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A GenePoool.com Essay
Rhiannon
Our first thought was, maybe we shouldn't have gone.
We arrived home from our annual vacation in Florida to find Rhiannon, our dog for the last eight years, lying motionless beside a fan. She was gasping for breath and unable to even climb to her feet. Her breath was ragged and harsh, and each one seem to take more effort to draw than it was worth. We were used to her having problems breathing-- she'd had a respiratory problem for a few years-- but this was something new.
The real problem was a heart condition. About four years ago the veterinarian detected a heart murmur. "On a scale of one to six, it's about a four," he'd said. "It's loud enough that I don't need the stethescope to hear it." Untreated, her heart would expand and burst, or simply stop working altogether. Or, fluid-- another by-product of her inefficient pump-- would build up in her lungs and she would drown.
We were recommended to a specialist at Angell Memorial Hospital, who subsequently prescribed two drugs for her. One, theoretically, would treat the heart murmur. I say theoretically because it had proven successful in some trials, but had not been rigorously tested. A side effect of the medication was that it increased body fluid production, which would make her pee more often and also increase the risk to her lungs, so a second drug was needed to offset the fluid build-up.
This was expensive. For some reason the government has ignored my pleas to issue our pets social security numbers, so we can't claim them as dependents for our health care plans. But Rhiannon was a young dog, so we did what we had to.
We never really knew exactly how old she was. We adopted her in 1991 from an animal shelter in Sudbury called Buddy Dog. This is one of the few shelters in the state that doesn't euthanize, which unfortunately means that they frequently have no space for new animals until the old animals are adopted. Deb was the one who found her, a small terrier cowering in the first cage in a side room, a room reserved for puppies and dogs with behavioral disorders. Rhi's disorder was fear; she was the most frightened animal I had ever seen. But she wasn't afraid of Deb. The first time she met Deb she walked from the back of the cage she was trying desperately to press herself through, and came up and licked Deb's hand through the bars.
According to the shelter, Rhiannon was one of dozens. A family in Ayer had been keeping her and about sixty of her brothers and sisters in cages in their back yard. This family evidently either did not believe in neutering, or did not know where babies come from. Or both. Rhi was the runt of her own litter, and based on the evidence had borne at least one litter herself. She'd been terrorized by the dogs she was locked up with, and terrorized by the people that kept her in that cage, so she'd developed a healthy fear of both. She was also an escape artist. Twice at Buddy Dog she had wriggled out of a standard collar and run out into the Sudbury wilderness, only to be found a month or two later covered in brambles, tired and starving. She was, by the shelter's estimate, only two years old.
The irony here was that we got the dog because Deb was pregnant with our first child. We actually thought having an animal we were jointly responsible for would be good practice for having a baby. Then we brought home the most high-maintenance animal in the entire state.
At first, she was terrified of everything, especially me. For months I'd have to chase her around the apartment, hoping to hold her still long enough to slip on her harness (since she could escape a collar) and take her outside before she did her business on the rug. I finally wised up and just left the harness on her. This came in handy for the times she escaped. On occasions too numerous to mention I'd find myself running around the neighborhood in whatever I happened to be wearing at the time she took off, chasing Rhiannon through several yards before I caught up with her, sometimes picking her up by that harness.
Having two kids in the house didn't help, but we also didn't have to worry about her hurting one of them. She did get jealous on occasion, though. One time, right after Becky had finally fallen asleep in her crib, Deb caught Rhiannon bumping the crib leg hard enough to jostle Becky awake again.
But Rhiannon did eventually calm down, and even learned to be happy. She stopped trying to run away all the time, and she even became sociable with other dogs. In our first apartment the common yard we shared with several families was right outside our door, and a neighborhood poodle named Jake used to come to our door and wait for Rhiannon to come out so they could play. Our current landlords-- who live beneath us-- have a dog named Mopsy that got along famously with Rhiannon. Rhi would go down the back staircase and, knocking down a gate in her way, sneak into their apartment to visit Mopsy, and also to polish off Mopsy's food.
By the third year of treatment for her heart murmur, Rhiannon's condition started to worsten. The murmur itself hadn't progressed any, but she was having more trouble with fluid in her lungs. An increase in dosage of the second medication was a stopgap at best. We became accustomed to her walking around and hacking for several minutes before settling down. She was still playful, but even this was difficult, as she'd also developed arthritis in her legs.
Some time while we were in Orlando something catastrophic happened. We'll never know if it was a sudden change or something gradual that we simply didn't see the early signs of. About mid-week, she stopped going down the back stairs to go outside. Our landlord, Virginia, still came up and filled the food bowls, but the dog didn't express any interest in going outside, and since the bowls kept getting emptied and there were newspapers set up on the front porch for an emergency dog bathroom, Virginia assumed the dog was going out there instead. The last two days she came into our apartment, Virginia didn't actually see Rhiannon, who was by then lying on the floor of my study, trying just to breathe. It was the cats who had been emptying her dog dish.
Our first reaction, when we found her, was that we would be able to snap her out of it if we could just get her some air, so I carried her out onto the open back porch, but she scarcely moved. She did acknowledge us, and was clearly aware, but she simply had no strength. When we tried to get her to eat she showed no interest. So I called the Brookline Animal Hospital.
By this time I knew we were bringing Rhiannon in for only one thing. I'd been watching her gradual deterioration and expecting this day to come sooner rather than later. Right after vacation was maybe not the best time, but this is what we were dealt. After telling the hospital that we were bringing in a dog in respiratory distress, I sat down with Deb and told her I thought Rhiannon wasn't going to be coming back home with us.
Deb would be the first to admit she's not good at this sort of thing. Years ago, before we were even married, we found a sick squirrel in my family's yard. His face was swollen, he couldn't sit upright, and he looked to be in pain. We were able to coax him into a box, and then we called the Animal Rescue League. By then we had named him Harvey. An hour or two later, while we sat with Harvey, trying to feed him carrots he had no interest in, the man from the rescue league arrived. Deb asked what they were going to do for the squirrel. Not much we can do, the man explained. He'll have to be destroyed. Deb was devastated, even after I convinced her it was the humane thing to do.
Telling Deb that our dog, the one she had bonded with in that little cage in Sudbury so long ago, was going to have to be put to sleep, was not easy. She held onto the hope that the hospital would be able to revive her, and at least get her back to the state she was in before we left for Orlando, but I wasn't so sure the life she led even then was a very comfortable one. Putting her down was far more humane than trying to prolong her life.
Since we still had the children to worry about, I called my father and asked him if he could take them while we drove into Boston. Then we sat down with Becky and Tim and explained what I thought was going to happen. Tim, to put it politely, took it rather well. Not being the nurturing type, he was only interested in animals that played with him, and by the time he was old enough to play with Rhiannon, she was too old to play. Becky was another story. She went out on the porch and sat down next to Rhi, trying to figure out how to say goodbye when she'd never been forced to even fathom having to do so before. By the time my father arrived, Becky was in tears and bordering on hysteria. Dad took one look at Becky, looked at me, and said "are you sure she should come?"
So Tim stayed with Dad, and Becky came with us to the hospital, as did an ample supply of tissues. Becky and Deb sat in the back, with Rhiannon between them, the dog's head on Deb's lap, still gasping for air.
It only got harder. The veterinarian made it clear to us that we could admit Rhiannon, they could megadose her with drugs to clear the fluids from her lungs, and in a few days she might be well enough to come home. But there was no way of knowing whether this would prolong her life a few days, a few hours, or a few weeks. If it even worked. He ran through the treatment options that might enable Rhi to continue to lead her life, but all the options were ones we'd already taken four years earlier, and there were no other ones available. As the vet put it, in painfully cautious language, "putting her to sleep would most definitely not be inhumane."
Deb eventually did agree with me that this was the best thing. I know she didn't want to, and I know she didn't like having to, but when she saw our dog on the table in back, fighting the oxygen the technician was trying to administer, she knew it was time. Even Rhiannon knew.
I took Becky, who had been silently observing us debate this, in back to say goodbye. Then we left the room, and while I sat with Becky, Deb stayed behind as they euthanized Rhiannon.
Becky was inconsolable. I think the only thing worse than the feeling of powerlessness in this sort of situation is the realization that not only was she powerless, so were her parents.
"I can't stop crying," she said, "I've never gone through this before!"
"Neither have I," I admitted.
It was soon over. I made the final arrangements at the front desk, and we took our weeping daughter back to our much emptier home.
Becky couldn't get herself past Rhiannon's death. She slept in the next few days, waking up but just lying in bed for no reason, which, for an eight year old, is fairly unusual. During the day, even when it seemed like she was having fun and finding herself again, she's stop in the middle of what she was doing and say "I still miss Rhiannon."
Deb wasn't much better. While she stopped short of blaming me, she was convinced we'd made the wrong decision, and she probably still is. She was angry with Virginia for not having noticed Rhiannon's obvious distress, and she was angry with herself for not stopping the procedure at the end, when Rhi, just before the drug was administered, and for the first time all evening, tried to get to her feet.
Tim didn't seem to show much in the way of change. It had been his responsibility to walk the dog when he came home from school, and he was actually sort of glad to have been relieved of that task. But he knew enough to steer clear of Becky; even if he didn't feel a sense of loss he understood that she did.
There was only one real solution, and after a couple of days, when it was clear nothing was going to change, I broached the subject of getting a new dog.
"When can we leave?" Deb asked.
So we found ourselves, eight years later, back at Buddy Dog. And in the corner of the first cage, in the room set aside for puppies and dogs with behavioral disorders, cowering in the corner, was a small beagle. She was desperately trying to push her way out of the back of the cage, until Deb got down on her knees and called to her. The dog forgot about wanting to escape, slowly walked over, and licked Deb's hand.
We named her Penelope.
© 2000, Gene Doucette
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