tumor, and she wears a cone at night when she sleeps so that we don’t wake up in the morning to a blood bath. This is really a cruel, cruel disease, and I cannot believe my beautiful Swiss mountain dog, my Little One has to suffer from it.
Taking care of her now takes me back to the first time I was worried about her physical wellbeing. One evening in August, when Maris was only about 12 weeks old, I took her to the animal emergency room in the middle of the night. Jeff wasn’t with me because he had gone to bed early – he had gotten his first colonoscopy that day, and needless to say, it was a traumatizing two days, starting with that prep drink, yuck. So I was watching Maris alone in the living room when I saw her make a funny motion with her neck while trying to swallow something. I panicked.
“Maris, what’s wrong? Talk to me!” She wouldn’t stop this funky swallowing motion. She was wagging her tail, but to my untrained eye, it looked like she was choking and couldn’t breathe. “What did I do? What did she eat? What did I leave out?” etc. etc. etc. In the back of my mind I thought, “see, I have only had her for a few weeks, and I’ve already messed up. I can’t take care of anything. She deserves a better mom.” Funny how the mind can go somewhere dark so quickly.
It was already 10:30pm, and Jeff was in the bedroom. I decided to take Maris to the pet ER. The small puppy sat on the passenger side and looked at me, still making that weird swallowing motion. I heard myself say, “no, no, please be okay little Maris. I’m so sorry, I don’t know what I did.” We got to the ER and there was no one in the waiting room. We were taken in without much wait.
The veterinarian who examined Maris was a nice lady, whom Maris liked very much. She started to wag her tail and lick the vet’s ear, and was acting totally normally! The vet examined Maris and said that she didn’t feel anything lodged in her throat. The next thing to do is to get an x-ray. They took Maris to the back room where they took the pictures. When they got back, I saw two pictures: in the first one, Maris was spread eagle, and in the second one, it was a profile of her sitting down. The x-rays were actually quite funny (how do you get a puppy to do a spread eagle and to stay still?), and what was funnier was that Maris’s guts were completely filled with gas. “Gas? That’s what was wrong?” The vet said that over-the-counter Gas-X should do the job.
What a relief! Just gas. Six hundred dollars later (!!!), I came home late at night with the dog and a CD of the x-ray pictures. On the way home, Maris did a thing for the first time… sitting on my lap and falling asleep. I think she knew at that time that I would do anything to take care of her, that I love her, and that we are going to tackle life’s challenges together. When I got home, Jeff woke up and asked me what was going on. Boy, was he in for a story… I saved the longer version for the next day, and what I said was that it has been a day of gutsy drama in the Rathbun house, and that I expect an effervescent path toward a happy resolution.
I wish I could fix Maris’s cancer with pills as simple as Gas-X. Today, she is on steroids to help with her appetite and swelling, painkillers for comfort, blood pressure meds for her kidneys, and antibiotics to keep the tumors clean. She has sores inside her mouth, so eating is not as pleasant as it used to be, so I have been making her food to keep it soft for her mouth. I know that this cancer will take her at some point, but somewhere in the back of my mind, I can’t help thinking that maybe homemade food might help to beat the cancer. Stranger things have happened, right? Maybe there is something magical in the Costco ground beef… you never know. But I see the tumors spreading to other parts of her body; this is a very aggressive cancer with a high mitotic rate, and I can see it unfolding before my eyes. Other than the sores on her body, the lymph node on her right neck is now the size of a grapefruit. But she doesn’t yet know what is happening to her. Maris still wakes me up in the morning, more ready than I am to greet another new day, eating like a champion, and then sitting by my side because I am her best friend. We have our routine, which we keep doing because while I am neck-deep in grief, it is just another day for Maris. Maybe canine cutaneous lymphoma, this rare form of cancer, is in some way harder on the humans.
Everyone keeps telling me that she will let me know when it is time to let her go. I know that Maris will let me know anything that she is feeling. She has always been highly and clearly communicative (mostly bossing me around, haha), so I don’t doubt that she will let me know. But it is really the anticipation that is hard. I am at peace with the sacred process of knowing and accepting the moment, but the fact that I don’t know what that will look like makes me nervous. I keep imagining what her eyes will tell me, trapped inside her broken body. And then I get sad just picturing the moment in my head. So I keep looking at photos of her during her happy moments in the last 11 years because apparently, it helps to celebrate the good times that we had together. We shall see.
The Little One 