We knew that the veterinary surgeon was still in the facility because we heard the receptionist speaking with him on the intercom. Gerda told the vet assistant that we wanted to see the doctor, but the doctor declined to come out and speak with us.
Although she is petite and soft-spoken, Gerda can put a steely menace in that gentle voice without raising it. The vet assistant backed off a step when Gerda said, “He won’t come out? This dog has been grossly oversedated. Where is he? We’ll go to him.”
By the alternately defensive and aggressive-and entirely inappropriate-reponses of some on the facility staff, we suspected that scenes like this had occurred before. After originally telling us they would not release Trix until she was completely recovered from anesthesia, they now insisted there was nothing to worry about if we took her home even though she couldn’t stand up and didn’t know who we were.
No doubt the doctor had skedaddled out a back exit, and we would get no satisfaction even if we kicked open every door in the place to track him down. Trixie was our first priority. I carried her to our SUV, and we took her home.
Expecting that she might vomit or void in some other way, we bedded down, all three of us, on the kitchen floor, where we were close to whatever we might need: cold water, ice, all the cleaning materials in the nearby laundry room, an outside door. Trix seemed as unable to sleep as she was unable to walk. Lying on makeshift bedding with our girl between us, we stroked her and spoke softly to her, worried that she had suffered permanent brain damage by reason of reckless over-sedation, and we worked up the kind of quiet rage that usually leads to shotguns and Molotov cocktails.
Near midnight, Trixie was finally able to rise far enough to lap some water from a bowl. She started dozing on and off, but she showed no sign that she recognized us until four o’clock in the morning, eleven hours after we brought her home. She was not fully herself until around five o’clock the next afternoon, twenty-four hours after we brought her home from Dr. Death’s Hospital of Horrors.
Adding a rotten cherry to this toxic sundae, Dr. Death’s office called to inform us that the MRI had not produced sufficiently clear images to make a diagnosis. I wanted to know what combination of illegal drugs the doctor himself used on the average day, but his staff was reluctant to disclose this information.
I TOOK TRIXIE next to a neurosurgeon, Dr. Wayne Berry, who came into the examination room, at once got down on the floor with Short Stuff, called her “Cookie,” and won her adoration in about one minute flat. He had taught veterinary surgery at South Africa ’s largest university, but he had immigrated to the United States with his family some years earlier. He was ex-military, with the rational self-confidence, air of competence, and efficient manner of a man who knew the value of discipline and who had a sense of honor about how he lived his life and performed his surgery.
Wayne wanted another MRI. He assured me that it would provide a definitive diagnosis because he would be present during the procedure and would insist on redoing any slice of the image that wasn’t clear. I needed to return with Trixie by five thirty Wednesday morning.
I explained the condition in which Trix had been delivered to us by Dr. Death. Wayne guaranteed that when he met with me at eleven thirty to deliver the diagnosis, she would be recovered 100 percent from the anesthetic.
Wednesday morning, when I took Trixie down in the elevator to the lowest floor of the house without stopping at the kitchen, on the main level, to dish up her breakfast kibble, she hesitated at the door to the garage, waiting for me to realize my mistake. When I said, “Let’s go,” which was not just a suggestion but a command from her CCI training, she favored me with the Ross look. I explained that because of the anesthesia, she could not have any food in her stomach during the test, lest she regurgitate and aspirate vomit into her lungs or choke to death. If I say so myself, I have a talent for illuminating complex concepts for the edification of dogs, employing pantomime and sound effects to define and supplement the words they might not know. My aspirating-vomit illustration would have made Dustin Hoffman weep with envy. Trixie still gave me the Ross look and seemed to be on the verge of a bucket-bottom move.
I resorted to what always works when all else fails in these situations. Squirming with pretend delight, I spoke in a voice breathless with excitement, words tumbling over one another: “Let’s go to doctor! Trixie go, doctor, doctor! Holy moly, fun, fun, Trixie, Dad, doctor, fun, fun! Play dog doctor game, fun, fun! Go, go!” Dogs are strongly food oriented, but if they think a great good time is being had somewhere and they can be part of it, they will accept a delay in mealtime in order to get to the party.
Considering how well dogs read us the rest of the time, I’m surprised how reliably this cheap trick can whip them into a state of excitement and distract them even from breakfast. I would think once in a while the dog might realize, Waaaait just a minute. The last time there was going to be a holy-mol-fun-fun-go-go thing, I ended up with a needle in my arm, a cone around my head, and a thermometer up my butt. Their perpetual readiness for play is endearing, and their willingness to forgive deception time after time is one of the key differences between the heart of a dog and the human heart.
Trixie bought my wriggling, breathless promise of fun. She allowed me to lift her into the SUV, and as we drove off into the still-dark morning, she panted at the windows, anticipating a grand adventure.
I felt like scum. Not the worst kind of scum. Not the kind of scum you’d scrape off a kitchen floor in Hell. I felt like the kind of scum you sometimes find on the skin of a tomato that’s two days past overripe, but that was bad enough.
We arrived at Dr. Berry ’s facility early, just as the mobile MRI arrived aboard an eighteen-wheeler. The truck was so huge, it looked like the transport that a villain in one of Roger Moore’s James Bond movies would use to haul around a doomsday weapon in search of the most visually exciting landscape in which to have a chase scene.
Trixie pranced to the reception desk, and the women there cooed and fussed over her. After giving me an I’m-all-right-Dad look over her shoulder, she went with a veterinary assistant through a swinging door, where she would not find the promised party.
At home, with more than five hours to kill before we would have our girl back and hear what surgery she might require, I could not concentrate to write. I could pass the time doing correspondence, a mountain of which looms constantly in a writer’s life, or I could spend the morning sulking in an armchair, looking through magazines, and binge-eating cookies. By cookies, I mean the human kind, not the dog kind; this was not a self-punishing Freudian guilt-fest. As I stuffed myself with cookies, I did to some degree consider it a form of penance for deceiving the Trickster: If I keep this up, I’m going to be gross, I’m going to be as disgusting as Jabba the Hutt, the Beautiful People of Newport Beach will recoil from me in revulsion, and that’s exactly what I deserve. Okay, no more of those regular chocolate chip. Time for some of the chocolate chocolate chip.
Gerda and I met with Dr. Berry at eleven thirty. He clipped the MRI pictures of Trixie’s spine to the display board and asked if we could see the problem. The images were so crisp and clear that even Dr. Death might have been able to see the problem, assuming sobriety. Our girl’s spine was revealed as an exquisitely regular series of black and white forms-until near the base, the pattern compressed, deteriorated. One of the spaces that allowed a spinal nerve to pass freely from the spinal cord, between the vertebra and spinous process of vertebra, was drastically narrowed by excess bone that pinched the nerve.