A Dog Was Loved
Mar. 31st, 2021 09:22 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
jhameiaAfter months of up-down health, the family dog, Lady, finally passed away of an infection on her tail. It's been a while coming--her health since I got home in late 2019 hasn't been great. She had an unrelenting skin rash that intensified until I asked my dad how long she'd been having it, and how long the next-door neighbour had been renovating (an intense reno that involved practically gutting the house, generating a lot of dust).
She also started walking more slowly, and what used to be a whole neighbourhood walk became just one jaunt down the road and back. On especially bad days, she would eventually just sink to the ground even as she walked, looking a bit like a big white furry lizard, and I'd carry her home.
She used to say hello to all the neighbourhood dogs, and lost interest in them completely.
Sometime last year she started having difficulty standing up and walking on the tiled floor of our driveway porch, slipping a lot. It got worse when my mother decided to bar access to the garden because she could no longer wait for her regular walk hours and started to pee and poop in the garden. She compensated by either howling for our attention, or peeing/pooping in the driveway if no attention was forthcoming. Towards the end, she couldn't even get up, even to show interest in her leash, even as she howled, and I realised that she needed to be picked up and taken out of the house first, onto the road where she could get a foothold.
She started coming into the house during rainy days to find a rug to lay on. But at some point she couldn't climb in through the window, so I let her in. Then I laid out cushions wrapped in a fleece sheet that I've been using for sewing scrap experiments so she could sleep more comfortably on the floor (which my mother was upset about, since the cushions are from the old bamboo furniture that she couldn't bring herself to get rid off, sentimental value and all, and she foisted the single-seater onto my bedroom and I only really use it for putting stuff on).
I have never been particularly attached to this dog. She was happiest when running, and unlike previous dogs, didn't give a fig about the family. She barked when dark-skinned strangers approached the house, but not Chinese strangers. Where my last two dogs had separation anxiety, howling if I left the house, and whining and barking happily whenever I came home, this one ignored me most of the time unless I fed her or took her out on a walk. Most of her expressions were mostly of resignation, like the eternal sigh of a dog just waiting for her next meal.
(I once brought home a kitten, and showed it to her. She responded by retracting her body that said, "nngggghhh no" and when I tried to shove it in her face, she got up and repositioned herself. She didn't actually run away, she just put in bare minimum effort. It was one of the funniest expressions I've ever seen on a sentient creature.)
My dad was training her in her last few years, to respond to his voice when he asked her to wait or cross the road off-leash. It went okay, since it wasn't like she was being asked to do very complicated tricks (she wasn't that starved for stimulation). But she started to lose her hearing.
We got her from the SPCA about a year after my last dog, Jenny, died, in 2005 or 2006. She'd been obviously part of a puppy mill, with distended teats. She had black spots under the white overcoat, so she was clearly some sort of dalmation mix, and my mom felt she was the prettiest dog in the shelter (we're not particularly good at picking out dogs for personality--in Malaysia most of our dogs are kept for guarding the house so things like temperament aren't that important). Since I didn't pick her out, and I wasn't in the country for most of the year anyway, it didn't matter to me.
Our dogs have never lasted so long.
Our dogs also have either died by accident, or at the vet's. My dad was already starting to talk about putting down the dog and I would regularly get mad because it felt like trying to absolve resopnsibility for caring for an aging senior dog, and all the arguments about her suffering just boiled down to the effort it took to make sure she was comfortable.
(I'm still low-key mad at my dad because I bought pee pads for the dog, and he wouldn't COMMIT. He'd rinse them and hang them to dry if she did pee on them, and he would just clear them when she made a mess of them from using them to stand up.)
Last weekend, she got a balding spot on her tail, which I didn't think much of, because her rashes caused similar problems. But then it darkened, and when she thumped her tail on the floor, I noticed spots and it took me way too long to realise that it was blood. Not only that, but the fur around it picked up more dirt that got onto the wound. I asked my dad about it after he'd bathed her on Saturday, and he didn't think much about it. By Monday, it had necrotised, and I frantically called the vet. Our regular nearby vet was closed, our regular vet in USJ 8 could only see her on Wednesday. So I trimmed the fur around the wound and wrapped it up to prevent more dirt getting in. (She wagged it off later that day, so my dad re-wrapped it, even more tightly).
On Tuesday, she'd gotten so weak she peed on herself, and got her bandages wet. While I know theoretically urine is sterile, I didn't want her to keep moving around with a urine-soaked bandage, so I gently tried to remove it.
Unfortunately, what I SHOULD have done was get a pair of scissors and cut it off, because what happened instead was it popped off, and the tip of her tail with it. SHE WAS VERY UNHAPPY. And also bleeding all over. I laid out some pee pads for her to rest on and good thing too, because she was bleeding a LOT. My initial re-dressing the wound became a bloody mess, and I had to break out my embroidery scissors to cut them off.
(Upon further reflection, I should have used the nearby saline splution to rinse it first, THEN cut it off, because it would have saved the dog a lot of discomfort and would have made it all easier.)
(You don't need to know how ridiculous my family is but I am also low-key mad that my dad's first offering of a pair of scissors was our old kitchen scissors. So my next emergency purchase will be dedicated first-aid scissors.)
I dressed the wound again, this time making a bigger dressing, realising that my mistake was to wrap ONLY around the wound, instead fo binding further down the tail, which would help keep the bandage on and would also be less uncomfortable to bind tightly.
We managed to get an emergency appointment later in the day. Lady was not up for moving, so I carried her into the car and she looked very much the picture of resignation (which is not unusual for her). And as soon as the vet saw her, the good doctor asked, "what do you want the outcome here to be?" Because there was no way to really get rid of the infection short of amputation, and there was no way of amputation because the dog was too old for anesthetic. So the dog got some vitamins, and got some water intravenously, and we took her home and had to wait for my mother to bring home antibiotic cream.
(Made worse because my mother started complaining about how there was leftover antibiotic cream, and how my dad is supposed to be in charge and know all this, and how I shouldn't waste new antibiotic cream, and she could have sold that one tube. I don't really understand whether this is true when it sounds like her pharmacy doesn't get a lot of stock turnover.)
Dad blended food and we had to syringe feed her, and it was tough going because she wasn't really interested in food. She even turned down sausage skin, which she never does. She was moaning through the night unless sleeping, and I'm not sure whether it was from pain or hunger or both.
(Makes me wonder if I had fed her more, if I'd presevered with feeding her food, whether she would have pulled through.)
The next morning, I re-dressed her tail, and she pooped right as I was done, so I carried her to the garden hose to wipe her off, and she flopped in my arms in a way she'd never done before. I fed her as much as she would swallow, which was about as much as I expected her to eat, but it was hard because towards the end she just let food dribble around her mouth instead of licking her chops like she might have.
When I last checked on her, it was 2pm, and she was sleeping so soundly, she was snoring. Usually when I pet her, she'd startle awake, no matter what, because she's not the type to sleep through touch. But this time she just snored, and I wasn't sure whether it was because she had difficulty breathing (though, I guess, snoring IS a symptom of difficult breathing).
Around 2.45pm my mom burst into my room to announce that the dog was dead; she just got home and tried to talk to the dog, and the dog was just straight up not breathing.
My dad had already picked a gravesite for the dog (the municipal council had dug up some ground a block over, and my dad thought the ground might still be soft) so when he woke up from his nap, he borrowed a small handheld hoe from a neighbour and got to work digging.
(I don't know why we are so inefficient. I think because we're just so used to cutting corners.)
I wrapped the dog in the sheet as tightly as possible, to mimick her usual sleeping position, and carried her over when my dad felt the hole was big enough. I am never playing Tetris with him because he can't judge size of depth right, because the dog did not fit!!! And while my dad scraped the side of the hole, an Indian woman passed by, watched us for a while, looked askance at the dog's body, and I explained that the dog had died, and she responded by taking the hoe from my dad and digging the hole so quickly, shoveling out the dirt so swiftly with her own hands, that in a fraction of the time it took for my dad to dig the hole, she'd made it twice as large and deep. (She's from Chennai, moved to Malaysia some time ago, and now works as a cleaner.) (Yes, in fact, it showed us just how bourgie my dad and I have become, that we're incapable of efficiently digging a hole.) Then she helped us bury the dog.
So now we have no family dog.
There is some leftover dog food that my dad had blended for syringe feeding. A cat came into the house on Friday looking for company, and my brother feed her a bit of it, and I had her in my room for a bit, but she went out to explore, and when she tried to come by later, my dad chased her our, and I haven't seen her since, so we still have leftover dog food. I AM STILL ANNOYED AT THIS.
I've been thinking a lot about what I should have done to make sure the dog was more comfortable. That I should have noticed sooner the wound on her tail and taken her to the vet the week before to have it checked out. That I should have ignored everything my dad said about the dog just being old. That I should have insisted on more wet dog food instead of the kibble (nixed because it was "too expensive"). And I realise that because she was not my dog, but the family dog, I felt a lot of inertia around any decision-making for her. And it's a similar inertia when it comes to the rest of my life right now, where I feel very limited in my choices, truncated in my thinking, because I don't want to argue and rules-lawyer my way around what's clearly a system that works for the current inhabitants.
I am sorry for the dog. I'm sorry I didn't do more. I hope she was in some way happy when she was alive. I'm glad she went off sleeping, instead of being put to sleep, instead of dying in an accident, or of heartworm. I wonder if she would have pulled through the infection if I had taken better care of her, and had a few more years (unlikely, given her strength issues in the last year). But she snored to the end, sleeping on her cushions and the fleece sheet, looking as pretty in old age as she had been when we first picked her up at the shelter, so I'm glad for that.
She also started walking more slowly, and what used to be a whole neighbourhood walk became just one jaunt down the road and back. On especially bad days, she would eventually just sink to the ground even as she walked, looking a bit like a big white furry lizard, and I'd carry her home.
She used to say hello to all the neighbourhood dogs, and lost interest in them completely.
Sometime last year she started having difficulty standing up and walking on the tiled floor of our driveway porch, slipping a lot. It got worse when my mother decided to bar access to the garden because she could no longer wait for her regular walk hours and started to pee and poop in the garden. She compensated by either howling for our attention, or peeing/pooping in the driveway if no attention was forthcoming. Towards the end, she couldn't even get up, even to show interest in her leash, even as she howled, and I realised that she needed to be picked up and taken out of the house first, onto the road where she could get a foothold.
She started coming into the house during rainy days to find a rug to lay on. But at some point she couldn't climb in through the window, so I let her in. Then I laid out cushions wrapped in a fleece sheet that I've been using for sewing scrap experiments so she could sleep more comfortably on the floor (which my mother was upset about, since the cushions are from the old bamboo furniture that she couldn't bring herself to get rid off, sentimental value and all, and she foisted the single-seater onto my bedroom and I only really use it for putting stuff on).
I have never been particularly attached to this dog. She was happiest when running, and unlike previous dogs, didn't give a fig about the family. She barked when dark-skinned strangers approached the house, but not Chinese strangers. Where my last two dogs had separation anxiety, howling if I left the house, and whining and barking happily whenever I came home, this one ignored me most of the time unless I fed her or took her out on a walk. Most of her expressions were mostly of resignation, like the eternal sigh of a dog just waiting for her next meal.
(I once brought home a kitten, and showed it to her. She responded by retracting her body that said, "nngggghhh no" and when I tried to shove it in her face, she got up and repositioned herself. She didn't actually run away, she just put in bare minimum effort. It was one of the funniest expressions I've ever seen on a sentient creature.)
My dad was training her in her last few years, to respond to his voice when he asked her to wait or cross the road off-leash. It went okay, since it wasn't like she was being asked to do very complicated tricks (she wasn't that starved for stimulation). But she started to lose her hearing.
We got her from the SPCA about a year after my last dog, Jenny, died, in 2005 or 2006. She'd been obviously part of a puppy mill, with distended teats. She had black spots under the white overcoat, so she was clearly some sort of dalmation mix, and my mom felt she was the prettiest dog in the shelter (we're not particularly good at picking out dogs for personality--in Malaysia most of our dogs are kept for guarding the house so things like temperament aren't that important). Since I didn't pick her out, and I wasn't in the country for most of the year anyway, it didn't matter to me.
Our dogs have never lasted so long.
Our dogs also have either died by accident, or at the vet's. My dad was already starting to talk about putting down the dog and I would regularly get mad because it felt like trying to absolve resopnsibility for caring for an aging senior dog, and all the arguments about her suffering just boiled down to the effort it took to make sure she was comfortable.
(I'm still low-key mad at my dad because I bought pee pads for the dog, and he wouldn't COMMIT. He'd rinse them and hang them to dry if she did pee on them, and he would just clear them when she made a mess of them from using them to stand up.)
Last weekend, she got a balding spot on her tail, which I didn't think much of, because her rashes caused similar problems. But then it darkened, and when she thumped her tail on the floor, I noticed spots and it took me way too long to realise that it was blood. Not only that, but the fur around it picked up more dirt that got onto the wound. I asked my dad about it after he'd bathed her on Saturday, and he didn't think much about it. By Monday, it had necrotised, and I frantically called the vet. Our regular nearby vet was closed, our regular vet in USJ 8 could only see her on Wednesday. So I trimmed the fur around the wound and wrapped it up to prevent more dirt getting in. (She wagged it off later that day, so my dad re-wrapped it, even more tightly).
On Tuesday, she'd gotten so weak she peed on herself, and got her bandages wet. While I know theoretically urine is sterile, I didn't want her to keep moving around with a urine-soaked bandage, so I gently tried to remove it.
Unfortunately, what I SHOULD have done was get a pair of scissors and cut it off, because what happened instead was it popped off, and the tip of her tail with it. SHE WAS VERY UNHAPPY. And also bleeding all over. I laid out some pee pads for her to rest on and good thing too, because she was bleeding a LOT. My initial re-dressing the wound became a bloody mess, and I had to break out my embroidery scissors to cut them off.
(Upon further reflection, I should have used the nearby saline splution to rinse it first, THEN cut it off, because it would have saved the dog a lot of discomfort and would have made it all easier.)
(You don't need to know how ridiculous my family is but I am also low-key mad that my dad's first offering of a pair of scissors was our old kitchen scissors. So my next emergency purchase will be dedicated first-aid scissors.)
I dressed the wound again, this time making a bigger dressing, realising that my mistake was to wrap ONLY around the wound, instead fo binding further down the tail, which would help keep the bandage on and would also be less uncomfortable to bind tightly.
We managed to get an emergency appointment later in the day. Lady was not up for moving, so I carried her into the car and she looked very much the picture of resignation (which is not unusual for her). And as soon as the vet saw her, the good doctor asked, "what do you want the outcome here to be?" Because there was no way to really get rid of the infection short of amputation, and there was no way of amputation because the dog was too old for anesthetic. So the dog got some vitamins, and got some water intravenously, and we took her home and had to wait for my mother to bring home antibiotic cream.
(Made worse because my mother started complaining about how there was leftover antibiotic cream, and how my dad is supposed to be in charge and know all this, and how I shouldn't waste new antibiotic cream, and she could have sold that one tube. I don't really understand whether this is true when it sounds like her pharmacy doesn't get a lot of stock turnover.)
Dad blended food and we had to syringe feed her, and it was tough going because she wasn't really interested in food. She even turned down sausage skin, which she never does. She was moaning through the night unless sleeping, and I'm not sure whether it was from pain or hunger or both.
(Makes me wonder if I had fed her more, if I'd presevered with feeding her food, whether she would have pulled through.)
The next morning, I re-dressed her tail, and she pooped right as I was done, so I carried her to the garden hose to wipe her off, and she flopped in my arms in a way she'd never done before. I fed her as much as she would swallow, which was about as much as I expected her to eat, but it was hard because towards the end she just let food dribble around her mouth instead of licking her chops like she might have.
When I last checked on her, it was 2pm, and she was sleeping so soundly, she was snoring. Usually when I pet her, she'd startle awake, no matter what, because she's not the type to sleep through touch. But this time she just snored, and I wasn't sure whether it was because she had difficulty breathing (though, I guess, snoring IS a symptom of difficult breathing).
Around 2.45pm my mom burst into my room to announce that the dog was dead; she just got home and tried to talk to the dog, and the dog was just straight up not breathing.
My dad had already picked a gravesite for the dog (the municipal council had dug up some ground a block over, and my dad thought the ground might still be soft) so when he woke up from his nap, he borrowed a small handheld hoe from a neighbour and got to work digging.
(I don't know why we are so inefficient. I think because we're just so used to cutting corners.)
I wrapped the dog in the sheet as tightly as possible, to mimick her usual sleeping position, and carried her over when my dad felt the hole was big enough. I am never playing Tetris with him because he can't judge size of depth right, because the dog did not fit!!! And while my dad scraped the side of the hole, an Indian woman passed by, watched us for a while, looked askance at the dog's body, and I explained that the dog had died, and she responded by taking the hoe from my dad and digging the hole so quickly, shoveling out the dirt so swiftly with her own hands, that in a fraction of the time it took for my dad to dig the hole, she'd made it twice as large and deep. (She's from Chennai, moved to Malaysia some time ago, and now works as a cleaner.) (Yes, in fact, it showed us just how bourgie my dad and I have become, that we're incapable of efficiently digging a hole.) Then she helped us bury the dog.
So now we have no family dog.
There is some leftover dog food that my dad had blended for syringe feeding. A cat came into the house on Friday looking for company, and my brother feed her a bit of it, and I had her in my room for a bit, but she went out to explore, and when she tried to come by later, my dad chased her our, and I haven't seen her since, so we still have leftover dog food. I AM STILL ANNOYED AT THIS.
I've been thinking a lot about what I should have done to make sure the dog was more comfortable. That I should have noticed sooner the wound on her tail and taken her to the vet the week before to have it checked out. That I should have ignored everything my dad said about the dog just being old. That I should have insisted on more wet dog food instead of the kibble (nixed because it was "too expensive"). And I realise that because she was not my dog, but the family dog, I felt a lot of inertia around any decision-making for her. And it's a similar inertia when it comes to the rest of my life right now, where I feel very limited in my choices, truncated in my thinking, because I don't want to argue and rules-lawyer my way around what's clearly a system that works for the current inhabitants.
I am sorry for the dog. I'm sorry I didn't do more. I hope she was in some way happy when she was alive. I'm glad she went off sleeping, instead of being put to sleep, instead of dying in an accident, or of heartworm. I wonder if she would have pulled through the infection if I had taken better care of her, and had a few more years (unlikely, given her strength issues in the last year). But she snored to the end, sleeping on her cushions and the fleece sheet, looking as pretty in old age as she had been when we first picked her up at the shelter, so I'm glad for that.
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Date: 2021-04-01 05:36 pm (UTC)