Month: June 2010

Mom comes home from shopping. Since she still owes me a truckload of treats, I sniff the bags as best I can – I don’t table-surf like Catie and there’s a limit to how high I can lift my nose but it’s all good because I have superpower nostrils. I don’t smell anything interesting. Mom is enthralled however with all her goodies and she carefully lines a series of small packages on the table. Then she puts on her funny-looking facial apparatus that makes her eyes look scary huge.

“Hm. Why do they make the print so small,” she says. She turns a pink box over and over and squints at some microscopic markings on the back. She notices that Catie and I are watching her and mistakes my apprehension for curiosity – her eyes look like that guy in that horror movie The Fly and it’s creeping me out. She feels compelled to explain. “These are beauty products. And this…” she squints some more. It’s not a good look. “..is a hair removal kit.”

That sounds seriously wrong. I look at Catie, who still has these funny naked patches on her front leg and both her back ones. I look at the box Mom is holding in her hand. Aha. I make the connection and slink off to a safe corner where Catie and I hide all our fur balls from Mom. Catie’s too lazy to be concerned and flops down on her pillow while Mom disappears upstairs.

Just as I start to relax, there’s some commotion from the room with the flushable water bowl.

Mom comes back downstairs. She’s wearing her bath robe and she’s got the pink box crushed in her hand. She shoves the package in the garbage can and stares at it for a moment. “That really hurt,” she says. She has some funny red patches all over her legs.

For a species that prides itself on its intelligence, I’ll never understand humans. I certainly don’t understand mom’s obsession with grooming. Maybe it’s just her. Dad’s not nearly as worried about it all – in fact, one time he was sitting at the table reading the paper and something caught Mom’s attention. “You have an eyebrow hair that’s four inches long,” she said to him. “Stay right there.”

When Mom says stay, everyone but Catie listens.

Now, my dad’s usually a tough dude like me; but when Mom came back with some tweezers and yanked on that eyebrow whisker, he cried like a baby.

Mom blames the disappearance of Catie’s whiskers on some chemo treatments. Hmm. I’m just not too sure any more so Catie and I are going undercover to put the pieces together. The truth might not be pretty.

I know my dreary mood is directly correlated to awakening before 3:00 AM. It’s one of the more unpleasant hazards, I’ve found, of getting older. I swear I was once able to sleep all night. As a teenager I could sleep for days, it seemed. It’s an elusive and nearly impossible feat now when I need all the beauty rest I can possibly get.

Catie and Riley are never sure what to make of my nocturnal prowls through the house; they barely raise a brow. Their innate sense of time tells them it’s too early for breakfast, for dinner, for a walk or a trip to the park.

I cruised the internet for a help line for insomniacs; surely they didn’t have daytime hours. I phoned in a refill for a prescription and checked the mailbox for the paper. The world is eerily quiet at that time of day.

I shouldn’t have looked through old photos last night but both my daughter and my son want a visual display for their respective weddings and I’m the one with all the baby pictures.

To be honest, I couldn’t finish the sorting before I went to bed because I started missing my oldest son. I’ve seen him once in the last year, and that’s not because he lives three hours away. Following a twelve-month period where his life went off the rails –  substance abuse and suicide attempts and financial distress – he left a phone message last July and said he wanted nothing more to do with the family. He’d already exchanged his old circle of friends for a new one; I’d never dreamed he’d cast us off too.

We’d forget about him in time, he said.

So my heart was feeling heavy. I didn’t see him at Christmas or  get a return phone call to the message I left on his voice mail. I was sad he won’t be going to his little sister’s wedding. They were once really close and she’s even living now in the same city as he is. I somehow doubt he’ll be attending his younger brother’s wedding in September either. I was sad he hasn’t picked up the phone or sent me an email to ask how Catie’s been doing; he knows about her illness because I sent him a message the day of her surgery. And I was sad because I knew he was in town yesterday to see a surgeon at the clinic in the same building where I work and I’d been hoping he might, just maybe, come and see me.

I’m thinking, just maybe, that’s why I couldn’t sleep last night.

It was a really long day and I was ready for a good, solid poor-me cry when I pulled into the driveway this evening. But then – oh, look –  two expectant golden faces at the window, noses squashed against the glass, just as they had been when they watched me leave in the morning. I could see Catie’s scrawny tail wagging in circles and thwacking the curtains; I could hear Riley’s excited bark telling me to hurry up and get inside as I fumbled with the door key.

I’d be lying if I said Catie and Riley made everything better. But their non-judgmental, unconditional, unselfish, wholehearted loving this evening really, really, really helped. I didn’t need a cry after all.

Bored – according to Oxford: Feeling tired and impatient because one is doing something dull or one has nothing to do.

Ok. I didn’t quite get the human concept before, but I’m getting it now.

After reading something about the benefits of strength and endurance conditioning for Tripawds, Mom decided that Catie needed to start a fitness program – NOW – to make her one remaining front leg stronger. I don’t understand what the big deal is; Catie seems plenty strong enough to me when she has one of my toys and I want it back.

The training goes like this:

Mom spends a lot of time getting Catie positioned on one of the dog beds. Like most houses, we have heaps of them in each room. Mom and Dad have had to clear a lot of their own furniture for them all, which is fine with me because the only human item I go on is Mom’s bed. I’ve never willingly gone up on a couch or a chair except for the times Mom hauls me up on one. I endure it to make Mom happy – for about five minutes. She finally lets me go because I won’t look at her for the entire time because it’s humiliating. Mom can’t understand it. I keep trying to tell her it’s because I’m a cool dude and I prefer being on the floor.

Catie doesn’t want to cooperate. I simply stay out of the way.  I’m a little worried already that this is all going down the way of yoga. Mom’s all red in the face and she’s not even upside down. Who needs a fitness program again? Catie’s not even breathing hard.

“Down, Catie,” Mom says.

Catie looks at her. She looks at me out of the corner of her eye. Naturally, I go down.  I respond to commands very well – even ones not directed at me – and wait for my treat but Mom’s not even looking my way.

When Catie finally does as she’s told, Mom makes a lot of gushy noises about “Oh, good girl!”

Give me a break. Hellllloooo! Over here! See this g’boy, superpowered dude over here doing exactly what Catie’s not doing?!??

Here we go. Mom asks Catie to sit.

Catie looks at her. She looks at me. Her gaze slides toward the window, the ceiling, anywhere but at Mom. Good grief. It’s an involuntary reaction and I sit. And wait.  Mom eventually wrestles Catie up to a sitting position. It is sad but true – this is FAR worse than yoga.

This futile endeavour continues for some time. In the meantime, because I can’t help myself, every time Mom says “down” to Catie, I go down; every time Mom says “sit” to Catie, I get up and sit. Over and over and over again. By my estimation by the time Mom gives up, I’m owed about 6,032 treats. Catie deserves none. Nada. Zippo. She gets one anyways. So do I.

One.

Bored – according to Riley: Feeling tired and impatient after doing something extremely dull and still waiting for 6,031 biscuits.

Some idle thoughts in no particular order:

We decided after much thought and conversation with the oncologist not to put Catie through the sixth chemo treatment. Catie was tired. We were tired of her being tired and feeling ill for over a week each time. She’s endured enough. Wherever this journey takes us, and however long the road may be, we just couldn’t put her through it any more.

She was also running out of places to shave for the IVs.

Over the last couple of weeks the weather’s been seventy percent lousy and thirty percent good. Lousy meaning we had snow the weekend of May 29th; good meaning days where we had no rain and snow.

Not only does Catie still have a sparsely-feathered tail, she’s lost all but four whiskers. Yes. I counted them.

When I took Catie and Riley for their leash walk on one of the thirty-percent pleasant evenings, a teenager on a bike way too small for him stopped and asked if he could pet my dogs. He asked what happened to Catie’s leg and I said she had cancer. He considered her carefully and told me she looked like she was really strong and she could fight it.

We continue to celebrate each small victory. Since Catie’s amputation she has only tried to go down to the third level television room a few times and only when my son or my future son-in-law were here. Each time, however, we’d have to carry her back up to the main level because she was too petrified to attempt on her own. This past Wednesday evening, she paced and hovered at the top of the stairs and, as if she had simply made up her mind, she tentatively but determinedly worked her way down to the bottom to thunderous applause and happy dances (the dancing would be my husband, not me). Riley thought our behaviour perplexing and ridiculous – after all, he goes up and down all the time so he couldn’t understand the fanfare. He accepted a treat anyways.

Since then, Catie’s taken the stairs down and back up, on her own three legs, on numerous occasions. It goes without saying that each time she makes the trip, my heart hiccups in exactly the same way it did when my kids used to scramble and climb on playground equipment.

I’m really hoping the snow’s gone for good now. And can anyone explain to me why there’s still hockey on television in June?