The Puppy Diaries: Raising a Dog Named Scout (9 page)

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Authors: Jill Abramson

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In late October, two months into Scout’s city immersion, I found another urban treat for her. Near our loft is an unusual clinic and day-care center for dogs called Water 4 Dogs, which specializes in hydrotherapy for dogs with ailments or postsurgical problems, but also offers fun swims for healthy dogs for thirty dollars.
A trip to Water 4 Dogs would be a luxury for sure. But since it was now too cold for Scout to swim outside in Connecticut, I figured she must be missing the water terribly. When my children were young, I had often taken them swimming in the winter at our neighborhood YMCA, which had an affordable
membership fee. Now I would have to pay more for Scout to swim than I ever had back then. But I was curious, so I called and reserved a place for her on a Tuesday evening.
The person I talked to on the phone told me that dogs could swim alone or with their owners, so when Henry, Scout, and I set off for Water 4 Dogs, I took my bathing suit. Knowing that Scout was used to swimming in backyard pools and the Long Island Sound, I anticipated that she might want company at this unfamiliar city pool.
When we arrived, there was only one other dog in the pool. (The manager told me that the maximum number of dogs allowed for the one-hour swims was four or five, a relief to hear since the prospect of swimming with a pool full of dogs seemed about as appetizing as wading into a baby pool full of diaper-free toddlers.) The water, kept at ninety degrees, felt like a warm bath.
I got in first, and Scout quickly followed me. Henry—who was delighted that I had volunteered to be the designated swimmer—offered to shoot some video. Scout swam in big circles and enjoyed using a ramp that allowed her to get in and out of the water easily. As well, the sides of the pool had rails on which she could climb and rest between laps. We swam for about half an hour and then availed ourselves of the
pool’s spalike amenities, including fluffy towels, nice shampoo, and hair dryers. There was a shower for me and hoses with hot and cold water for Scout.
While I showered and dried my hair, the staff gave Scout her own professional blow-dry, which she seemed to have mixed feelings about, since I could hear her barking in protest. The fee—about what I paid for guest privileges to swim at a nearby health club—was too high to make this part of our weekly schedule. But it was fun for a special treat.
At the
Times
, where there is a coterie of devoted dog owners, I learned about yet more special dog services in New York. One of the paper’s business reporters told me about a palatial farm outside of Manhattan that offers daily or weekly stays for city dogs, along with pick-up and drop-off car service. (The cost is twenty-six dollars a day, but the transportation to and from the place costs a stiff ninety dollars on top of the daily charge.) Scout and I also checked out a hotel for dogs in SoHo, where there are $115-a-night suites, replete with little beds, turn-down service, and flatscreen TVs. Like so much else for the canine set in New York, this hotel is designed to appeal more to humans than to dogs.
Even so, I understand why so many of Manhattan’s dog owners are inclined to pamper their pups. A lot of people work in an office and feel guilty about leaving
their dogs alone in their apartments for hours on end, and also for depriving them of their natural longing to be outdoors. Understandably, city owners often worry that urban life is simply too confining for dogs.
Experts differ over whether this is true. Temple Grandin told me in an interview that she isn’t a fan of raising and keeping dogs in the city, but she also said that pets are usually fine as long as they got enough exercise. “Besides love,” she said, “exercise is by far the most important thing for dogs. If a dog gets enough exercise in the city and is loved by its owner, it can have a good life.”
Karen Overall, another animal behaviorist, agreed that a dog owner’s most important responsibility is spending time with the pet and giving it plenty of exercise. It is true, she said, that dogs who are cooped up for hours in cramped apartments can acquire behavioral problems and are sometimes prone to obesity. But she also said that many city dogs live happy lives. In fact, Dr. Overall—a professor of psychology and behavior in the Psychiatry Department of the School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania—splits her year between city and country, and she has owned dogs for years.
Dr. Overall went on to tell me a bit about her current dog, Maggie, an Australian shepherd who was bred to herd cattle but is perfectly happy in her small
apartment in Philadelphia. In the summer, Maggie lives at Big Bend National Park in Texas, where Dr. Overall does research. Maggie loves spending part of the year in Texas, but she is basically happy in either place, as long as she is with her owner. “Whether it’s swimming in the Rio Grande and flirting with desert foxes and coyotes, or going to class and defending me from muggers, she wants to be with me because we are a team.” Companionship trumps location, Dr. Overall concluded.
At the
Times
, one of my younger colleagues, Gabe Dance, tortured himself over whether to bring his dog to New York after deciding to move here in 2005. The dog, named London, had followed Gabe everywhere, from his childhood home in Colorado to graduate school in North Carolina. Because of his responsibilities in the
Times
’s multimedia department, Gabe knew he would rarely be able to get home before 9 p.m. Right before London’s designated moving date, Gabe made the decision he calls “the most painful of my life.” He decided to leave London with his parents in Colorado, where she could play outside all day with their other two dogs. “I just thought it was the right decision,” Gabe explained, but he misses London fiercely and visits her as often as he can.
I appreciated how hard it was for Gabe to be separated from London, in part because Scout sometimes
stayed in Connecticut for extra days with Henry, and these separations were hard on me. When Henry didn’t have to see clients in New York, he preferred to split the week between New York (Monday night through Thursday) and Connecticut (Thursday night through Monday). This meant Scout could still be part of the farm crowd in Connecticut and then return to the city and reclaim her place at the funky run, where she now had established friends.
By early November, Scout had been visiting Biscuits and Bath regularly for two months, and one day Fred Holmes sent her home with a report card. “She is where she needs to be,” Fred wrote. “She is healthy, happy and interacts well with other dogs. That being said, Scout also has a strong personality and sometimes has more love than she knows what to do with and being a puppy this comes out as goofy, mischievous, silly behavior—all of which is encouraged.”
She was, I was not surprised to learn from Fred, the class clown.
 
 
Whether we were in New York or Connecticut, Scout’s morning greeting usually came promptly at 6 a.m. when she arrived at our bedside, her big squeaky duck in her mouth. She often carried something in her mouth when she was excited, and in the mornings she brought the duck as an offering, an invitation for immediate play. Even then, two and a half years after the accident in Times Square, my leg was usually quite stiff first thing in the morning, so left to my own druthers I probably would have wanted to sleep a little later. But over the past few months Scout and I had developed a mutually agreeable morning routine.
I would first sit Indian-style on the bedroom floor
for a few minutes while Scout walked in circles around me, duck in mouth and braying with happiness. Then I would try to grab the duck, which, of course, I never managed to snatch away. Once I felt limber enough, I would haul myself up and chase her.
But one morning in November, when she was seven months old, Scout failed to appear on cue. It was a weekday morning in the city, and without my trusty alarm clock I overslept. At about eight o’clock, when Scout finally dragged herself into our bedroom, I could see immediately that something was wrong. Her eyes were glazed and she exhibited no trace of her usual morning playfulness.
A few minutes later, I had to pull her out for a walk when usually she was the one who pulled me. She also had no appetite. That afternoon, when she seemed no better, we decided to take her to the veterinarian near our house in Connecticut, where she had gotten her puppy shots.
The vet took an X-ray to make sure she didn’t have some sort of intestinal blockage, and we were instructed to take her home and give her some Pepcid from the drugstore. But even after taking several of the acid-controller tablets, she was still out of sorts. I felt helpless and worried; her droopy gaze and listlessness made it apparent that she was ill, but of course she had no way to communicate what was wrong.
As with a sick infant, a dog’s illness can be especially frustrating to diagnose. Whether in my role as a parent or a dog owner, I had never handled these sorts of medical problems very well. We had taken our children to the emergency room a few times with high fevers or after other mishaps; I recall with particular dismay the time Will got one of Cornelia’s long crafting needles stuck in his foot. In these situations, I was always a nervous wreck while Henry remained admirably calm and reassuring. And whenever Buddy was ill and had to be taken to the vet, I was similarly agitated.
As soon as we got back to New York, I took Scout to see our vet in Tribeca, where Buddy had received uniformly good care. The vet ordered a blood test and examined a fecal specimen. The results came back with a double whammy of city and country ailments. Scout had giardia, a common parasite in Manhattan that she could have picked up from feces on the sidewalk or at Biscuits and Bath. She also tested positive for anaplasmosis, a tick-borne illness that she might have caught in our yard or at the farm. Our house in Connecticut is near Lyme, the ground zero for Lyme disease, which is also carried by ticks, and although Scout had been vaccinated for Lyme disease, the vaccine didn’t protect her from anaplasmosis. Although we routinely checked Scout for ticks and tried to keep her nose off the ground
on Manhattan sidewalks, it was impossible to be perfectly vigilant.
Our vet in Tribeca told me that neither of these infections is serious. But it’s important, she said, to complete the full course of treatment, a three-week-long regimen of antibiotics. To ensure that Scout would take the medicine, she suggested we use Greenies, a soft dog treat, to envelop the pills.
Scout perked up considerably in the next few days. But because her infections were potentially contagious, we had to keep her away from other dogs while she was taking the antibiotics. Deprived of her dog pals, she was mopey and glum.
It was a relief to see her healthy again, but then one day, just after finishing her drug regimen, Scout was running to greet her friends at the farm when she suddenly let out a piercing yelp. I dashed over to her; she was breathing heavily and obviously in pain. Henry and I called our vet in Connecticut again and were told to take Scout to a twenty-four-hour emergency pet clinic near New Haven.
Upon arrival, we learned that the clinic’s X-ray machine was broken, so we were sent to a second clinic. There, the doctors were unable to diagnose the problem, though one of the vets detected sensitivity in her back. After deciding to give Scout a painkiller and
inject intravenous fluids to rehydrate her, the vets asked to keep her overnight for observation.
When we went to say good-bye to Scout before leaving, she was lying down in a cage with an IV needle attached to her right front leg, one area of which had been shaved. She looked terribly forlorn and vulnerable.
As we got into the car for the lonely ride home, Henry said, “Please don’t assume the worst.” He knew exactly what dark corner I was visiting in my mind. I was thinking about our ordeal with Dinah.
 
 
In 1995, three years after we got Buddy, Henry and I began thinking about getting a second dog to keep Buddy company. This idea came to us after my then-boss in the Washington bureau of the
Wall Street Journal
, Alan Murray, told me he wanted to get a puppy for his two young daughters. Intrigued by the notion of getting a Westie, Alan asked me for guidance. One thing led to another, and that summer I returned to the same breeder in Maryland from whom we had purchased Buddy and collected two females from a new litter. Carting home those two white puppies in our minivan, I told my children, then twelve and ten,
that we would let Alan’s girls, who had never had a dog, pick the puppy they wanted.
When we got home, we put the two little puppies in the yard, introduced them to Buddy, and then awaited the arrival of the Murrays. Meanwhile, unbeknownst to me, Will had fallen head over heels for the smaller of the two pups—apparently she had a vulnerable look that claimed his heart. When the Murrays arrived, the two girls couldn’t decide which puppy they preferred, so Cornelia, looking out for her little brother, tried to steer them to the bigger pup. Naturally the Murray girls decided they wanted the smaller one, but at the moment of turnover Cornelia handed them the bigger puppy. Unaware of the switch, they accepted it happily. Will was immensely grateful for his sister’s intervention, which Henry and I learned about only after the fact.
We named our new puppy Dinah, but we also gave her the nickname Tiny. She didn’t grow as quickly as Buddy had, which began to worry me. In September, at about four months, her back legs began to tremble. A passerby watched her one afternoon that fall as she played in our yard. “Look at her back legs,” he called over to me. “They wobble. You should have that checked out.”
I called our wonderful vet, Dr. Kay Young, who had given Dinah her puppy shots but hadn’t seen her since.
Dr. Young looked concerned as she examined Dinah. She ordered tests and did further research. In particular, she wanted to rule out a rare neurological disease called globoid cell leukodystrophy—also known as Krabbe disease—that is specific to Westies and cairn terriers. She sent Dinah’s tests to the University of Pennsylvania’s School of Veterinary Medicine, one of the best in the country.
Tiny Dinah
A week later, Dr. Young called me with a devastating diagnosis. Dinah did indeed have Krabbe disease. There is no cure, and most afflicted dogs die within a year. This disease also affects humans, and in infants it’s often fatal before age two.
When I got home from work that night, I found it almost impossible to believe that the perky little pup licking my face was likely to be gone in a few months. After a flood of tears, I called the breeder and informed her about Dinah’s disease—since both parents have to carry the Krabbe gene for it to be transmitted, I knew she would immediately stop breeding Dinah’s parents. Happily, the Murrays’ puppy, named Furry, did not exhibit any signs of the disease; as well, she had already been spayed, so there was no danger of her passing on the gene for Krabbe. As heartbreaking as this situation was, I was glad it was our misfortune and not the Murrays’, whose little girls were over the moon about their first dog. After
all, we were still blessed with healthy, wonderful Buddy.
Not long after receiving Dinah’s diagnosis, I got a phone call from Dr. Mark Haskins, a professor at Penn’s School of Veterinary Medicine. Dr. Haskins told me that having a dog with Krabbe would be extremely valuable to his research, because while some Westies and cairns carry the Krabbe gene, it’s extremely rare for a living dog to have the actual disease. He also hoped we’d donate Dinah to the large animal colony at Penn’s veterinary hospital complex and invited me to come for a visit.
The notion of giving Dinah up was even tougher for our family to absorb than the fact that we would soon be caring for a puppy who would suffer seizures, blindness, deafness, and loss of motor control. We wanted to give her our love, not give her away.
Nonetheless, right after the Thanksgiving break I traveled to Philadelphia to meet Dr. Haskins, a kindly man with a gray beard and mustache. The Penn veterinary facilities are impressive indeed. The animal colony has enough room for dogs to roam free, and there are treatment rooms with little gurneys, some with tiny stirrups, just like human ones but in miniature.
Then Dr. Haskins gave me a stack of newsletters to read. They contained accounts written by the parents of
children with Krabbe, and most were accompanied by pictures. The stories documented how this disease ravaged families by robbing children of their early motor development and then causing death. Reading the newsletters was emotionally draining, but it also put our own family’s plight in perspective. If Dinah could aid the research of this fatal disorder—if she could help researchers take even a tiny step toward finding treatment for these children—how could we say no?
I asked Dr. Haskins if we could strike a compromise: what if we kept Dinah at home but brought her to Penn, as frequently as he wanted, for testing and observation? He agreed and even said he would help with the commute. For the next eight months, we alternated: sometimes we drove Dinah to Penn; sometimes Dr. Haskins’s students or aides drove down to Virginia to pick her up. Usually she returned home in a matter of days. Although some of the tests were painful, Dinah showed no overt signs of suffering, and the people at Penn treated her like a medical celebrity. She remained sweet and playful, a great companion to Buddy and to us.
Several months after the diagnosis, Dinah did lose her eyesight, but her quality of life was still pretty good when she marked her first year. Dr. Haskins was surprised by her relatively stable condition. But a few months later, Dinah’s limbs began buckling beneath
her, and she started having seizures. When the seizures grew frequent, I was forced to accept the sad fact that it was probably time to end her suffering. I called Dr. Haskins and made arrangements to make one last trip to Philadelphia.
Because Dinah’s most valuable contribution to Dr. Haskins’s research would come from an autopsy, she needed to be put to sleep at Penn’s veterinary hospital. I cried while I drove, but I’d composed myself by the time Dinah and I arrived at the hospital. A group of young doctors came to collect Dinah, and Dr. Haskins sat beside me in the waiting room for more than an hour to comfort me after Dinah had received her lethal injection.
Surprisingly, Buddy did not seem particularly traumatized by the loss of his companion. We wondered if he sensed something was wrong with Dinah and whether it had interfered with the normal bonding between dogs. When I asked our vet, Dr. Young, about this, she said she thought that may have been the case. Either way, Buddy seemed to enjoy being the sole focus of our love and attention once again.
 
 
One lesson I took away from the experience with Dinah was that it’s very important to have a vigilant
vet. Another—which we’ve learned from our own experience and from talking to many friends who have nursed their dogs through cancer and other chronic illnesses—is that a sick dog is often especially loyal and lovable, and can bring the pack, dog and human, closer together.
While Scout was suffering through her season of ill health, I got back in touch with Dr. Haskins. He remembered Dinah well, not least because she was the oldest dog with Krabbe his team had ever seen. He reported that there had been some new developments in research and treatment of the disease, including a requirement in New York State that every newborn be tested and research conducted on cord blood transplantation. Unfortunately, though, there was still no cure. He wished me luck with Scout and tried to reassure me by saying that most dogs make it through puppyhood with no serious illnesses.

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