A catalog of healed animals

Shoring myself up for whatever comes next

Mackie appreciation post

It has been a hard week. My beloved dog, Mackie, has something growing in the cavity behind his eye, and it’s pushing his eye outward in a way that has not yet caused permanent damage, but it is heartbreaking to look at it and, no doubt, deeply uncomfortable.

We are trying things—antibiotics, steroids, a tooth extraction. We were hoping for an abscess, but that hope is dwindling. Now, we are on a waiting list to be seen at a clinic in Albany and at Cornell, but there are no appointments until late April.

As a way of coping, I’m lavishing him with attention and special privileges—I let him ride in the car to pick up the kids from school, let him crawl into my lap in the evenings after everyone’s asleep (despite the fact that he’s quite heavy and very long). I’ve fed him thinly sliced apples and let him snooze by the fire instead of trudging through the snow to the barn. It feels good and useful to spoil him this way, but it doesn’t put a dent in my sadness. I’ve tried some remedies for that, too—namely, assuming the worst so that I won’t be so devastated when my fears are confirmed. But today, I’m trying something else.

Today, I’m remembering a list of beloved animals who defied the odds.

First there was Casper—our childhood dog who arrived on Christmas morning when I was 7. He was a scruffy Westie who was bred to be a show dog but preferred to sleep in a pile of old towels in the garage. One day, when Casper was an old man with bad hearing, he fell asleep in the driveway too close to the tire of our eggplant-colored Chevy Suburban. My mom ran over his tiny back leg, and broke it.

At the vet, they recommended putting him down. He’s old, they said. He won’t recover. My mother said absolutely not and came home in a rage with Casper tucked under her arm. She pulled a CVS bag from her purse and, from within that, a metal finger split lined with blue foam. I stroked Casper’s head while she fitted the splint around his back leg. He never flinched. His little leg bone, no thicker than my middle finger, healed straight. He lived many more years, happily snoring in the corner of the garage.

And there was Lark—my mother’s problematic but deeply loved horse who ran through a barbed wire fence on my grandfather’s farm. The day that it happened, I sat in the car outside of the pasture, watching my mom and a selection of my uncles trying to load Lark, who was delirious and defiant with pain, into the trailer to take him to an emergency vet. His chest looked like hamburger meat.

The vet advised my mom to put him down, but when she denied his offer, he stitched up what he could of Lark’s chest and sent him home. They quickly became infected. I watched my mom unstitch the wounds. I watched her clean and debride the wounds (which were so deep she could fit her fist inside) every day for weeks, filled simultaneously with great admiration and revulsion. He stood perfectly still and let her. Lark’s wounds healed, leaving two flat starburst scars on either side of his chest.

And, of course, there was Sully—my dog soulmate, who I got at 15 and could read my mind. One afternoon, while chasing a tennis ball thrown by my then-boyfriend, he ran beneath a horse trailer and caught his back on the jutting metal support. It opened up his back in a massive U-shape, cut all the way down to his muscle. He sat in my lap, looking up at me for hours as we drove around rural Lowcountry South Carolina, begging vets to help him. Two separate places took a look and told us to put him down. The third, an hour and a half away in Bluffton, said he would give it a try. The vet said he couldn’t promise anything, but he let me, stroke Sulley’s head as he went under anesthesia, politely ignoring my weeping.

For weeks, I lay on the cold cement floor of the barn apartment we were living in, curled around Sulley. This time, I was the one cleaning his sutures, carrying him outside to use the bathroom, hand feeding him pieces of kibble. The vet had removed the entire U-shaped chunk of flesh (it had taken us too long to get him help, and the flesh was dying) and stitched him back together. The tension was so great that the vet predicted the stitches wouldn’t hold, but they did. When it healed, there was hardly a scar. We graduated from college and moved to Brooklyn. We kept growing up together.

It feels, sometimes, like I know every one of my animals inside and out. But I’m reminded that there is something that I cannot possibly know. I cannot know the animalness of them. The depth of their resilience. Their overwhelming will to survive. Tomorrow, I will probably go back to preparing for the worst-case scenario. But today? Today, there’s still hope.