October 13th

A year ago today, this little sleeping monkey on my lap was nearly disemboweled. Another dog living with us got into some sort of altercation with him, and my roommate called me at work to tell me I needed to come home NOW.

When I got to the house, I saw Bill holding a bleeding shocky dog on the counter wrapped in a towel. I scooped the dog up and we drove five blocks to the most incredible vet in the world who met us at the front door and ran him into surgery. I had just made it back to the house when she called and said I needed to get back to the clinic - his lung had collapsed while he was on the table and he needed to go to the doggy ER. I spun the car around, raced back to the clinic, and was met at the door by her surgery tech. We turned the front seat of the volvo into a makeshift dog ambulance complete with oxygen tank and heart monitor, so by the time the doc had stapled his side shut and run back with him to the front, the car was turned around and running. We loaded the dog in, and I drove to the emergency clinic (running all the red lights) with one hand on Connor, saying "hang on little man, hang on, buddy, just a few more blocks, you'll be okay, you can do it..."

At the emergency vet, he went back in to surgery and I was sent home. I hadn't even made it three blocks away when I got the phone call that he was trying to die whenever he would roll onto his side. He had to be kept upright for his heart to keep beating. As soon as I left the clinic, his heart had stopped.

I had to pull the car over.

The nice, calm woman on the phone told me that i should go home, get some rest, and come back in a few hours. She assured me that at this point they were doing everything they could and it would be up to him to decide if he wanted to stay or go. The surgeon was working on stabilizing his rib fractures, they were trying to keep the swelling down on his brain, but they would call when I could come back and see him and we could talk about more options.

All I remember from that afternoon is crying. Gut-wrenching sobs, hyserical stupid.

I went back to the vet that evening, and he was on the treatment table propped up with towels. His side was torn open from his ear down his back, around his foreleg, and all the way to his sternum. He had two broken ribs, a collapsed lung, massive crushing head trauma, his ear was almost ripped completely off, and there was a huge hole in his neck; deep enough to see his trachea and jugular vein. His left front leg was shredded, he had puncture wounds all over his abdomen, and he was bleeding from his nose. His head was so swollen that he couldn't open his one good eye, and his tongue was paper-white.

I put my hands on either side of him, kissed the thumbprint cookie-head, and told him that he'd done a very good job and could go if he wanted to. He was still in a coma, but as soon as I touched him his blood pressure came up and his heart rate stabilized. He was trying to stay.

The vets never asked me to leave, so I stayed that way with him until the next morning - during the night he had a hard time breathing so we had to intubate him, and he needed stronger meds to keep the swelling down on his brain. they put in a jugular catheter at about 3 in the morning to help with the meds, and I held his oxygen mask and kept him from slipping sideways until the sun came up. At that point he had been pretty stable for about 12 hours, so they told me I could go home and get some sleep, and they'd call me if anything changed.

As soon as I left, his blood pressure dropped again and his body temperature went down. I got a phone call at about seven that he needed a blood transfusion, and was going into the oxygen tank. They managed to keep his swelling down and his blood pressure up, but he was nowhere near out of the woods when the money ran out and I had to take him home the next day.

We set him up in his crate with pillows for positioning, his IV bag with antibiotics and pain meds hanging from the lamp, and the heating pad under him to keep him warm. I stayed on the floor in the living room with him, and I didn't take my hands off of him for the next four days. What little sleep i got was with my head and shoulders in his crate, making sure he was still breathing.

We finally moved him into my bed and started his medication regimen on day three - pain meds injected every three hours, more pain meds orally every six hours, antibiotics by mouth every six hours (two hours after the pain meds cause they interact), syringe feeding every hour (a baby food and liver smoothie), and bandage changes every three hours after the pain meds have time to kick in. Also, i had to carry him outside to go potty each hour after he eats, and hold him up since he can't stand. With his IV bag balanced on my shoulder.

Over the next three months, he got progressively better. We were at the vet every three days for cultures and resuturing and checkups, and he developed some nasty systemic infections that required absurdly expensive antibiotics to treat, but overall he's been recovering steadily ever since. We had some minor setbacks with abscesses blowing out all over and stinky draining pus from staph infections in his bloodstream, but once we found the correct cocktail of drugs, the abscesses quit blowing and his nasty gash in his armpit started to heal.

So today, a year later, his ear looks almost normal, the scars on his legs are barely noticeable, the giant hole in his neck is gone entirely, and his ribs don't crunch when you hug him. He has quite a bit of scar tissue on his left side, and a couple strange 'bridges' of tissue where there's still some drainage right by his armpit. His left back leg (where all the nasty abscesses were) has some larger scars on it, but is just as functional as it was before (it's the one that's held together with pins from the SUV incident when he was a puppy). He moves a little slower than he used to, and he gets grumpy a little easier, and he doesn't seem as able to tolerate extremes of heat and cold. He's a bit more cuddly than he was, and he's certainly more demanding of my time. He has lost a lot of his range of motion in that left leg, but he still runs around pretty well - he won his class at the lure coursing event in August.

I'm amazed and grateful that he's made it here, and I'm not sure if there's an appropriate way to thank all the people who helped him through his (and my) time of need. To start, the litany:

Thank you Bill Doctorman for your Eagle Scout first aid skills, and your crisis management skills, and for keeping as much of his blood in as possible.
Thank you Djai for financial help even though you didn't understand, and for the ebay supplies that kept his guts in.
Thank you Dr. Daroowalla for dropping everything that day and seeing me through the next six months.
Thank you Southern Arizona Veterinary Specialty for letting me hold him sternal to keep him breathing those first 48 hours, and for the oxygen tank, and the blood transfusions, and the heart-restarting, and the dedication and commitment of your staff.
Thank you Senna for your banana-nut muffin and your kindness.
Thank you Egan and the Summit Hut for letting me bring him to work even when he was incontinent and infected, and for understanding our many many vet appointments.
Thank you Genevieve for helping with the caregiver burnout, and for providing the space for Connor's first outing even though he tried to eat your cats.
Thank you Casey for listening to me babble hysterically and for the energy and the candles and the magic - and for tending to the others while I was consumed with the little man.
Thank you to all the Beverly Drive kids - Anna and Tree and Thom and Logan and Bill (again) and Chris - for your patience with my crazy dog and my crazy self. I can't think of a better group of housemates to hold the place together when i have to sleep on the floor in the living room to keep my dog breathing. You guys are the best. No-one else would put up with bloody terrier bandages on the bathroom counter every four hours.
Thank you mom for giving me permission to keep going, and the ability and wherewithal to see it through.
Thank you Chaz for being a responsible sort of guy and picking up your end of the SAVS bill.

I'm not very good at this sort of effusive gratitude, but I need to be, because every morning i wake up with him tucked into the back of my knee, and I'm astounded that he's still alive.

Until a year ago today, i didn't know I could love anything this much or this deeply, or this unconditionally. Now I can't stop.


he's snoring, and I'm happy.