How it goes for a “forever” dog

When you adopt a dog, they tell you you’re giving them a “forever home”. What you don’t quite think about consciously is that it’s forever for the dog, not for you. You’re almost certainly going to outlive your dog, so you’re going to be the one saying goodbye someday.

I had been volunteering at an animal shelter for several months before I made the decision to adopt a dog, my first. It would be several weeks before I could actually take someone home — there was grass to plant, a fence to install. But when my house was ready, I blocked out a Saturday and I escorted him out of that shelter for the last time.

My new dog was called Lake, named after the place they had found him as a stray. He had some behavior problems, so he had been at the shelter for over two years. No one quite said so, but it seemed that if I didn’t take him, no one would, and his future at the shelter was likely to be very dim and very brief. So I adopted him, and my only regret was that after waiting for two years, he still had to wait that extra time to go home. That initial insult to him ate at me the entire time he was with me.

While he enjoyed lying around and napping and eating as much as any dog, I made it my business to give him the best life I could. I liked to get him out into the world and get him some new experiences. We couldn’t go to a bar or any place people would be too close, but he loved going for walks everywhere, and we eventually visited every park between here and the middle of the state. He liked to hang out the window on these road trips, and he loved all of the new smells in those parks and forests.

He was never that interested in dog parks — he loved meeting every dog he saw, never had a problem, but he wasn’t really into playing that much. He was just happy getting a few sniffs, and then moving on to the next new smell.
It took me a long time to figure out how to introduce him to people, but if we did it the right way, it was like a switch was thrown, and he was a friend for life. A friend who didn’t care much about your thoughts on personal space or sloppy kisses, but a friend nonetheless.

A side benefit of those walks, of course, was that his walks all over western Pennsylvania meant that I was going on those same walks, so if they were good for him, body and soul, they were good for me, too.

We were on one of these walks, about five years in, when I noticed a lump in his neck. He was always a muscular dog, constantly pulling this way and that, so I thought it might just be an overdeveloped muscle, from all of the pulling. I took him to the vet to check it out, and they promptly sent me off to the specialty vet for a closer look. They found a cancerous thyroid, and said it could be serious. The good news was that we caught it pretty early, that it didn’t seem to have spread, and that he was showing absolutely no symptoms at all. The bad news was, well, cancer.

They removed the bad thyroid, and said they got most of it, which is not as good as getting all of it, but he bounced back after a day and continued to live that life of exploration. For a year and a half, he never displayed a single symptom. Those cells were certainly growing, but he didn’t say anything about it. He also felt no effects, as far as we could tell, from his daily chemotherapy meds, so long as I wrapped them in peanut butter or pepperoni.

As well as he was doing, we were on borrowed time now, and I continued to make every day as interesting as I could for him. He never stopped enjoying treats, never lost his appetite. He loved playing hide and seek with me in the house, and he perfected his staring-and-drooling skills any time I was eating something that interested him.

Eventually, this bonus time came to an end, and it caught up with him. One day he was fine, and the next day he was suddenly a little lethargic, first losing interest in long walks, and then within a couple days not so big on shorter walks, either. Pit bulls are notoriously stoic about reporting pain. They feel it as much as anyone, but they just don’t do much about it. A small wheeze from Lake was the equivalent of a painful yelp from a lesser dog, and I began to hear that wheeze when he moved just the wrong way. He seemed to be a little unsteady on his feet, and he usually had his tail between his legs, another sign that he was uncomfortable.

It had all come on so quickly. I thought the end might be near. We made a visit to the ER, and I was prepared for it to be a one-way trip for him. I stopped at McDonald’s on the way there and picked up a cheeseburger meal for him. I ate the fries, but I broke up a cheeseburger and handed it to him in the back seat.

He wolfed it down as quickly as he ever did. I left him in the back seat when I went into the vet office to check in. When I came back out, I found him in the front seat, having sniffed out the second cheeseburger, which he had happily destroyed. He perked up a little, and the vets and I decided that it was not yet time. We went back home to see if anything would change.

His oncologist thought he might finally be having a reaction to his chemo meds, so we stopped that. After a few more days of clear discomfort, we tried some pain meds. That didn’t do much, either, and one night as he was trying to rest on the couch, unable to find a comfortable position, he just looked at me with those eyes. He was telling me “enough.”

We could have prolonged things for a while, but it wouldn’t really be pleasant for him, and for what? I still remembered how he had had to wait in the shelter those extra days before coming home, and if I couldn’t go back and do anything about that, I would certainly see to it now that he would not suffer one minute longer than he had to, not even overnight. His pain was going to stop, and it was going to stop now, no matter how much it hurt me.

We went back to the vet. They set us up in a quiet room, and we let him go. I was with him to the end, on the floor, telling him that he was a good boy, even accepting a few final kisses as the drugs took his pain away. I was his forever person, and the last thing that he saw on this earth was me.

I started to clean out the house, starting with things no one would ever use again — his water dish, his bed, his unused meds, his personal peanut butter jar that had helped with the meds. One of his friends took some dog food.

Life at my house felt a little off balance, as if my left arm was permanently asleep. I didn’t have to get up a half hour early to make breakfast for him, or get in that morning walk. I didn’t have to hurry home after work to let him out. My couch felt a little empty without the constant battle over the best spot.

One morning, as I was at that fuzzy space between sleep and wakefulness, I had the distinct sense that someone had hopped on my bed with me. I was awake enough to know that wasn’t possible, there was no one in the house, but then I had the sensation of someone lying down on my left hip and curling up against me. I had to open my eyes to really see what was going on there, which, of course, was nothing. The muscle memory of those morning wakeup calls was stronger than I might have guessed.

I still have a few chew toys lying around, because I like having them there. There’s a patina of dried dog drool on the outside of my car doors where he used to hang out the window. I’m not getting rid of that, either.

But his seat cover is still on the back seat, and his crate is still in the house. It has been cleaned out, but it’s there, because it’s going to be used again, by someone. Someday soon, I’ll find someone else who has to get out of the shelter, and I won’t make him wait a minute longer than I have to. Because he’s going to be with me forever.