Part VI – The Things We Do For Love

Especially the love of a 4-footed companion

CJ’s Substack

24 December 2024

When I say the doggo was acting “unwell,” I mean she wouldn’t eat.

When Licorice came to us in 2018 she was about a year and a half old. We were told she had been a service-puppy-in-training, and that she was the only surviving pup of a litter born prematurely. She also had struggled to survive. She was petite for a black lab, and her legs were a bit shorter than standard, so she had a distinctive look, but that didn’t stop her from doing anything.

Despite her own challenges (or perhaps because of them), from the moment she joined our family Licorice had a natural instinct for keeping me safe. She devised her own method of alerting me when she detected changes in breathing or heart rate or any other subtle signs of distress, and she patrolled the rooms in our abode, regularly checking on me, the cat, and Towinn, in our various corners, to make sure all was well. She had decided it was her job to make sure we were all okay, and she took that job very seriously. When she started skipping meals and declining food, we knew something was off but it was hard to know what, exactly.

We’d had picky eater dogs before, so we started experimenting to see if we could find something she liked better than what she’d been eating. That strategy worked for a while, but eventually it became clear that something other than finicky tastebuds was at work. We phoned the veterinarian to see if we could do a remote consultation. This was early in January 2020. The vet wasn’t set up to do remote or virtual appointments (yet), but given our isolation status she was willing to have us bring our doggo to the clinic and do a curbside check-in. The earliest available appointment was 8 weeks out. Meanwhile, she prescribed a probiotic and a prescription diet food and had them shipped to us from a veterinary pharmacy.

As I’m writing now, I realize this is the first time I’ve shared this particular experience with anyone outside my immediate circle. My feelings and memories about it are all jumbled up with feelings and memories about being in endless quarantine, and about losing my own independence and mobility, and about feeling helpless to change situations that seem to have inevitable outcomes, and about where to draw isolation boundaries and what change in circumstances might be sufficiently urgent that those boundaries would need to be broken temporarily, and about grief and loss and starting over, over and over and over again, and and and and…. So this particular chapter feels even more stream-of-consciousness than usual as I try to tease apart the tangled chain of what happened when and why and how and to whom. “Where” is almost never a question anymore. Where is right here. All the time. Right here.

Christmas came and went. It was lovely. New Year’s came and went. It was fine. Life in isolation started to feel normal-ish. We developed a routine that seemed to center around grocery orders and delivery, probably because that was the most frequent and predictable interaction we had with the outside world in any given week. We learned which items needed to be ordered from which retailer, because even big box stores and global giant warehouse vendors have their limits and their own priorities which often don’t align with ours.

I also spent an inordinate amount of time on the phone explaining to various entities why I needed to switch from in-person services to remote or virtual or online services. It’s probably a surprise to no one that it wasn’t always possible to arrange for the needed accommodation.

I became much better at choosing my battles. If a vendor or service provider wouldn’t or couldn’t accommodate my needs after careful and patient explanation, I didn’t push. I just dropped them and moved on. If there were no viable alternatives, that generally meant dropping a service altogether. It meant more losses, but also lots of learning about letting go, about living without certain comforts in the interest of raising the odds of survival. We became more adaptable, more flexible, and – at the same time – more anxious. We were only a few weeks into quarantine and doing it long term was starting to look more difficult than we had anticipated. The world wasn’t set up to cater to people who can’t get out and about. It's still not.

Meanwhile, more and more friends nearby and in far-flung places were getting sick and staying sick with upper respiratory illnesses. Kinda like this year. We still felt safe as long as we could isolate, but it became increasingly clear that staying isolated was going to require dedication and new forms of creative problem-solving.

As we waited for the date of the veterinarian appointment, Licorice became increasingly lethargic, her elimination became unpredictable and unpleasant, and her breath went from “dog breath” to dogawful.

Finally, the appointment date rolled up, and we had the answer to our isolation boundary question: we might not break isolation to take ourselves to the doctor, but if we had a sick animal, there was no debate.

Licorice’s visit to the veterinarian revealed that I wasn’t the only one who was having dental problems. Despite our dutiful efforts to care for her in all the recommended ways, several of Licorice’s back teeth appeared to be diseased. The doctor needed to do a full cleaning and full dental exam and x-rays to figure out what was going on. Our pupper was only 3 years old. What was going on? The earliest available appointment was again 8 weeks away.

Covid Lockdown, on the other hand, was only a few days away.

The world went quiet.

The parking lot outside our apartment stayed full during the daytime. School bus traffic in the neighborhood was non-existent. But this wasn’t summer break where roving bands of feral children wandered the grounds. They stayed indoors, safe. Quiet.

The street noise on the main thoroughfare just beyond our little community dropped to zero, except for the sounds of emergency vehicles. We heard a lot of those, usually coming to the senior living communities nearby and going back the other direction to the hospitals. During a plague that has a disproportionate impact on medically fragile and elderly people, that’s a sound that will wear on you over time.

The veterinarian called to reschedule Licorice’s dental cleaning/exam appointment. They were closing the clinic for a few weeks out of an abundance of caution, and needed to push all appointments out by an additional 8 weeks. Fortunately the probiotic and special diet seemed to be having a positive effect so the waiting wasn’t quite so concerning, but still…we couldn’t help worrying.

Other issues were also popping up that served to distract us a bit from the continuing concern about our precious pupper. The biggest one seems comical now, but at the time it was a stressy stressor: despite my most diligent planning and prudent stocking up, the timing of the lockdown came just before the end of a pay period…our fresh food supplies were low, and – worst of all – we were inconveniently low on toilet paper and paper towels and basics like dish soap. We quickly learned the difference between stocking up a little bit for the sake of convenience versus acquiring supplies in large quantities to guard against severe shortages in time of extreme need.

I told you it sounds silly now. But then, no. Unlike much of the world, we weren’t at liberty to just mask up and go store-hopping in search of necessaries. And the stores we had been working with for deliveries had quickly started restricting purchases to protect against hoarders. In my prior experience, the closest analog to the Covid Lockdown run on basics would be the phenomenon of local stores running out of bread, milk, and bananas whenever the national weather service forecasts a blizzard for our area. It’s simultaneously ridiculous and terrifying. I was quietly grateful I didn’t have to worry about acquiring things like diapers and baby formula. It was daunting enough to try to solve the problem of disposable paper goods with a couple of anxious people and a digestively distressed dog in the house. The cat, remarkably, seemed completely unfussed about any of this. As long as her food bowl stayed full and her litter box got scooped regularly, she was happy.

We got down to our last four rolls of TP and two rolls of paper towels and the stores still didn’t have any more in stock that they would send us. If we wanted TP, we had to go get it ourselves. Yeah. No.

In a fit of desperation that pushed me to abandon my usual “I can do it myself” stubbornness, I sent out an SOS to a couple of small local groups with online connections, and within a few hours we had bonus-sized packages of Angel Soft, Charmin, Bounty, and Brawny at our front door, along with safe-to-eat treats, from friends who knocked on the door and then waved at us through the window as they retreated to a safe distance.

It may have been mid-March, but that was the moment when the cosmos confirmed for me that there really is a Santa Claus, and her name is Internet …

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