putting it all in storage
Last July I was playing with my niece and nephew at my brother’s house, trying to distract myself while waiting for my phone to ring. My 12.5 year old dog, Skylar was 15 miles away having an MRI on her brain. After months of increasingly strange behavior and new habits (getting stuck in corners, waking up throughout the night to bark at me, doing loops in the house, having accidents on furniture) that my regular vet had chalked up to old age, my gut kept pushing me to find better answers and so I had made an appointment with one of two veterinary neurologists in Northern California, who happened to be in spitting distance to where I grew up.
Earlier that morning Dr. Westworth had observed her a short period of time before my mom and I joined him in the treatment room. He asked me what I thought was going on, and I had said that she seemed confused and was worried she had canine dementia. That was the the bottom of his list of suspected root causes, but he said an MRI and spinal tap if the imaging didn’t turn anything up would give us answers. One we had answers, we would know how to help her. No more googling symptoms or behaviors trying to puzzle together what was going on. After signing her treatment plan and swiping my credit card on a very large deposit (human MRIs are expensive, a dog’s will make your eyes water - thank god for pet insurance), I felt a sense of relief that we BOTH were getting the help we needed.
My phone finally rings. Sky is waking up from the anesthesia, Dr. Westworth tells me, and her vitals are good. I wait. He tells me they didn’t have to do a spinal tap, that she has a large mass in the frontal lobe of her brain. Can I be back there in 30 minutes to pick her up and look at the images?
Back in the observation room, he explains that without a biopsy of the tumor, that there is no way of knowing whether it is a glioma (very very bad, “of the brain”) or a meningioma (bad, but between the brain and skull, therefore more easily operable). A biopsy of the brain is effectively surgery of the brain, and he explains that if she were to pull through, it would maybe give us a few more months. Months of a dog not understanding why she is being put through pain. That was a no for me, which I intellectually know was the right choice, but still sometimes torture myself wondering if I should have at least tried. They sent us on our way with steroids and pain meds, and a plan to keep her as comfortable as possible for her final weeks or months.
I started this post thinking I’d talk about how travel as a fight or flight response has always been my ‘push button in case of emergency’ reaction. After a breakup in high school, before I had really been anywhere other than a resort in Mexico, I self-soothed with a visit to the library, checking out travel guides for Italy and France to mentally transport myself to a richer frame of existence than being seventeen and devoid of agency.
Absorbing the news of a prognosis that set a timer on when my heart would be broken by the loss of my best friend, the constant in my life, I knew that when the time came I would need to get the fuck out of town.
This dog was the love of my life: an intuitive, perfect creature in a world of disconnection. Relationships are tricky for me, and she gave me the security of unconditional love. Should a dog hold so much space in a person’s heart? In her absence, it feels like the answer is no, but she was so safe to give and receive love to, and I don’t regret a second I chose to sit with her for company on a Friday night.
So, six months after I lost her and was strong enough again to choose things again, I put all my stuff in storage. First stop, Mexico.
