To the Dogs

So, the dog keeps you in touch with
Being—beyond mind—Being, the innermost core.
Eckhart Tolle

It seems like the right time to write about how all of this got started. Of course, in the interconnected universe, where any event has multiple causes stretching back to creation itself, it would be easy to lose any sense of a story. For brevity’s sake, and in the hopes of making it more entertaining, I will only go as far back as November '09 and the dog that saved my life.

On the weekend after Thanksgiving, I went to Charlotte, North Carolina, to meet up with our son, Justin, to perform a good deed. The deed was a simple one; Kath and I would adopt their 18-month-old Great Dane, Daphne, so that Justin and Jenny would get some peace and quiet in order to focus on raising their 2-year-old daughter, our grandest of all grand daughters, Elizabeth Grace. This act was a no-brainer for Kath and me. We had fallen in love with Daphne the moment we had met her as a little pup (if Great Danes can ever be considered that.) When our son started talking about finding her a new home due to the stress of raising two toddlers, we knew that new home would be ours.

Daphne arrived at a new home that was already populated by one dog named Sage, four cats and four fish. I figured that given her size, she was going to need an outdoor pen to run around in. We had already set up a double kennel in order to allow Sage and her earlier companion, Cody, to spend time outdoors without mauling each other. Since Sage showed little interest in the pen, I decided to expand the two areas into one large pen for Daphne. I spent that Saturday raking up wet leaves (I know!) and moving large pieces of fencing around in order to create a space fit for a Great Dane.

By the time I was finished, my left shoulder and most of my arm were in pain with an intensity I had not experienced before. Similar problems had sent me to a cardiologist, and then to an orthopedist to have my left shoulder examined and scanned. The cortisone shot they had given me had helped immensely. However, on this day, the shot seemed to have lost all effectiveness and I decided that I needed something stronger. I headed to the local Urgent Care center to tell them that my bad shoulder was acting up and to ask if they could kick up the pain meds just a notch.

Most of my time at Urgent Care was uneventful and predictable. Blood pressure was fine; temperature within normal range, range of movement in my pained shoulder was good. The doctor in charge said that he couldn’t tell where the pain was coming from but stated that since I had told him that the sensation was stretching across my chest he wanted to do a chest x-ray. So the routine orders of “Stand here, hold onto this, turn this way,” were issued and, in ever-increasing pain, I waited for the results of the x-ray.

The world changed for me that day when the doctor came back into the room and asked me to lay back down on the examining table. Now, most of what I know about medicine comes from watching M.A.S.H and ER, but I knew that this was not a usual request. As he started poking and prodding various parts of my body, I began to experience the rush of a coming panic attack. My toes became very warm and I felt light headed. Without saying anything, the doctor left the room and the nurse returned and hooked me up to a blood pressure monitor. My pressure was sky high. When the nurse asked me what was wrong I replied that I was "a little freaked by what the doctor was looking for.” As she left the office, I overheard her confront the doctor saying, “What did you do to him, he was fine when he came in.”

A thousand other things unfolded from that encounter with a doctor who decided to take an x-ray of the one area no one had looked at recently. I often think back to that sunny day raking leaves in order to make a home for the newest member of our family. What would have happened had we decided not to take Daphne into our home? How much longer would I have lived with the shoulder pain, which, not so coincidentally, is now gone post removal of the tumor, before having another shoulder scan and thereby again just missing the growing mass only inches away?

While no one ever said it to me directly, my sense is that had I not seen the doctor on that November day, the tumor may not have been removable through surgery and what was there may not have responded to chemotherapy. I think of this every time I see Daphne running through the house swinging one of my pillows joyfully in her huge mouth, when she chases one of our more timid cats across the living room, and even when she pees on the floor in an obvious statement of “I told you that I needed to go out.” I like thinking that Daphne played a role in saving my life. It helps to replace the often fearful thought that the universe is mean and arbitrary with the faith that it’s actually a truly miraculous place and only our ignorance of its depth makes us afraid.