Tag Archive | euthanasia of pet

Empathy

Dec14

My intention today was Patience, because I had to take Wren to the vet forty-five minutes away. Monday morning she was fine, but after she’d been in the sunroom awhile, where she likes to lie in the windowsill, and also roll on the rug, she came back to the living room with her brown eye squinted shut and weeping. When I gently prised it open, it didn’t look bloody, or swollen, and I didn’t see any foreign object in it. So I watched it. On Tuesday, it was no better, so I called and made an appointment for today. Yesterday it was no better, but no worse, and this morning she seemed to be opening it just a little bit more often. Clearly it was still uncomfortable, so down to Delta we drove.

Where’s Wren?

We waited calmly together in the same room we had last time. I was calm because of mindful intention, and she was calm because I had carefully doped her up a few hours before, so that she might not freak out as she did last time. She trembled when we first arrived, but because we had a nice long wait, she calmed down by the time the skilled tech came in. I offered her some treats to offer Wren, and she sat down beside us and showed me a trick that worked like a charm: she held my hand and offered it to Wren to sniff, quickly rotated our hands to put hers in front of Wren’s nose, and back and forth a few times before we exchanged treats. It was fascinating to watch Wren’s subtle resistance to D’s hand dissipate, and her fear of taking a treat from a strange hand melt away. Then D slipped a lead on her, gathered her up, and carried her off.

I was grateful all happened before the tragic wailing commenced in the next room over. The walls are thin, and the doors loose sliders. I was already feeling empathy for the man in the room west of me, who had carried his dog in and laid him on blankets, as the tech asked how long the dog had been unable to walk, and heard that he’d been having seizures. I thought of Stellar’s last few days, and could relate to his distress. I’m grateful for empathy. And then, a woman in the room on the other side suddenly wailed and began to sob. There is only one thing that causes that sound in a vet’s office.

I knew she had just received word that her dog would have to be euthanized. I became very still, and allowed her weeping to hold my attention. I let her pain wash through me as I relived that trip home from the vet two years ago when I wailed for twenty miles over the body of my beloved Stellar. I felt the empathy that I imagine my friends in the front of the van felt for me then. I heard her use my very words, my best boy, as her keening waned. There were murmurs from others in the room, and earnest explanations that I couldn’t discern, and her sobs rose again. My chest swelled and emotion rippled through me, down my arms, and out my hands. My eyes filled, and a tear overflowed. All the while, I held her pain, knowing she would never know, but nevertheless sending compassion out toward her, and toward the man on the other side. How helplessly we love our dogs.

Soon, it was over. It was suggested that they sedate Wren because she wouldn’t let them dye her eye to see if there was a scratch, and if there was she’d need a temporary stitch in her third eyelid (that membrane that slides up from the inside corner when they blink), after which I’d have to give her antibiotic drops twice a day for a week. I asked if I could skip straight to the drops and see if that solved it. I wanted both of us out of there. It had already been a long day. If the drops don’t help, I’ll bring her back in a week, in the morning before their day is complicated by an overtime surgery and at least one emergency euthanasia.

As we were checking out, Dr. Natalie walked by and smiled at us. “Little Monster,” she said. I assume she meant it in the Lady Gaga term-of-endearment way. I asked her to pause and give my little monster a few treats, and she kindly did so. We stopped for a milkshake on the way home and she got the whipped cream. She fought the first application of drops, but allowed the second more readily. I think they’re already helping.

Dead Dogs

Sep28
Stellar enjoying his nose on our short walk this evening, after a long few days.

Tonight, as I reflect on them, I’m grateful for all the dogs who’ve died on my watch. There was Sam, the pregnant stray I picked up in college; Knobby, who picked me up at a campground; Mocha, renowned for her sweetness; serious Mr. Brick, the golden bobtail, my first puppy; mischievous Raven, who died in my arms. Each of them died a different way.

I see growth over the course of this progression in my understandings of life and death. Karmically speaking, I can only hope that by the time dear Stellar dies, I’ve been able to purify the negative karma I incurred when I had Sam put down. The memories still traumatize: She won’t feel a thing, they assured me. She bucked and fought on the table, the whole time glaring at me in wide-eyed terror. It was the most horrible thing I’d experienced thus far in my young life. And the reason I did it? I’m ashamed to admit it, because now, knowing about no-kill shelters like Best Friends, I would never have even considered it. I rationalized it as the most compassionate thing to do, and it was the most compassionate way I knew at the time.

The object of my thoughts for days has been whether or not I could ever euthanize Stellar. During his seizure Sunday night, I was perhaps too willing to let him go, prematurely welcoming relief of my own suffering (and inconvenience, I have to admit). All this morning I perused online Buddhist perspectives on euthanasia. I spoke to his vet around noon, and she thinks he may have a bladder infection that’s exacerbating ‘everything else.’ So I drove to town this afternoon to pick up antibiotics.

I’ve had a couple of dreams in the past six weeks after which I vowed I would not have him put down. It’s never gone really well. The best deaths have been those rare affairs when a beloved dies on their own. A local vet came out after staving off Knobbydog’s time for a week; I ended up sleeping outside on the patio with him his last two nights before she came with the shots. A friend had helped me dig a grave down near the canyon rim: I’d never have had the courage to buy this land without the security of Knobbydog. He had a fast-growing cancer in his mouth, and was half dead by the time we took that last walk. As the vet strode briskly ahead down the trail, chatting, Knobby stopped to sniff the base of a juniper. After what seemed to me sufficient time (for his last long sniff, really?), I hurried him along. To his death.

We stood on the lookout rock together, the three of us, the vet chatting, Knobby sniffing the breeze and looking his last look into the canyon, I so sad. She gave him a sedative. After a few minutes she suggested we should walk to the graveside before he fell asleep. There under the Ancient One, I sat on the ground and held his knobby head in my lap, my arms around him, while she gave the lethal injection, chatting all the while about people I neither knew nor cared about. ‘Just shut UP!’ I kept screaming in my head. I have always regretted that I let myself feel rushed, and rushed him along. Also, I vowed to never have that vet come kill another pet for me.

So I had Doc Vincent come put down Mocha, when she could no longer rise for walk or food due to kidney failure. He was the exact opposite. He strode through the gate while I explained to Brick and Raven, and by the time I got inside he’d already wrapped the rubber around her leg. She, objecting, had crab-walked across the living room to get away from him. I gathered her into my lap on the couch and held her, cooing, while he finished the process. We had a communal funeral for her and Michael’s cat Luna, burying them both in the hole I’d dug to plant a peach tree the following spring. While that death went more smoothly, it still unsettled me. I happened too fast, and she was frightened. She didn’t understand.

Mr. Brick… I tried to let him die on his own. It was in the low twenties night after night, and he wouldn’t come inside. Paradoxically I both feared and hoped he would freeze to death, but he just hung on day after day. After days of pacing, he chose a favorite spot down by the pond and didn’t get up. But he didn’t die. Raven required a midnight run to the ER vet in Grand Junction. Stellar was a puppy and needed a lot of attention. I was exhausted. By then I’d come to believe that if I was going to do it, I should do it myself. So I consulted with another vet, gathered up my mom’s leftover morphine, some sleeping pills a friend kicked in, and my own Lorazepam prescription, and mixed up a brew, which I fed him with a syringe. But still I was impatient. It felt like hours and still he didn’t die. I feared then that he might wake up and keep living like a vegetable. I can’t write what I did next, but again, my intention was pure. Though again, tinged with concerns about convenience. Anyway, it worked, and I felt like he never woke up, though his head thrashed. Ack.

How much negative karmic imprint have I incurred so far? This is why Raven’s death was such a gift.

Some of the things I read this morning suggested that we listen to our pet; some argued that euthanasia is the compassionate option, others that it is the easy way out. Some raised the question of whose suffering are we trying to relieve? Many referred to the Buddhist precept of ‘no killing, not ever,’ and also used karma as a basis for ruling out euthanasia, both the pet’s karma and the person’s. Karma aside, since I’m still not clear in my understanding of nor faith in it, there was one argument that has stuck with me all day: The sense of betrayal and confusion a pet might feel when the loving hands that cuddled become the hands that kill. I thought of Sam, of course.

As I lay beside Stellar tonight, my forehead against his, stroking his soft ears, his thick ruff, his thin legs, it came clear to me. Just thinking about euthanasia had thrown a wall between us, was robbing my attention from whatever life remains to him. I chose to reaffirm my dream-inspired vow not to kill. There was an immediate sense of relief, a letting go, a flood of love released. We both relaxed. I reassured him as I did during the seizure that I will do whatever it takes to make sure he’s comfortable, and be fully present with him until his journey’s natural end. I committed to attend him with boundless patience. I felt deeply the true value of his precious life; understood viscerally for a moment the meaning of sentient being.

Maybe the antibiotics will slow down his inevitable demise, give him a few more walks in the woods, slow down the flow of pee and make him more comfortable; maybe not. He’s in doggie hospice now either way. Between the seizures and his deteriorating hind end it’s clear his neural pathways are failing. My mission is simply to ease his transition. I’m grateful for all the dead dogs that led me to this realization, and for the mindfulness practice that enables me to receive it with equanimity.