In the winter of 1998-1999, when we were building the kennel, we had had record snow accumulation from frequent storms. In the winter of 1999-2000, we had had record cold, so much so that our septic had frozen. The winter of 2000-2001 brought yet more extreme conditions. This time we had so much snow followed by melts and days and nights of freezing rain, which were then followed by freezes, that there was an ice pack everywhere about 12 inches thick, more in some places.
Our porch door stopped opening. John frequently had to use a pick axe to chip away the ice around the gates in the play yards so that we could get them open. We could no longer sit on the benches in the outside yards, as the ice pack was level with the seats. Of course, we were also falling frequently on the ice.
When spring arrived and all that ice pack melted, our efforts at building up the play yards with gravel and patio stones bore some dividends. We only had to close two of the four yards.
By now life had settled more or less into a routine marred mainly by the weather and the issue of drop ins and lateness, which persisted like a bad toothache.
John took a call after closing time from a woman who was supposed to have dropped her dog off that morning for a first booking. Since he had the phone on speaker, I was able to hear both sides of the conversation.
Her excuse for being late was that she was lost. This, she insisted, was the result of errors we had made when giving her directions. Our map was clearly wrong. She was in an entirely different town, in the exact opposite direction from where she should have been. How she got there remains one of the great mysteries in the annals of navigation.
This was all our fault.
Apparently we didn’t know where we lived. For over a year now, hundreds of people had been given this map and these standard directions and had managed to show up at Oak Meadows on time. How ever had they done it? They must have had supernatural help from fairy godmother guides. Or a whole troop of Boy Scouts.
It was the only possible explanation.
John was a lot calmer and more polite than I would have been. I was just so sick of this shit.
He told the woman that we were closed. An argument ensued. He finally relented, but told her that if he was going to have to go back to the kennel to open up, get all the other dogs excited and then settled back down again, he was going to charge her $25. Her response to this concession? A hearty “Fuck you!!!”.
Next day, I fielded the predictable call from Big Manly Husband complaining about my husband’s rude treatment of his wife and daughter. His daughter was handicapped, he informed me. Of course, it takes his wife a little longer to get organised and on the road. This was pronounced with unmistakeable triumph. He clearly thought that he had produced the unbeatable trump card.
Just parenthetically, what exactly did that have to do with the issue at hand? Her stated excuse to us had not been that caring for her handicapped daughter had delayed her departure. She was furious in her assertions that our directions and map were wrong.
Anyway, presumably his wife was used to traveling with their handicapped daughter and knew from experience that it “takes a while to get organised”.
So wouldn’t that actually be a reason for starting earlier, not later?
We were open for two hours in the morning. There were very few places in our area, from where the drive to our place would take two hours, even in rush hour in a blinding snow storm. Even if she hadn’t started until 8 a.m., our opening time, she would still have arrived before we closed, despite her bizarre detour.
Do they expect planes to be held for them, theatre and movie performances to start late, grocery stores and malls to stay open later because “it takes a little longer for them to get organized”? I’m betting they don’t.
No, the issue was not the handicap. The issue was that they didn’t believe us when we told them before they came, in every way, shape and form we could conceive of, that they would have to be on time. They knew we lived on the property. Instead of exercising a little time management and judgement, she relied on her belief that we could be bullied.
Not being stupid enough to open the ‘handicapped child’ can of worms, I told Big Manly Husband that I had heard the conversation on the speaker phone. In fact John had been extremely civil, even offering to let them come in, only requiring them to pay a nominal fee for the inconvenience and upset. The response from the woman on the other end of the phone to this civil offer, I told Big Manly, had been the F word.
I told him that it seemed to me that in any contest of incivility and rudeness, his wife had become the winner the moment she told my husband to fuck off.
Apparently not.
This man told me, perfectly calmly and as if it was the most reasonable and normal thing in the world, that in fact it was the handicapped daughter who had told John to fuck off. But so what? Of course, she was justified.
Not only did our own ignorance about where we lived cause them to get lost. Not only was simply enforcing rules which had been made crystal clear in advance, in and of itself unpardonable rudeness. Not only was John crass and greedy in stipulating a small charge for the time and inconvenience that setting aside our rules would involve. No, all of this led, inexorably, to the handicapped daughter dropping the F-bomb on John. It was all his own fault, really. Any idiot could see that.
Ladies and gentlemen, we had a new winner.
I don’t want to convey the impression that we had no polite and appreciative clients. By far, the greatest number of them – and all of the people with whom we had long term relationships – fell into that category. Many are still friends.
People brought us presents. People sent us notes. Kids drew us pictures.
That same winter, clients who were supposed to pick up their two dogs in the evening were delayed getting back by weather. They had his parents call to ask if it was alright if they came to get the dogs. I let the parents come an hour before our official opening, because they were old, doing a favour for their son and didn’t know where they were going. Plus it was snowing, and we were at the kennel anyway to walk the dogs.
The son called the next morning to thank us profusely for ‘putting up with’ the parents, and especially for letting them come early. He said he had not meant to convey the message they wanted any special consideration because he thought it was great that we put the dogs’ needs first.
We were very friendly and warm to anyone who respected the rules, and as a result we had a lot of return business. This was very welcome on many levels. We had discovered how much easier it was to board a dog or cat we already knew. The owners had already toured the kennel and signed the Boarding Agreement. This meant that they already knew our two rules – don’t show up without an appointment, and be on time for pick up and drop off.
We did of course make occasional exceptions for good clients who had a history with us, who had never sought to take advantage, and/or who had suffered some unforeseen misfortune which made them late.
Everyone else, mostly the first-timers, thought that an exception should be made for them because it was “just this once”. But it wasn’t ‘just once’ for us – it was at least three or four times per week.
Or, my other favourite, a big argument about whether they were or were not “too” late for us to open up again and let them in.
This position acknowledged that yes, they were late, but being “only twenty minutes” late shouldn’t disqualify them from coming in. Apparently, unbeknownst to us, there was some sort of unspoken grace period to every time limit, and they were always just inside it. I suspect that in their minds the imaginary grace period would always be exactly one minute longer than the amount of time by which they were late on any given occasion.
I expressed this view to a good client one time. She had arrived when an unscheduled visitor was storming out past her. She told me that she was a receptionist for a doctor. People apparently often showed up late there too. Once she told a patient who had arrived more than an hour late for an appointment that the doctor had had to leave.
The patient replied indignantly, “Well, if I’d known she had to leave, I would have been here on time!”
The fact that I could not just write these people off, but instead wasted time and effort in order to demonstrate to them how completely wrong they were, showed a certain irrationality and loss of control that should have been disturbing to me. It was symptomatic of a deep malaise that was overtaking both of us.
The accumulation of stress was not just from the relatively small number of unreasonable, bullying clients. There was a much darker side to the kennel business.
At the ABKA course in Colorado Springs, the instructor had told us that if we operated a kennel business long enough, one morning we would open up the kennel to find that a dog had died in the night. The most common cause would be because the dog had bloated.
John and I looked at each other, horrified. That wouldn’t happen to us, right? Right?!? And what was bloat anyway?
When we got home, I looked it up. Bloat is a torsion of the gastro-intestinal tract. The stomach sort of flips over, if I understand it right, and strangles the blood vessels that are taking blood to all the vital organs. The abdomen swells with gases. If a dog bloats, they have to get to the vet quickly, or they will almost certainly die. Sometimes the vet can relieve the situation by inserting a tube into the abdomen and siphoning off the gas. Rarely, the stomach will right itself. But surgery is almost always required. It is a very expensive surgery and it has a high failure rate.
No one really knows what causes bloat, although there are a lot of theories. It happens most frequently in bigger dogs – retrievers, standard poodles, all of the giant breeds.
The very first summer we were open, a miniature poodle and a standard poodle had arrived for their first boarding.
I had taken the visit from this lady when she first approached us. By that time, my spiel was pretty comprehensive. When I came to the part about veterinary care and what we did if a dog got sick, I used the example of bloat, as I always did, because that was the absolute worst case scenario. If one of their dogs bloated, they would be looking at a very expensive operation – about $5000 at that time – and not always a good outcome.
This lady didn’t know anything about bloat. At the end of the visit, she decided to have a conversation with her vet before she made up her mind whether or not to leave her dogs at the kennel. After she spoke with the vet about bloat, she called us back and made the booking for her two dogs.
The first day of their two week stay, the dog walker reported that the standard poodle, who we’ll call Gabrielle, had stopped and sat down during the walk.
She got up after a second and they continued without anything else untoward occurring. I checked her over, but couldn’t see anything obviously wrong. I actually went so far as to read our vet manual again for symptoms of bloat, and generally, what lethargy might signify in a dog who otherwise looked healthy. I couldn’t see anything that matched.
Gabrielle refused a biscuit. Not an unusual occurrence in a dog who is nervous about her first boarding. Poodles do not tend to be avid biscuit eaters anyway. Honestly, have you ever seen a fat standard poodle?
That evening in the yard, she lay down at my feet. She wasn’t showing any signs of distress – no panting, pacing, dullness. Again, I checked her over, and couldn’t see anything.
We went to bed, not thinking too much about Gabrielle.
In the morning, we arrived at the kennel and I started opening doors so the dogs could run out to where John was waiting to let them outside. I came to the poodles’ room. Gabrielle was lying on the floor. Something in her immobility or her posture made my heart accelerate while my brain was still trying to identify what I was seeing. I went in and touched her. Stone cold and stiff.
The miniature poodle, who we’ll call Mickey, hopped blithely over Gabrielle’s carcass and trotted out the door.
It was one of those dreadful moments when you want to deny the evidence of your senses. You come up with nonsensical explanations. I had a macabre replay of the old Monty Python skit pop into my head: “That parrot’s not dead, it’s just sleeping!”
I yelled for John and we both stood there stunned, looking at Gabrielle’s corpse, and cursing our fate.
When I recovered my wits, I girded up my metaphorical loins and called the owners at the number they had left, to report the unhappy news. Not a phone call you want to have to make, especially with a new dog, people you don’t know, and less than 24 hours after they had left their dog with us.
“How’s it going?” Gabrielle’s owner inquired.
“Wellll…… about that….”
Houston we have a problem.
After I told them what we had found and offered my condolences, I asked if they wanted an autopsy. This had been suggested by the ABKA as a useful thing to do if a dog died while boarding with us. The clients wanted to know how much that would cost. I figured there was a big trust issue here, and I wanted to make sure the clients had as much security about the outcome as possible, so I spoke with their vet. I called the clients back to tell them it would only be $50. They said to go ahead.
I also offered to take Mickey to any other kennel of their choice, or to any friend or family member they wanted to take charge of him. They said they would leave Mickey with us for the duration.
As soon as we were finished in the kennel, John and I wrapped the corpse in a blanket, loaded it into the back of the car and I proceeded across the city to the client’s vet, wondering if he would feel we were responsible in some way. While I was convinced on the evidence that there was nothing we did or didn’t do that could have affected the outcome, emotionally, I was devastated and couldn’t help drowning in black waves of guilt.
Were we wrong to leave the dogs at night unattended? I couldn’t imagine that any other kennel owner was sitting up all night with the dogs checking them by flashlight for signs of illness. I knew that the dog could just as easily have bloated in the night while she was at home with her owners. If they had departed on vacation 24 hours later, they would have been the ones to discover Gabrielle’s corpse. It didn’t help my raging sense of guilt.
Were there signs we should have noticed but missed? What had we seen that should have sent us off to the vet? A dog sits down on her walk? I had mentioned that to the owner when I broke the news to her. The owner told me Gabrielle did that all the time.
A dog doesn’t take a biscuit, a dog lies down at my feet? If that was sufficient cause to send us to the vet, we’d be at the vet every day.
I stressed over whether this incident was going to result in us being black listed by that veterinary clinic, which happened to be the biggest in the city.
It was a long drive.
The people at the vet clinic were very kind. The tech took one look at Gabrielle’s body and said that while they would do the autopsy, she was pretty sure it was bloat. I expressed surprise that the dog’s abdomen didn’t seem to be visibly distended. She told me that in fact bloat doesn’t really present as a gross distension. The signs are subtle. She pointed out what I already knew; that it could just as easily have happened at home when the owners were asleep. Bloat can start up and kill a dog in a matter of hours.
A few years later, I took another dog to the vet because I was afraid she was bloating. That vet told me about a friend of hers who was looking after a bouvier for a third friend. The friend called the vet to say the dog was looking kind of off; not moving, just starring fixedly at one point. The vet told her friend to load the dog in the car and bring him in right away in case it was bloat. The dog died in the car on the way to the vet’s.
The next day, the result of Gabriel’s autopsy came back and it was indeed bloat. I spoke with the vet, who was very kind to me. He himself was feeling unjustified guilt. In his case, he couldn’t shake the feeling that by having such a long detailed conversation with the owners about bloat before they left, he had somehow jinxed it.
We reported to the clients, who didn’t have much to say. They didn’t make other arrangements for Mickey, the miniature poodle. I took some comfort from the fact that they were content to leave him with us. I was now thoroughly paranoid about Mickey though. I watched him like a hawk.
On the following Friday, it seemed to me he was acting funny. For one thing, he threw up. I knew this meant he couldn’t be bloating. In any case, little dogs seldom bloat. But I was determined that if he was going to die too, he could bloody well do it at the vet’s. I took him all the way back out to the client’s vet to be checked over. There I wasted three hours of my life, only to be told that there was nothing wrong with him. I took him back to the kennel where he continued to engage in his favourite pastime of barking his poodle head off.
A further week went by without incident. The day arrived when the owners of the poodles came to pick up their surviving dog. They were not happy, nor did it seem that they were they inclined to hold us blameless.
I repeated again how sorry we were for what had happened with Gabrielle. I explained my concern about Mickey and his visit to the vet. I told them we would pay for that vet visit, as it was due to my paranoia that it had taken place. They glowered at me without saying much. When John brought Mickey and his possessions out to the front, they picked up their dog and his stuff, turned without another word and promptly legged it for the door.
I called them back to deal with the bill. John and I had discussed at some length whether we ought to charge them, and for what. We had decided to waive the boarding fee for poor Gabrielle’s one night with us, as well as Mickey’s vet bill. We never charged anything for our time or our gas when we took a dog to the vet, even when, as in this case, it involved a 90 minute round trip drive, not to mention all the time I had spent waiting in the vet’s office.
On the other hand, it had been their choice both to leave Mickey with us after Gabrielle died, and to have the autopsy done. Awkward as it might be to present a bill, neither of us could see why we should provide these services for free when they had explicitly authorized them. Especially since nothing that had happened was our fault.
When called back to deal with the bill, the clients looked outraged.
This was not what we expected,” the man spluttered.
I’m still not sure whether they were referring to their dog dying unexpectedly, or as I think more likely, they thought they shouldn’t have been asked to pay the vet bill for the autopsy and for the two weeks’ boarding for Mickey. Whatever. They did pay up, though with obvious reluctance, and left. Not surprisingly, they never darkened our door again.
The pall cast by this episode hadn’t even lifted before the next occurrence.
New Year’s Day, 2000, we arrived at the kennel to find a 12 year old German Shepherd stiff and cold on the floor of his room. It was six days into his first, eight day boarding. There had been no warning signs of any kind this time, not even a refusal to take a biscuit. We couldn’t believe it. We had now had two dogs die in the kennel within a few months of each other.
In what was becoming a depressingly familiar routine, we loaded the corpse into the back of our car.
“The Rav 4 – the all purpose vehicle! Family excursions with luggage, buying sprees with loads of shopping bags, or the corpses of beloved family pets on their way to the morgue – this car does it all!!” John joked grimly.
I again drew the job of both driving the corpse to the client’s vet, and getting hold of the owner when I returned. There was a moment of shocked silence and then, with a sigh, he said kindly, “Well, King was an old dog and these things happen. It could have happened at home.” Which was true, but still failed to make us feel any better.
Years later, after we had several other cases of bloat, our experience taught us that the major sign is simply a change in demeanour. That makes it very hard to identify when dealing with a dog you don’t know. We quickly got very paranoid about any dog we saw who looked stressed when they had no reason to be, or was standing staring at the wall with their head down.
I wouldn’t say that we got better at identifying bloat, but we did tend to hustle any dog who looked ‘off’ into the car and up to the vet’s. As often as not, it turned out we were right to do so.
One blustery February afternoon in 2002, John called me from where he was feeding dogs.
“Heather, can you come and look at Doug?”
It was dinner time at Oak Meadows and I was in the kitchen filling up feeding bowls. “Sure,” I said, wiping my hands and starting towards the dog wing where John had been feeding the hungry hordes. “What’s his deal?”
“Well, he was outside on his dog run when I took in his bowls. I called him, but he didn’t come.”
I waited for more. Doug was a Siberian husky who was notoriously picky about his food. As Doug had gotten older (he was now 12), his appetite had waned even more. Doug’s dad was a restauranteur, and Doug’s food choices came directly from the restaurant, as individually packaged gourmet meals. Even with that, he was seldom was very interested. So just ignoring dinner time in favour of staying outside on a cold winter’s day would not be a cause for concern when it came to Doug’s lifestyle choices.
“I picked up the flap on his dog door, and he was just standing there staring.”
Oh oh. By this time, we took any change in behaviour, like listlessness, immobility or looking depressed, as the signal of the onset of this horrible condition. I knew immediately why John was concerned.
When I arrived at Doug’s room, he had come in, but he seemed completely uninterested in his surroundings or even in our presence, which was indeed unusual. We got him out of his room and into the play room, where we put him up on a couch to give him a quick examination.
I compressed his sides, but couldn’t feel anything unusual. I looked at his gums and they were pale. This, along with the fact that he was unresponsive to his usual triggers, like his name being called, was enough for us to decide, better safe than sorry.
I called our vet, as they were much nearer than Doug’s. I explained the situation, feeling rather self-conscious. I stressed that it was probably nothing, but we would feel much better if Amanda or Mark (our own vets of choice at this clinic) could check Doug out. As I expected, we were cheerfully invited to bring him right in.
In the five minutes it took us to get there, Doug had started drooling. When Mark saw him, he performed a quick exam, including palpating his abdomen and listening to his heart. Mark told me that Doug’s heart was really racing and he suspected a cardiac event of some kind. Nevertheless, he would start with an x-ray to reassure me and to rule out bloat.
A few minutes later Mark returned with the news. Doug was indeed bloating. In a weird sort of way, I felt vindicated by the fact that even this very experienced and competent vet had not diagnosed bloat from a visual examination and the superficial physical signs Doug had presented.
The operation for bloat is hugely expensive. There is a significant mortality rate. Doug was a senior citizen. This was a high risk, high cost situation. Glad that it wouldn’t be us who had to make the decision about whether to proceed with the operation, I called Doug’s owner.
In a nice little turn of fate, Doug had been scheduled to be picked up and taken home that very morning. His owners had called first thing that day to say their flight was delayed due to bad winter weather, and to ask if there was any problem keeping Doug overnight.
“Not at all,” we had assured them. “Doug is doing just great!” Fate’s a bitch and sometimes I’d like to personally punch her in the face.
The bright side, I thought as I dialed their number, was that at least I knew they had their cellphone and it was working.
Or not.
Fate wasn’t done with me yet. The mechanical voice came on, assuring me that the caller I was trying to reach was unavailable. Great.
I called John from the vet’s. After some discussion with him and with Mark as to how long we might reasonably delay Doug’s operation (if such was the decision), we resolved that Mark would do the procedure to relieve the immediate gas and swelling in the stomach and also insert an IV to deliver fluids. I would make the trek into Ottawa and across the city to take Doug to his own vet, which also happened to be that same big veterinary hospital where I had delivered Gabrielle’s corpse.
John would dig out the number for the owner’s parents, who were the emergency contact if Doug’s owner’s couldn’t be reached. He would call them while I was en route. Hopefully by the time I got Doug to his vet, the owners’ parents would have contacted the animal hospital with instructions.
We got Doug, complete with IV, into the back of my car and I set out to make the trek to the far side of Ottawa, in the dark, through both rush hour traffic and a snow storm.
“You’ll never make it,” chirped the tech helpfully as I got in the driver’s seat. (He was new and didn’t last long, I’m glad to say.)
It was one of the worst drives of my life.
I alternated between peering through the blizzard to watch for oncoming traffic straying onto my side of the road, steering out of skids, and murmuring encouraging words to Doug in the back.
We did make it. Our vet had called ahead and when I rushed into the office, a number of people came swarming from the back with a stretcher to retrieve Doug and get him prepped to be ready in case the surgery was authorised. To my disappointment, the parents had not yet called the clinic to give instructions.
I called John and he told me he had reached them, but they were having a disagreement. The father felt that given the risks and the costs, it was pointless to do this surgery on a dog of Doug’s age. The mother disagreed.
I got the number from John and called them myself. The argument was still raging.
“You’re not killing Vicki’s dog while she’s away!” the mother shouted at the father.
“I don’t want to kill Vicki’s dog!” the father shouted back. “But our daughter would not want Doug to suffer either!”
Finally the deadlock was broken when the mother had a truly brilliant idea. She knew the airport where her daughter and son-in-law were stranded. She would call the airport and ask for them to be paged. To my amazement this actually worked. Within ten minutes of hanging up with the parents, Vicki called me and I was able to hand my phone to the vet in charge of Doug.
The decision they made was to proceed with the operation.
To the delight of everyone concerned, this story had with a happy ending. Doug did survive the operation, and he lived for two more healthy, happy years.
Not every crisis we dealt with had such a positive resolution.
On a beautiful crisp fall afternoon in 2001, things were not too busy, so John started walks without me.
John had been walking Frank, a nine year old golden retriever, when without any apparent cause, the dog simply collapsed. I was in the house and heard him yelling. We thought Frank must have had a heart attack. He was still breathing, so we loaded him into the car and I ran him up to our vet.
By the time we arrived there five minutes later, Frank was walking again.
Mark lifted Frank’s lip and showed me that his mucous membranes were really pale. Mark pressed Frank’s abdomen and said he could feel fluid there. He guided my hands into place and yes, even I could feel the sloshing. Mark advised an ultrasound. I could tell from his face that there was something badly wrong.
I authorized the ultrasound. Sure enough you could see waves being made by some sort of fluid. Mark gave me the unwelcome tidings that it was most likely blood, and most likely coming from a tumour on Frank’s spleen. These tumours are apparently quite common in goldens. They attack the blood vessels. An operation to remove the tumour was a possibility, but the problem was that there was a good chance that the cancer would have spread. For example, it could have metastasized to the heart. It wouldn’t necessarily be possible to determine that, even after Frank was opened up.
Our vet got Frank stabilized and on an intravenous tube.
Frank’s owners did not have a cell phone. Leaving Frank at our vet, I returned home and tried calling them at the number they had left for their hotel. No joy. Next I tried calling the man’s mother, who was their emergency contact. No response there either. Faced with such a serious situation, again I decided that our clients would feel better if I took Frank to his own vet, which was the second largest clinic in Ottawa.
I called their vet, who said to bring Frank in right away. I returned to our vet and wrestled Frank, his IV feed and his ultrasound pictures into the back seat of my car, then drove him in to Ottawa.
A really kind and sympathetic vet attended us, and confirmed the diagnosis our vet had made. I wouldn’t have believed that the day could get any shittier, but oh look, here’s more bad news. This vet told me that the chance of Frank surviving an operation was about 50% and even then, he probably wouldn’t live for more than a year. If she was going to operate, she had to do it soon, and oh yes – the surgery and recovery would cost thousands of dollars.
But don’t feel pressured.
We tried reaching the client again. Still no response, but thankfully, this time when I called the mom, she did answer her phone. I bet she wished she hadn’t.
Mom talked to me, then to the vet and then to me again. As fate would have it, she herself had lost a golden retriever to the same problem not long before. We talked about the possibility of trying to stabilize Frank and keep him pain free long enough for his family to return and say goodbye to him. But the family was away for a long time, and given the internal bleeding, the vet wasn’t optimistic that she could do this successfully.
Mom finally decided that the only rational thing to do was to have Frank put down.
I stayed with him during the procedure, held him, stroked his head and told him what a good boy he was while he drifted off into his last, painless sleep.
It was a devastating experience for all of us. Almost twenty years later, I still tear up thinking about it. The client’s mother had the wonderful task to look forward to of meeting her son and his family (which included small children) once they arrived back home, with the news that their beloved dog was no more.
The only good thing was that we didn’t have to decide whether or not to keep the ashes. The vet could keep Frank’s body on ice until the owners returned.
Unlike Gabrielle’s owners, Frank’s family didn’t blame us at all. There were no recriminations. Instead, they were touchingly appreciative of how we had handled the situation. They came out to thank us in person. They even brought flowers.
I couldn’t have felt any worse if Frank had been my own dog. Unlike Gabrielle, who we only knew for 24 hours, Frank had stayed with us several times. We loved him very much. All goldens are sweet, but Frank was in a class by himself, even for a golden.
When we started this adventure, we thought the planets were aligning in our favour. Now we were starting to wonder if we were cursed.
After nearly three years of constant work, we were exhausted, physically and mentally. In addition to the regular emotional confrontations with angry clients, the physical demands of the business began to feel like they were almost too much. We had had little luck with our efforts at hiring help. We were both prone to injury, but me in particular. I was usually covered in bruises from the dogs jumping on me or tripping me.
I fell while getting some dogs outside and hurt my hand and finger. That took a month to heal. A Kerry blue terrier tripped me while I was in his room bending over to pick up dog dishes. I hit the concrete wall with the side of my head and got a cauliflower ear as a souvenir that’s still with me. I also sprained my thumb and wrist and suffered bouts of sharp pain if I wasn’t careful when loading up my dogs for walks. I got bitten by a terrier, who broke through my thumbnail. I hurt my back on one occasion and couldn’t get out of bed without excruciating pain. Fortunately, that happened on a weekend when some staff actually showed up to help John walk and feed dogs.
While I by no means want to suggest that all, or even the majority of the dogs we were boarding were problem children, it was discouraging how an annoying habit, which would be just a relatively minor irritant in one dog, became depressing on large scale when multiplied by 30 dogs. A joyful puppy jumping on you is cute. Having five or ten dogs jumping on you? Not so much.
I joked to John that if I wanted to not only divorce him but put him in jail, all I would have to do would be to display my poor abused body and blame him for its condition. He countered, correctly, that he could play the same game, for he was in almost as bad shape as I was.
Financially, we were barely keeping our heads above water servicing our substantial debt load. We spent our days in a fog of exhaustion. Every day we were a little more tired than the day before. Tired soldiers.
Things did not reach any particular crisis, but the accumulation of misery got to the point where we just couldn’t see ourselves slogging on.
In the spring of 2002, we decided to sell the kennel.
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