ON THE EVENING of February 10th, 2011, Tam-Tam stopped eating and threw up her dinner. I didn’t think much of it at the time. As near as I can tell, vomiting is a hobby with dogs. But then she threw up again later that night, and again at around three am. And what came out of her then wasn’t food: it was black, viscous, smelling of rot--like liquid pooling under a dumpster.
Now, Tam-Tam had been losing weight for months before this. She still enjoyed walks, but she had been become very thin, and by then she was unpleasant to touch: bony, angular. She had always weighed about 35 pounds. But at that point, February 10th 2011, she weighed 24 pounds. The vet thought she had cancer, but said that, given her age, it didn’t make much sense to put her through a battery of tests--much less the treatment. I didn’t think she had cancer. I thought her weight loss was related to getting old, muscle atrophy, because she’d been losing the weight so slowly. She was almost sixteen. (In retrospect, that idea seems pretty silly.)
The next morning, February 11th, Tam-Tam didn’t eat or drink. She didn’t get up, either. I carried her outside to pee, and then carried her back to her bed. A short while later, I saw that she had soiled herself, and hadn’t moved out of her own waste. So I brought her to the vet right then—they saw her between appointments. The vet proscribed painkillers and a pill to increase her appetite. Again we discussed cancer testing.
Over the next few days, I gave Tam-Tam the pills. But she didn’t eat and drank only a tiny amount. She didn’t get up, either. When I took her out, I had to hold up her back end so she could pee. Most of the time, she soiled herself. She was almost entirely unresponsive, but if I put my face near hers, she would lick me a little.
I went back to the vet on the 12th and again on the 13th. On the first visit, I expected the vet to tell me to put Tam-Tam down; I was prepared to fight. But then the vet’s assistant carried Tam-Tam to the scale: 22.4 pounds. At that point, the fight left me. How long could she go without eating? How much weight did she have left to lose?
We saw a different vet that day; our regular vet was in surgery. I don’t remember much of the visit, except that this other vet told me to start giving Tam-Tam a pepcid. I didn’t think much of it, but did it all the same.
I came back on the 13th because I wanted to see our regular doctor, Dr. Nader. Tam-Tam had now not eaten or gotten up in three days. Dr. Nader told me that it would be a reasonable choice to put Tam-Tam down now, or—if I wanted—we could hold on a few more days. She gave me a handful of syringes, and showed me how to force feed Tam-Tam. I won’t say she recommended that choice, but she told me it wouldn’t be crazy.
So starting that night--for five days--I force fed Tam-Tam every day, three or four times a day. Ground up cottage cheese and baby food, loaded into a syringe. Also some special dog food the vet sold me. I held Tam-Tam’s muzzle up and squirted ten or fifteen small syringes of food into her throat. Tam-Tam was too weak to resist much, but she didn’t seem especially bothered. (Sometimes she’d jerk a little bit and we’d both end up striped with bright orange lines of yam.) I had to wash her three or four times a day, too, and her bedding. She essentially didn’t move. Every time I came back from class, I braced myself to find her dead. I spent evenings with my face against her fur. Motionless as she was, it seemed like she was already dead.
February 18th was a Friday. I had made a vet appointment for 2:30 that day, eight days since Tam-Tam had vomited in the middle of the night. It was warm, sunny, almost fifty degrees after what had been a brutal winter. So I bought Tam-Tam’s bed outside and sat with her in the sun for an hour before our appointment, which I understood, in a foggy way, was taking her to die. I didn’t think about, refused to make that connection, even though it was clear to me, too, that’s what was going to happen. The picture below is from that afternoon. I took it with my cell phone.
After an hour outside, I brought her back in and got myself ready to go to the vet. There was a biscuit there by where I put her, on the floor by her bed, and I saw her extend her neck over, smell it, and then take it in her mouth. Then I heard her crunching and eating half of it. I almost didn’t understand what I was seeing and hearing.
Well, it turns out Tam-Tam had an ulcer and a gland infection in her back end. The former explained her not eating; the latter explained her not walking. Because the two occurred simultaneously, I guess each was much harder to diagnose. In the following days, she slowly started eating again, and her back-end infection ruptured: messy, but the first step in healing. After that, she started walking again, too. I hate to think of how much pain she must have been in for those eight days, and I wish I had understood better what I was seeing. In retrospect, her symptoms seem to point clearly to her diseases.
But it is now exactly one year later: a year of uninterrupted health for Tam-Tam. She weighs 34 pounds today, and most mornings we walk for upwards of an hour. (Albeit very slowly.)
This has felt like an extra year, an unlooked for bonus, like when the numbers match up exactly right and you get a free pinball game. I am more grateful for it than I can say.