20/20 Hindsight: All The Little Signs

Looking back over last Autumn, it's hard not to feel that we should have known something was amiss with Stella's health.  Hindsight lends itself to self flagellation and guilt, a lot of guilt, because there were a half dozen posts along the way, each shooting small sparks of information that, alone, didn't seem like much, but when collected, morphed into a well lighted map pointing to big trouble.

Since moving to California in the beginning to 2013, we had being living in a classic Berkeley Hills 1939 bungalow.  I use the term "classic" in the real estate sense.  We're talking moist, few updates, and stinky.  Really, really stinky.  By last fall,  I was obsessed with finding a new place for our family to live.  Stella and I still walked our miles in the morning and around the neighborhood in the evening, but practically every other waking moment was dedicated to scouring rental ads, writing introductory emails, fielding calls, meeting homeowners, and driving through neighborhoods.  If I had lifted my head, I would have noticed that Stella was sleeping a bit more.  When I did see her wonked out on our bed, I chocked it up to the heat or her now being eight and officially an "elder dog".

Then one morning, Stella balked at the start of our walk. She does grow bored when we take the same route repetitively, something she protests by walking very, very slowly (then when I drive her somewhere new, even the same day, she pulls my shoulder out).  I figured she was bored out of her skull by our morning walk up the hill, because she flat out refused to go forward.  We ambled home and she went back to napping.

Never bored with a stick!

I did notice that she was breathing a bit harder when we would walk uphill.  My brother called this exercise intolerance and he said to take her in to see her local vet.  The local vet who we had seen once before in the spring when we first arrived did some blood work, looked her over, and said she seemed fine, just an older dog starting to show signs of slowing down.  This was tossed out in between her narrative about her children, her dogs, her office remodel, her employees.  A little voice in the back of my head said, "Find a new vet."  I will never again ignore that voice.

In November, Jim and I took Stella to our favorite dog friendly resort on the rough Mendocino coast, situated on a wide estuary where the Big River meets the Pacific Ocean.  Stella started to cry with excitement the moment we turned off Highway 1 (honestly, we are just as excited as she is and spend the last fifteen miles of the drive ooh-ing and ahh-ing at every new view of the immense surf).  She loves riding in the Canine Cruiser, a large outrigger canoe with the perfect spot where she can lie down with her paws over the lip of the boat and watch harbor seals, river otter, and cormorants.  It was a beautiful weekend where we walked on the highlands above the water, hiked beside the river, read in bed, and just checked out from the world (no cell phones!  No internet!).

Stella in the Canine Cruiser

After returning home, I noticed Stella was pretty itchy.  I assumed she had picked up fleas at the inn, even on flea and tick preventative, but I never found any buggers.  Then I thought perhaps the sand or the river water may have bothered her skin.  Perhaps she ate something while we weren't looking (exacerbating her food allergies).  I bathed her carefully, but the itching continued intermittently.

Sometime around Thanksgiving, Stella started to scratch at her ears.  This has happened before when she gets a little yeast growth (that's a labrador for you).  But when I looked in her ears, they looked normal.  No brown goop, no red, tender skin.  They looked clean and healthy.  But still she bothered at them and was shaking her head more frequently.  I put her through a week long course of ear cleaning and steroid/antifungal ointment just to be sure.

One night, while Jim and Stella were playing around in the kitchen, she let out a sharp, painful yelp and backed away from Jim.  That sound always elicits a fiercely overprotective, overblown maternal response me.  Jim will tell you (as he has, unfortunately, most often been at the receiving end of my reactive fury), I turn into a demolish-the-neighborhood Godzilla type when Stella is injured in any way.  I shrieked, "What the fuck?"
"I have no idea."
"Did you pull on her ear?"
"I don't think so.  I was just grabbing at her neck."
"Well, don't do that!"
"Jesus, Beth, we were just playing."
"Sorry!  I'm sorry!  I just hate that something hurt her."

Yeah, I know.  I'm working on that.

In late October, I had found a new house for us to move into and I started packing like mad ahead of our early December move in date.  We would have the new house for two weeks before moving in so that I could clean, paint, and do the little tweaks that would make the rental our home.  That first week in December, new floors had recently been put in and they were off gassing like mad, but I opened all the windows and went to work with Stella by my side.  It was a very busy time.

When I think back now, I can not help but wonder had life been a little less hectic, would I have noticed all the little signs and seen the big picture?  Would I have recognized that when Jim was playing with her neck, he had actually pinched an incipient tumor? Would I have looked a little deeper as to why she was scratching that left side of her neck and chest, why her ears were bothering her?  For god's sake, why did I let my little girl lie in her bed on newly polyurethaned floors?!?

This sense of "jesus, we should have caught this sooner, we should have seen what was happening, we should have done something, anything, earlier" and "what did I do to cause this?!?" are apparently a common feelings among pet owners after a grim diagnosis. Many dog owners I've spoken with who are going through similar health struggles with their dogs were initially hit with an outsized sense of responsibility and guilt over their dog's illness.  When we, the people who given them their everything in life, miss some of their cues, of course we take it to heart as a failing on our parts.  In that first couple of weeks after The Discovery, I carried that lead weight in the center of my belly and it grew heavy tendrils through every moment of every day, rendering sleep difficult and eating next to impossible. The sense that I had let Stella down and would now loose her quickly colored every day like a tablespoon of ink or blood in a glass of pale milk.  I would wake up at 5am (inconceivable to those who know me), silently move to the living room (in this new, foreign house), lift the shades and watch San Francisco's night lights shimmer and wink, grief like an illness in full fever wracking my body.  I couldn't get comfortable and I couldn't find respite.

But, here's the thing.  Dogs, for the most part, carry their discomforts silently and stoically for a long time.  It's easy to see the picture on the jigsaw when all the pieces are perfectly placed, but it looks like a mess of visual noise when you first open the box.