Daily Dose #73 Goodnight, Sweet Prince

 

Huckleberry checking out the new kitchen floor at "The Sedge Wedge"

Last November, after a year of tumult where at one point I was living in spartan hotel room with three dogs in the Adirondacks, we finally settled into our new home in Syracuse.

Traveling, and being responsible for a menagerie of two aging Shih Tzus, a young 80 lb rescue retriever with a boundless source of dog energy, and a cat that sometimes resembles a criminal mastermind capable of great evil mischief, is not without its challenges.

So all of us here at the Sedge Wedge were pretty relieved to finally take possession of our new domicile and finally start our lives, all together. No more hotels, no more disruption. We may have been surrounded by a pile of boxes, but contained within were the familiar smells of our old home, and our old routines.

Huck and Doo dig Elvis

We barely made it all together across the finish line. Doodle (Huckleberry’s litter mate and little sister) took ill over the spring and summer. Being the runt of the litter and kind of snatched from the jaws of eminent death as a little tiny puppy, she had a few genetic / physical defects; primarily a little hole in her heart that got progressively larger through thirteen human years. Her heart sounds like a out of balance Maytag washing machine in the throes of an agitation cycle from hell. Her little ticker has a tendency to slosh fluid into her lungs, causing all sorts of problems, including passing out from oxygen deprivation.

So this became part of life last year. Emergency Vet visits, and a pretty complex daily chemical cocktail to keep her alive, pain free, and relatively healthy and happy. The pill pocket people (and the dog pharmaceutical distributor) love me, and probably have a portrait of Doodle hanging in the vestibule of their front offices, an engraved brass tag attached reading “Our Benefactor”.

We did in fact, finally turn the key, and the corner; or so we thought anyway.

But we didn’t. Huckleberry suddenly came up lame in his right front leg. This wasn’t exactly abnormal, as Shih Tzus are notoriously jenky in the joints, and there have been many dislocations of shoulders and legs; particularly when Huckie decides he’s super dog and calculates he can negotiate soft landings after launching himself off the bed and becoming airborne as he attempts to save the free world from...the epitome of all that is unholy, the cat!

After shopping for a new vet, transferring paperwork, and going through several visitations and second opinions, I got the bad news. This was no jenky joint. Basically he was suffering from degenerative bone disease, and was slowly becoming paralyzed, from front to back on his right side, and eventually, in total.

So the new house became a hospice care center, as I tried to allow him to squeeze as much life out of this world as he could, relatively comfortable and pain free.

Our days were spent with him by my side in the man cave, him listening to me practice the piano. Something that we used to do quite a bit in New Orleans, but not so much during my time up in CNY. He likes Beethoven Piano Sonatas, tolerates my butcher job of Chopin, and prefers the dirty boogie woogie. His tail wags telegraphed the tale of the scale. 

Huckie truly loved munching on his "snowbies" (His cue word for snow)

 My nights were spent ferrying him cradled in my arms, taking him outside every hour on the hour. He didn’t necessarily have to do his business (Although that did become problematic over time; How are you supposed to pee when you can’t lift your leg without falling over? This became a source of painful confuzzlement). Basically, he just wanted to eat as much snow as he possibly could, and I was happy to oblige. It kept me from having to subcutaneously hydrate him with an I.V drip bag and a needle; a task neither of us looked forward to.

So basically, I’ve been a 24 hour on call nurse, and haven’t had a night’s sleep in two months. My sleep deprivation is so severe that I’m in a constant hallucinatory state. Forgive me if this blog doesn’t contain my usual verbose flourishes.

I didn’t want to flick the switch on Huck out of personal convenience. I ushered him into this world, and he trusted me to take him out on his terms, not mine.

He fought right to the end. His spirit? Indomitable. Inspirational, really. Of all the gifts he gave me over thirteen years of love and loyalty, this last lesson he taught me may be the most valuable.

We had a pleasant last day. The weather broke, so he could smell the onset of Spring and the aroma of the dirt wafting up from it’s Winter slumber one last time. He got to sit in the sun some.

Huckie's Last Supper

He laid next to me all day, licking the thin veneer of shaving gel off my face and neck (Edge shaving gel: Puppy Crack). Sloppy work but what the hell. Doodle and Gingy joined us for a last supper of freshly cooked bacon, his favorite treat.

And as the hours ticked down my anxiety ratcheted up. As the knot in my stomach commensurately rose into my throat as we got closer to having to leave for the vet, it was all I could do from totally losing my shit. Driving while crying isn’t exactly a good idea. Huck always knew when I was in trouble and turmoil. I tried to shield him from the disturbance in my heart and mind the best I could for his last day in the material world.

I can rationalize to infinitude concerning my ultimate decision: ("He's in a better place", "You did the humane thing", "He'll be there on the other side waiting for you"....). All of those rationalizations ring hollow today.

He was my constant; my little rock that amazingly kept me tethered to the earth's surface for 13 years and three months, preventing me from floating off into the ether. All the shit that life throws at you (and life is capable of heaving enormous piles of shit), little Huckleberry was right next to me on the front line, a loyal soldier taking fire. He never wavered. He was my raison d’etre, because he was my responsibility, above anything else. He loved me without question and I him.

Swaddled in his favorite fuzzy green blanket, nestled comfortably in my arms, he didn’t know what hit him. He was gone five seconds after the shot was administered.

  
A big chunk of me left with him today. Life without my running partner of thirteen years is a great unknown. It’s too soon to make a total emotional damage assessment, but I’m afraid it’s going to be more critical than I could ever have originally projected. Time will tell.

I’m extremely grateful to be surrounded by the love of my remaining furry children, my family, and my partner Michele. They surround me and prop me up when I'm about to dive bomb into the abyss.

We never got to have that wing ding in Hawaii (More on that later; stay tuned kids). My hope is that he is surrounded by Hula girls, munching on spit roasted swine, with the strains of slack key guitars and ukuleles softly lilting through the gentle ocean breeze. 

Goodnight, Sweet Prince.

Huck and Doo at a Lua at the imaginary "Million Dollar Bash" in Hawaii 

My best friend, ever. Huckleberry Rossi (12/10/02-03/08/16)

"You may shoot for the stars and end up beaten and bloodied in a back alley behind Pluto, but at least I dare to dream; that’s better than being Earthbound mired in the muck of mediocrity".


I judge my forward progress and success by the crushingly epic nature of my failures.

The more epic the crash, the more I’m convinced I must be doing something right.



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COLONEL BEAUREGARD "IRON THIGHS" JEFFERSON, A.K.A. "THE MANAGEMENT"

Birth of a Dog Nation

The deal between my chronically alcoholic girlfriend and myself was this: Stay sober for one year, and we’ll get pregnant and get married.

She held up her end of the bargain, and it was a very good year for us…. so as she was ingesting prenatal vitamins and going to AA meetings twice a day, in the tenth month of her sobriety, the rings were purchased and the birth control pills were shelved. Birth certificates were excavated, and licenses applied for. The hall was booked for the reception, and regular meetings with Father LeDoux were scheduled. Plane tickets were purchased to fly both families down to New Orleans. She even made me go to “Catholic Camp” for a weekend as a premarital couples indoctrination / retreat.

And we got pregnant. The first foray into parenthood for both of us.

During her third month, she miscarried.

I’m not going to go into great detail here, for this is a story unto itself…let’s just say, as miscarriages go, this one was as bad as they get. Health care in New Orleans has always been a crap shoot, and it took three trips to the Charity Hospital emergency room to finally convince somebody that was pretending to be a qualified physician to give her a D & C….and as I held her hand, a glass vial was shoved in our faces with the contents of the procedure, the “Dr.” querying: “Wanna look?”

The period of domestic bliss (and it’s prerequisite sobriety, I feared) was officially over.

Giving herself no recovery time to heal psychologically, a few days after the miscarriage she looked at her three dogs and announced: “If I can’t have a baby, then somebody in this house is gonna get pregnant”, the only candidate being her 3 year old Shih Tzu, Dalai.


Little Dalai was about to be rechristened, “The Dalai Mama”.

I strongly advised against the idea, with a marriage, collected family invasion, a freshly unprocessed miscarriage, and a tenuous sobriety hanging in the balance. Having a litter of puppies in an apartment that already contained three dogs, one cat, and a fish whilst trying to pull all that off was lunacy, and I could see the hand writing on the proverbial wall…something was going to break, and it was going to be sobriety.

In retrospect, she knew that too…. she always needed to give herself a “rational” reason for starting to drink again. Part of the pattern.

So “play” dates were arranged with with an AKC male Shih Tzu (four dates, $500), and she got Dalai knocked up.

On a crisp night in the fall, Dalai’s pregnancy came to term and as she started to go into labor, she didn’t know what was happening. She was scared, and the safest place when experiencing any type of fear ( per example, a New Orleans thunderstorm) was on my chest.

So as I lay on the bed, gently stroking her, she gave birth to the first of three pups on my breast… it was amazing.

They say that in the animal world during times like this, instinctual “knowledge” kicks in, but with Dalai, this was not the case. She didn’t know what to do, so I had to break the pup out of his sac, rub his little shoulder blades until he started to breath, dangle the afterbirth in front of her face like a dog treat to get her to eat it, and affix the pup onto a nipple.

My betrothed had gone back to work by this time (She was a piano entertainer at Pat O’Brien’s Hurricane and Plantation Vibe Emporium). Every other hour on her breaks, she would come home to check on the process, and by 3am, we had three new Shih Tzu babies in our home, clumsily named Uno, Duo, and Treo until we could come up with something better.

It was a wonderful night. The last one we would share for a while.


DRINKING, DEATH, AND DESTRUCTION


The drinking started, and by the time we got to Christmas, the wedding had been called off, the hall had been cancelled, Father LeDoux was notified, and we barely got through the Holidaze with some family members who decided to make the trip to New Orleans regardless if there was going to be a wedding or not.

When she falls off the wagon, it isn’t a gentle climb down to the ground. It’s more like a full-on swan dive straight into the gutter. Zero to 120 mph in about three days.

So to ring in the New Year, with an apartment of 8 pets, including three newborn puppies, the drinking ramped up to “condition critical”… Three liters of vodka per day, flat on her back, non-ambulatory, defiling the bed because she can’t stand, let alone walk to the bathroom.

During these times, I couldn’t be around that scene…I could monitor it, if allowed, but I couldn’t live in it. I kept a small apartment just for these occasions, a necessary survival expense. This wasn’t the first time I’ve been to the “try and drink yourself to death rodeo”.

My basic stance was to leave, and dangle support in front of her like bait. I would only reinsert myself into her life if she got her shit together enough to be admitted into our favorite Detox center, St. Vincent Depaul’s.

I don’t know if this was right or wrong…. but at the time it really was the only viable option. She’d go on a bender, screw up our life, and then when she finally decided not to die and get into detox, it was my job to clean up the apartment after three weeks of total pet and human neglect, and try to put the pieces back together again. This was our cycle, our own dance with Doom.

One of her favorite pastimes during the bender phase was to “Drink and Dial”…. continuously torturing me, always with the intent of securing the promise that if she did make it to detox, that my support would still be intact…which of course, it always was.

It was then that I got this call, in barely translatable slurred speech:

"Uno’s dead, and Treo isn’t going to make it”

They weren’t nursing, and of course, being on her way to chat with her maker face to face, she neglected to notice.

So I scrambled down to the apartment, and broke my pact with myself. She could drink herself to death if she wanted to, but I couldn’t sanction having innocent little lives be lost as the result of that decision. I grabbed the puppies and hustled to the vet.

The vet informed me that, yes indeed, these dogs were both dehydrated and malnourished to the point that, at least for Treo, survival was unlikely…. and the most humane (and most cost effective option) thing to do would be to let her die.

I asked the vet, “Just for the sake of argument, what would I need to do to keep Treo alive?”

His response: “ You would need to insert a catheter down her throat, and inject formula and antibiotics into her stomach once every three hours…for the next six weeks. But the little one isn’t going to make it through the night.”

So against his better judgment, he hooked me up with the needed feeding implements.

I was about to become a Dad.


HAPPY ENDING

These are my children. Renamed Huckleberry (Duo) and Doodle (Treo), after another rocky two years, I finally assumed full custody after one of many subsequent swan dives.

Doodle still has the quirk of sucking on my fingers, a reminder of the many times I fed her by slipping the catheter into her stomach.

The future ex-wife is history, but this dog love is forever.

They were born in the French Quarter above the Voodoo Museum on Dumaine Street.

They were born amidst much human suffering, and they’re extremely adept at soaking that suffering up, and returning nothing but unconditional love… I know: cliché but true.

They have been through hell and back with me…from their rocky start, through a hurricane, a long separation (I had to leave town to take care of my father: Non-Hodgkin’s Lymphoma) and my own personal descent into suicidal madness… and never once did their loyalty or love sway.

They are by my side. Constantly. (Frankly, one’s in my lap and the other at my feet as I type this little story.)


I used to say that the only thing in my life that has never let me down was my love of music and my relationship to the piano….but that isn’t entirely true.

These little moppets are also in that select company. They have never let me down.

Dog Only Nose.