Missy's Story

While we were gone from the house, she had a stroke. When we came home, she was lying on the floor in front of the door, but didn't get up. When I picked her up and tried to stand her up, she collapsed and gave me a look that seemed to say, "I really messed up, Mom." Since it was a holiday and my vet's office was closed, we rushed her to the emergency vet clinic about 20 minutes away from our house. They immediately put her on an IV and started shooting her full of cortisone. She was very quiet through everything, and leaving her there was one of the hardest things I've ever done.

That night, we went back to visit her. The vet told us there hadn't been much change. She still couldn't stand, and she couldn't urinate without their help. The vet said the neurologist would look at  her the next morning and make her recommendations about what should be done. 

After talking to the vet, we waited for the vet tech to bring Missy into the exam room to visit with us. When the tech brought Missy in, he seemed a bit harried. He laid her down on the exam table and quickly left the room before we could get over to her. I'm sure he thought that since she didn't have use of any of her legs, she would be okay. But he didn't know Missy. Before we could reach her, she had summoned all of her strength trying to get to me. Luckily, my husband was able to catch her before she fell off the table!

The next morning, we met with the neurologist. It wasn't good news. She said that since Missy hadn't shown any change in her condition overnight, there was a chance that her spine was damaged. She wanted to perform a risky procedure and we had to agree that if she did find damage, she could take Missy straight into surgery. (I later learned that with back injuries, the more quickly the vets can act, the better the chances are for recovery.) Knowing that there was a chance that our 15-year-old dog, who also had a Grade 3 heart murmur, might not survive the surgery, we asked to see her before the procedure was done. The neurosurgeon had her brought in to us. When she laid her on the table, Missy again summoned all of her strength and pushed herself up on her front legs (the ones most affected) and tried to come to me. 

When the neurosurgeon saw that, she decided that perhaps we should give Missy some more time to heal on her own. She had to stay at the emergency vet hospital for a week. Jim and I visited her several times a day until the vet told us that it was getting her too upset (she thought everytime we came to visit that we were coming to take her home). On one of our visits, I noticed that the fronts of her front legs were skinned up. They told me that as a part of her therapy, she was taken outdoors every two hours and lain on the grass, even though she couldn't get up to go do her job. On one of those trips outdoors, the tech laid her down in the nice spot, and then lit up a cigarette and was enjoying the day. When he looked back at her, she was gone! She had forced herself up and was running, as best she could, across the parking lot -- in the direction of home. When she reached the curb, she kept trying to get over it, and just couldn't do it, but that was where she skinned her legs.

When we were allowed to bring her home, we put her down in the family room, which was just off the kitchen and down two steps. She had always spent a lot of time there and I thought it would be the most comfortable for her since it was carpeted. The first thing she did, after collecting herself, was muster up all of her strength to go around and check each and every one of her toys, finally lying down next to her favorite, a hard plastic ball that was about 4 inches in diameter and had an offset motor inside of it that made it wiggle and move around on its own when turned on. She loved that ball so much and when well, would wear herself out chasing it around.

She paid dearly for that effort, however, and you could tell that she had overdone it. I slept in the family room with her and when taking her outdoors, would put a long, narrow winter scarf under her to help support her while she did her job. She hated it, but she was so unsteady, I felt I had to do it for her. She also was upset because I put a barricade of pillows across the steps going up into the kitchen, another of her favorite places to go. It was all hardwood floor up there and I feared that she would fall and bonk her head. She hated the barricade too.

We had brought her home on Saturday. On Sunday, she was still exhausted and couldn't get to her feet. On Monday morning, I planned to go to my office just to pick up some things I needed to work on, and then come home, leaving her alone in a playpen for no more than an hour. She was still on a lot of steroids, which makes them have to urinate more often, so I also planned to tell my supervisor I needed to work from home, only coming in for meetings, for a couple of weeks at least -- until she no longer had to take the steroids.

On that Monday morning, after taking her outdoors and feeding her, I started to go upstairs to take a shower when she started moaning and crying. Nothing I could do would console her. Thinking that she might be in pain, I called the emergency vet hospital. They could hear her crying in the background and told me to bring her back in as soon as possible.

When I got her there, they told me that they would need to keep her to run tests, so I went on to work. At work, I explained to my supervisor what was going on and asked to work from home until things were stablized. Her first words were, "You ought to put that damn dog to sleep." Then, I guess she realized how crude that was, so she went on to say that I could work from home for as long as it took.

A few hours later, the vet called me. There was nothing wrong with Missy, he said -- she was just very, very angry about not being able to get around on her own. I went and collected her and went home. My supervisor's words still bothered me and I talked it over with Jim when he got home. We decided that it was best for me to give notice so I could stay home and help Missy get better, which I did the very next day.

Missy's progress was very up and down, and in the process, she got very vicious. She hated having to be carried and not being able to get away from us when we came to pick her up, so she started biting -- not just snapping, but biting with intent to hurt! I started handling her only when wearing kitchen mitts. Jim refused to wear them, and had many bites to show for it.

After a week of her getting increasingly vicious, once again, I worried that she was in pain. I didn't like to face it, but I knew that if that was the case, I would need to do the right thing by her and have her put to sleep. So I made an appointment with her neurologist and took her in, fearing the worse, but wanting the best for her. After examining her, the neurologist said she was steadily making progress and there was nothing physical to indicate why she was being so vicious. She asked me if I was "hovering" over her, and I said, yes, of course! Then I told her about the scarf that I used to support her when outdoors and the pillow barricade to prevent her from going onto the hardwood floor. The neurologist told me that all of this was making Missy angry and that was why she was biting. That it would be harder on me than on Missy, but I needed to start letting her do things she wanted and let her learn for herself what she could and couldn't do.

When I got her home, the first thing I did was take down the pillows that were blocking her from the kitchen. She looked at me suspiciously, as though I was trying to trick her. When she thought I wasn't looking, she mustered her strength and went up the two steps and onto the hardwood floor. She stood there for a moment, as though gauging how to get around on the slippery service, and then started trotting towards the front door. She was doing fine until she had to go around a corner. She fell very hard and just laid there. There was no protest when I went to pick her up. She never tried the hardwood floor again after that.

To take her outdoors was just as harrowing. I would take her out in the yard and lie her down in the grass, then walk away. She would lie there for a time, then struggle to get up, run, staggering like a drunken sailor, a few feet, get herself in position to do her job, and fall over before getting it accomplished. She'd lie there for a bit and then start the whole process over until finally she would get the job done.

The neighbor in back of our house and I were on friendly terms and Dana would often come to the fence and talk to me while Missy was trying to get her feet and do her job. Dana was a wonderful lady, always cheerful and pleasant. She often laughed about how Missy was like a little old lady who jerks away when someone tries to help her, saying "I can do it myself."

Once I started letting Missy work out things for herself, she really started progressing, and within a few weeks, only her neurologist could see the little goosestep she had to do with her front feet as she mentally willed herself to pick them up and set them down.

This all occurred in the fall of the year and when winter came on, Dana, as usual, no longer came to the fence or was outside in her garden when I would take Missy outdoors. By the next spring, Missy was pretty much back to normal, except that now, she was beginning to be affected with dementia (the stroke occurred when she was 15 and she lived 3 more years after that). She didn't run as much as she had before the stroke, but she still enjoyed going out in the backyard and sniffing around.

I noticed that Dana was doing a bit of gardening, but not nearly so much as she had in the past, and I rarely saw her outdoors. When I did see her, she would smile and wave, but she never came to the fence to talk. Also, I noticed that she'd taken to wearing hats with scarves under them to cover her beautiful naturally curly auburn hair. I didn't think much about her not coming to the fence, however. I just figured that she was busy with her kids' activities as they all were teenagers by this time and very involved in sports.

One day, when I was out there, however, Dana's husband came to the fence and told me that over the winter, Dana had been diagnosed with breast cancer and had had to have a double mastectomy. It had been very hard times for them, and the reason Dana wore the scarves and hat was because she had lost all of her hair in the chemo treatments.

A few days later, Dana was out in the backyard when I went out, and she came to the fence to talk to me. She told me about her cancer and how they hoped they had "cured" it. Then she told me that it had been terribly painful for her -- that on some days, she'd felt so bad when she first woke up that she didn't want to get out of bed and would just lie there and cry, knowing that she must.

"One morning," she told me, "I was lying there crying about how much it hurt and how scared I was when all of a sudden, I thought of Missy out there in the yard, falling down and getting up again, only to fall down again. And I thought, if that little old dog could find the strength to go on, so can I." She claimed that was a turning point in her recovery. I was so moved, I had to cry. Later, I was telling my groomer, who was a good friend, about it, and she said, "You know, that may have been God's mission for Missy while she was on this earth -- to help this kind lady when she was in her darkest hour." Somehow, I always thought that might just be true.