Chapter 1
POTHOLES ON THE ROAD LESS TRAVELLEDSummer, 2001. Dog walking time at our pet resort.
Sam, a thin, leggy mixed breed fellow with a calm but happy temperament was next on the list. I collected him and his walking partner, a young male standard poodle. We hadn’t gotten far outside the door when I realized I was having some difficulty persuading the poodle to come along. He had completely abandoned any interest in the walk. Instead, his attention was totally occupied with obsessively sniffing Sam’s crotch.
Of course, dogs do sniff each others crotches (it’s only polite after all) but this was beyond the usual “Hi, how are ya?” sniff.
The poodle was acting like he was James Franco and Sam’s crotch was a particularly sweet crop of Hindu Kush.
My attention thus being directed to Sam’s nether regions, I realized he was walking funny. This became totally understandable when I bent down to get a good look at Sam’s undercarriage. Sam’s penis was fully extended, and showed no inclination to return to the place assigned to it in Mother Nature’s Great Scheme.
It was early in our career in the dog boarding business, but we had already had this happen with one other dog. Which speaks volumes about how I was spending my time these days. Although the sight would certainly have made some people clutch their pearls, my only reaction was a world weary sigh.
There is an old joke about a man on a camping trip taking a pee against a convenient rock and getting a snakebite on his junk. Frantically, he asks his friend to grab their first aid manual and find out what can be done.
The friend finds the relevant passage, which reads, “Cut into the affected area just below the fang marks, then suck out the venom.”
“What does it say?” the snakebitten man demands.
“It says here you’re gonna die!”
The first time we found a dog merrily romping through the play yard waving his fully extended John Thomas around like some kind of demon-possessed laser pointer, I had rushed to consult my trusty veterinarian care handbook to see what we were supposed to do. This tome blandly offered the advice that we should lubricate the penis well, then manually manipulate it back into its sheath. My husband and partner John waited while I digested this, then asked anxiously, “What does it say?”
“It says here he’s gonna die,” I responded.
John understood the reference instantly. (We’d been married a long time.) But of course we weren’t going to let that dog suffer. We were just about to flip a coin to see who was going to take the matter in hand so to speak, when thankfully, it corrected itself on its own.
So when the condition presented itself again, I figured Sam’s johnson would most likely decide at some point in the near future to beat a retreat to where all the laws of God and nature dictated it should reside when not in active use. Reasoning that perhaps some exercise would help this process, I proceeded with the walk. But Sam soon began whining in pain, so I took him back. When I returned him to his room, I noticed a few drops of watery blood on the floor. The Little Erection That Could must have picked up some abrasions on its adventures. I felt bad for him. John, having the same equipment as Sam, was in such an agony of empathy that he could barely stand to look.
Bowing to the inevitable, I got Sam up on the grooming table and took my courage, a good sized blob of lubricant and Sam’s willie in my hands. My efforts to manipulate it back in, even with John holding the frantically struggling Sam, were a rank failure. Good thing I never contemplated a career in the dog sex trade.
That’s a thing, right?
Finally we gave up and I called our vet. Of course this happened on a Saturday, when they closed early. I left a message. A vet who was a fairly recent addition to this clinic called back. She didn’t project much confidence.
“Hhmm. Let me see. I’m trying to remember what to do….”
If there was one thing I had learned in my previous illustrious career as a trial lawyer, it was to never project uncertainty. Clients who seek professional help are stressed and worried and the last thing they need is for you to look like you are too. If my House had Words, they would be “Often wrong, never in doubt”.
The vet suggested that we should leave it for a time and see if it would sound the retreat on its own. I tried to ignore the suspicion that this advice was offered in default of her complete lack of any other solution. For my part, I had serious doubts about the projected happy resolution, as Sam’s unit was now swollen way beyond the size of the opening to its housing. But she was the vet. John and I decided to have supper and await events.
We went over to the kennel at 6:00 p.m. to find poor Sam in misery. The end of his penis was now swollen up like a big red cherry and I didn’t see any way it was going to be able to re-home itself on its own. Since I wasn’t feeling much confidence in the vet I had drawn at our own clinic, I called a much bigger clinic in our area which offered emergency services 24/7.
The vet I spoke to there suggested once again that we wait. But I had had enough. I had a dog in pain. It had now been nearly three hours since I discovered his condition, plus who knows how long in the afternoon Sam had been suffering before I went to walk him. I informed her that as it was getting worse, not better, I was just going to go ahead and bring him in. She told me it would be $500 just to get in the door.
I didn’t care. By this time I was roundly indignant on Sam’s behalf. I packed him up and we hit the road. John called when I was only a few miles away, to say that our vet had called back, was at the clinic and did I want to go there after all. Aargh! Numerous phone calls and frayed nerves later, I finally ended up back at our local vet’s. We got Sammy up on the table and restrained. Sam struggled frantically when the procedure commenced. I held onto him while the vet did her best to force the penis back into the sheath.
Honestly? I felt rather personally vindicated when she couldn’t do it either. Not that it was a competition. But if it had been, I would have earned a tie. With a vet.
The vet then decided she was going to have to sedate him. This was supposed to take ten minutes. She gave him the injection. There followed a stage wait of more than twenty minutes while not much happened. While the clock ticked on, she mixed up a solution of Lidocaine and sugar. Apparently sugar will draw out the fluid. Who knew? She proceeded to shoot this liquid over Sam’s swollen member.
Sam was supposed to have been well on the way to dreamland at that point, but let me tell you, the application of a spurting stream of ice cold fluid to his joystick woke him up in a big hurry. He came up off the table with a snarl that promised mayhem and maiming on an epic scale. We both jumped back about two feet.
After she recovered from the shock of Sam coming back from the dead, the vet decided that Sam needed another dose of sedative. Ya think?
This time she would give it intravenously. There was another wait while she tried and tried and tried again to find a vein on first one leg, then the other. By the time she succeeded in getting the IV in, Sam’s eyelids had finally started to droop and he was quite groggy. But he got the extra dose of sedative anyway. I guess the vet felt that having finally achieved success with the IV she was damned if it was going to waste.
Plus, Sam’s previous imitation of Lazarus.
Once Sam was under, she proceeded with the delicate operation of replacing the penis in its sheath. The end of Sam’s one-eyed snake was now roughly the size of a pingpong ball. It was like trying to squeeze that pingpong ball into a rubber hose that was half the size of the pingpong ball. And the pingpong ball was on fire.
I held him and she pushed and prodded, icing Sam’s apparatus with the Lidocaine solution in between squeezes. If he hadn’t been heavily sedated, we’d have never been able to do it, but finally the ordeal was over and all Sam’s private parts were reassembled into the position evolution had designed for them.
We had to wait a considerable time for Sam to come out of the double dose of anaesthetic. Every now and then the vet would shoot some of the Lidocaine/sugar solution up his sheath. You could still feel the lump where his poor little organ was all swollen up.
The vet took a phone call while we were waiting.
I heard her say, “Oh no! I’m so sorry.” A short silence while the person on the other end of the call spoke.
Then, “You can bring him in and we can keep him, but I’ll need help getting him into the freezer.”
The voice on the other end of the phone rose in volume. Silence again, then “Well, that’s what we do with them. Until the cremation company can arrive tomorrow, he’ll have to be stored in the freezer.”
I deduced that someone’s dog had died. The vet’s response seemed a bit brutal, but then I guess there is no tactful way to tell a grieving dog owner that you are going to need his help heaving the still warm body of his beloved family pet into a freezer chest.
When she got off the phone, she told me that the dog who had died was a malamute who had chased a deer onto the road and had been hit by a car. I guess this explanation was in case I thought she lacked empathy. Given the size of the breed, I wasn’t surprised she felt she would have trouble lifting the remains into the freezer by herself.
I told her that I would be happy to help her dispose of the remains, so the family’s last memory of their dog wouldn’t be the sound his corpse made when it dropped with a thud into the ice box. Well, maybe I wasn’t happy, so much as determined to spare the owners that pain at least.
A few minutes later, we heard the family arriving. The vet left me in the back with Sam and went through to the front office. From the sounds of distress, it was immediately clear that they had a child with them. Every now and then an adult would murmur something, and the kid would whimper, “Goodbye Chinook, you were such a good dog”, and then start to sob again.
At one point the child cried, “I can’t believe this is for real!”
It was heartbreaking. I knew exactly what she meant. Haven’t we all experienced that feeling of being in a waking nightmare, unable to understand or accept that it is not in fact a nightmare, but reality? The cosmos had made a terrible mistake. Time was going to spool backwards and Chinook would not chase that deer into the road just when a car was driving by.
I heard the vet tell the adults in a quiet voice that no one needed come into the back with her after all, as she had some unexpected help. As she came through the door pushing a rolling table on which lay a huge, incredibly beautiful dog, the child left behind in an agony of grief, screamed “Daddy!”
Hell is the screams of a child falling on the ears of adults who are powerless to take away her pain and horror. The vet and I were both fighting back tears by then.
We heard the family leave, the child still sobbing. The vet and I managed to manipulate Chinook into a body bag and then into the freezer. I was so very glad that fate in the form of Sam’s rebellious penis had brought me there so that no one from the family had to do that part.
Sam finally woke up enough to be bundled back into the car. We arrived back at the kennel just as John was finishing up for the night. When I got Sammy back to his room and onto his bed, I decided to lift his leg to check whether all was quiet on the southern front.
I was gentle and he was still woozy from the anaesthetic, but the minute he realised where I was going, this normally friendly, happy, loveable dog raised his head two inches off the bed, fixed me with a stare that would have frozen the Medusa herself and growled softly. The message was clear: “Don’t even think about it lady!”
And that, my friends, in a nutshell, is life in the dog and cat boarding business. Comedy and pathos. Drama and farce.
How did I, a member of the Bar, and a summa cum laude graduate with two university degrees, end up in the back room of a veterinarian clinic because of a dog with an unruly salami, helping to dispose of a corpse, while listening to the anguished screams of a bereaved child?
Well, you’d see the stories from time to time in the Lifestyles section (back in the far off time of newspapers), or in magazines or on local TV when it was a slow news day and they needed filler. A person of some accomplishment, with a perfectly fine but perfectly banal existence, decides to throw over the traces and – pick one – go around the world in a sailboat, move to Africa to help remove land mines, start a business growing organic herbs. Whatever it is, it sounds a whole lot more interesting and fulfilling than what you spend your days doing.
“Boy”, you sigh to yourself, “how I envy them. I wish I could do something like that!” But of course in your case, it’s impossible, because the kids, the mortgage – something – always presents an insuperable obstacle. Besides, as you get older, you begin to suspect that maybe sailing around the world isn’t all that terribly comfortable, and in fact, might actually require significant effort, at least compared to sitting in your recliner on a Saturday night, binge watching Netflix with a bowl of popcorn handy.
You never see any followup to those “I decided to live my dream” stories. I always wondered, what was it that caused them to take that leap, when so many other people don’t? And then too, what becomes of those people? As the seas get troubled, and the calluses on the hands grow and the skin becomes dry and itchy from the salt and wind, does sailboat guy ever begin to feel more like the Ancient Mariner than Jacques Cousteau? Does the righteous fervour to rid the world of land mines inevitably give way to an equally fervent wish to go back to the less exciting, but less stressful life of the chartered accountant? I mean, is it all rewarding enough to make these free spirits content that they gave up the simple pleasures of a good armchair and movie nights, to take on the challenge of reinventing their lives?
John and I are two of those people who took the leap. This is the tale of how it all turned out, after the news cameras went home and we were left to deal with the realities of our life-altering decision.