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My Friend RhodryJanuary 25, 2008 So I blog about procrastination then disappear for 10 days? What could be going on with that girl?? I haven't been procrastinating, honest. I've actually been accomplishing a fair amount on several fronts, including the job in residence (I'm well into the backmatter, which is good because backmatter is 400 pages of a 1,200-page manuscript and the sucker's got to be in New York on Wednesday). My letter to the editor about the Tisbury Great Pond assessments is the lead op-ed in today's Vineyard Gazette; it's got a good head -- "Funny Money? No Laugh Lines in Tax Bill" -- and they, unlike the Martha's Vineyard Times, in which I was quoted yesterday, spelled my name right. Trouble is, I've had at least three blog ideas swirling slowly around my head, and none of them has coalesced. Well, the West Tisbury property valuations coalesced, but into an op-ed, not a blog; that story isn't over yet and I've got plenty to say that I wouldn't write for the newspaper. I wanted to write something about Bill Strauss, co-founder of the Capitol Steps, who died in mid-December. I wanted to write something about my early steps toward seeing Mud of the Place into print. And I wanted to write about Rhodry, how he's been doing with his bum leg, and what we talk about when we drive around together, and a couple of minor (mis)adventures we've had. I couldn't focus on any single one of my ideas, so I focused on other stuff instead. Procrastination to the rescue: sooner or later time, in the form of unfolding events, will provide the focus, and usually if you try to force anything before its time it'll come out lopsided or squishy in the middle. So this one's about my friend Rhodry. Rhodry's left leg has improved a little, but not all that much. Exactly 13 months ago he got stepped on by his friend Manoog, the Friesian. Didn't break anything, but he was one hurtin' puppy. We treated it like a sprain -- dosing with rest and a pain-killing anti-inflammatory. Within two or three weeks, Rhodry was back to normal. Not this time. He still has a hard time climbing stairs, and I'm still helping him into the truck: he puts his forepaws on the running board, I boost his butt, and he walks himself in. Full moon night earlier this week, Rhodry wanted to go out around 10:30. I put my woollies on, grabbed a flashlight, and went with him, mainly to make sure he didn't think he was going to spend the night outside. Single digits may be Malamutt weather, but Susanna gets a say too, and Susanna thought that lying for long periods on very cold ground was making it harder for the Malamutt to get up. Rhodry wandered into the underbrush. I kept an eye on the white tail and chest and listened for crunching leaves. After a couple of minutes the crunching stopped and I couldn't see a damn thing. I called him, but it was late and the magna vox required to reach a hearing-impaired Malamutt at unknown distance might wake the neighbors. I set off toward the place of last known sighting. Amazing how much shadowy snow on dead oak leaves looks like a curled-up Malamutt, and how little full-moon light reaches the forest floor even when there are no leaves to block it, and how short and narrow the beam from my flashlight. My ears were more useful than my eyes, but I couldn't hear anything that sounded like Rhodry fighting his way through the scrub. Was he disoriented? Would he head off in the same direction he took last summer when the thunder rolled on and on? I went back for the truck and took a drive down the dirt road. No Rhodry. Leaving out all the panicky thoughts I had down the road and back -- when I returned, the headlights revealed a patient Malamutt getting to his feet in front of Sarah's studio door. A couple of days later at the barn there was a commotion up the hill on the other side of the fence: barking dogs and yelling kids. I emerged from Allie's stall, which I was cleaning, in time to see a slightly bedraggled Rhodry coming back through the fence. He was limping worse than usual, but Rhodry's lifelong habit has been to limp first and find out where, or if, it hurts later. He was OK. It used to be that Rhodry was the neighborhood alpha. He could quite literally deck all the dogs in the area with one look, even the ones that were bigger, younger, and more ferocious-looking than he was. Around his twelfth birthday, which was also when he got tangled up in Manoog's feet, he showed signs of abdicating his alphaness. I worried: would he get into a fight he couldn't win? But the dogs worked it out. Rhodry gradually became the alpha emeritus. The bloodhound and the shepherd mix would come through the fence -- which they never did when Rhodry ruled -- and do some mutual sniffing with Rhodry and, pretty soon, go back home. Through the week, Rhodry was showing less and less interest in his food. He's never been a voracious eater; he'll often leave some of his meal to eat as leftovers -- if Pearl next door, who is a voracious eater, doesn't finish it off first. But he wasn't getting around to the leftovers, and this morning he didn't want to eat at all. Worse, he wouldn't eat the biscuit I offered him. That was the clincher. His leg wasn't improving much, his appetite was off: we'd been treating the leg as a injury, but pretty clearly it wasn't. Time to go back to the vet. While Michelle's assistants took X-rays, Michelle and I discussed Rhodry's veterinary history and the various possibilities. Rhodry's had a couple of bouts with tick-borne diseases, most recently in the summer of 2006. He's been Lyme-positive for years but asymptomatic. Chronic Lyme? A tick-borne reinfection? Martha's Vineyard is tick paradise; tick-borne ailments are high on the list of possibilities whenever lameness and lethargy are involved. We were tentatively settling on a course of Doxycycline when the developed X-rays came up from the basement, along with Rhodry and Michelle's assistants. The X-rays showed some arthritis in the hip joint. They showed a piece of buckshot in the right hind leg -- something Rhodry never told me about, but for which I can think of a couple of plausible explanations; not to mention that it accounts for Rhodry's fear of anything that sounds like gunshots, which came on him suddenly during the years Allie was at Crow Hollow Farm. The X-rays also showed a substantial tumor up against the base of Rhodry's spine, on the left side. Probably prostate, Michelle said, and when she explained what it was doing, everything fell into place. About a month ago, its growth probably started pinching a nerve, bringing on the current bout of lameness. For considerably longer it's been affecting Rhodry's ability to pass feces. He has a hard time squatting in place to poop; he poops while squat-walking. I started noticing a change during summer 2006, when he was having a succession of tick-related troubles. I attributed it to that, or to age. In the last few months he's been prone to poop in inappropriate places, which some dogs do any old how but Rhodry has been from puppyhood a fastidious dog who does his serious business in the bushes. He's old, I thought, though it wasn't exactly like the incontinence I've seen in other old dogs. What next? Anyone with a dog probably thinks What if . . . ? on a regular basis, and as the dog gets older it becomes When if . . . ? Me too. Heroic beat-the-nearly-impossible-odds measures weren't part of my plan, and with prostate cancer at the stage Rhodry's got it, the treatment options are few. If he were four or six years old, I might consider them. He's not. So we're going with anti-inflammatories to deal with pain and laxatives to make the poop easier to pass. On the way home from the barn I picked up canned pumpkin (unadulterated -- not pie filling), which Michelle recommended as a source of fiber, and canned beef broth, to disguise the taste of Metamucil, which has worked in the past but which Rhodry doesn't especially like. I've got a list of other things to try; we're going to see what works. Rhodry scarfed down his beef-broth-laced supper with more gusto than usual. Michelle hazarded a guess of about two months. Could be less, could be more. My hunch is less. Should I even be encouraging him to eat when eliminating waste is already an issue, and likely to become more of one? Since his leg went wonky a month ago, he's been making do and not worrying about it. He doesn't really like climbing the stairs, but if I ask and I'm there he'll do it. He would much rather I boost his hind end into the truck than leave him behind when I go somewhere. One way or another, he'll tell me when he's ready to go somewhere else. We're scrubwhacking through the woods by full-moon light; I don't know where he is, and we don't know where we're going. Just now Rhodry picked up the stuffed dog Tillo gave him for Christmas and started squeaking. I looked at him. He was looking at me. I got down on the floor and we played squeakers. Have I told you lately, Rhodry, that I'm glad you're my puppy?
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