Some days I hate my job. I am the Initiator of All Things, Great and Small. It’s heavy, man.
We took the puppies to the vet on Thursday. We returned them to the breeder on Friday.
A bunch of stuff happened in between. A bunch of bullshit, really. Decisions. And agonizing. And crying. I hate my job.
I thought I had done my homework. I did a LOT of homework on this thing. A lot more than when we bought Tex, 8 years ago… JEEEEEBUS, when I decided I wanted a Golden Retriever for my kids, do you know, I just sorta… well, my Aunt Sis says, hey, I work with a lady who has Golden Retriever puppies, and I said, HEY, I want one! And so it was done.
We lucked out that time, because Tex is beautiful and just a great all-around dog.
This time I searched, and I watched, and I learned and I asked questions…
And in the end, we brought home a couple puppies that, you know, I looked at them when the lady handed them to me, and they just didn’t look right, their faces were almost bald, and the one puppy was TINY, with distended belly…
It’s really difficult, even though we saw the puppies IN PERSON, they were only a week old when we chose one… and that’s how you have to do it now, you have to choose right away, because people start to put deposits on them, and they go fast.
And when you pick the puppy up, and the lady hands it to you wrapped in a baby blanket, and it’s trembling, and you’re holding it all gingerly- like it’s going to shatter in your hands, and you just look in those little eyes, and you just… I don’t know, if you’re ME, you lose your shit, you fall in love with the scrawny little bald thing, and you don’t even take it out of its blanket, and see if it can WALK right, or see if it looks PROPERLY FORMED…
Yeah, that’s right, that’s exactly how I picked up my puppies. I hustled them into the car, it was chilly out and they were shivvering, and all the way home, my mom was driving , all the way home, an hour and a half, I wondered, am I doing the right thing? Are these puppies RIGHT? Is this how their faces should be? Should this one be quite so small compared to his sister? And why is a big chunk of hair missing from the little girl’s neck, pink skin showing through…
I had asked the breeder, we’ll call her Carol, for that is her name and she puts it on a website, for all to see… I asked Carol, I said, their faces, the hair is very thin… She said, Oh, that’s just how their mother is too, and she picked the mother dog up to show me the side of her face… barely any hair at all… and she showed me this as if this is THE WAY IT IS, ISN’T IT ENDEARING, and I thought, gee… that’s not really how I envisioned my dogs to be… and I was disappointed… but I didn’t speak up… I had given her the money, I had first choice on puppies for the girl, and then I took the little boy after no one else wanted him… sight-unseen, except for a picture on the internet, in which he looked EXACTLY like his sister…
I had looked at the 10 other puppies romping about in the play-pen. They were big and round and shiny, except for one teeny tiny black one. Three of them were from the same litter as my puppies. THEY had hair on their faces. And still, I said nothing. I don’t know how to explain myself here… it was just the situation… And inexperience. And a lifetime of not being sure how to carry myself… when to speak up… when to shut up… when to question… when to just go with my gut…
Carol handed me their vet folders, they had their shots and wormer, all up-to-date… no additional notations on either chart… It looked good. Fine.
We got them home, unwrapped them in the yard and took a good long look. What we should have done at the breeder’s. The boy was half the size of the girl. And half as active. I loved him so much my heart ached. He was a little snuggle pie, with a wrinkled, bald, little-old-man face… He would play a little, he would run and zip and romp and bite and roll with his sister, but then he was done in, and searching for a lap to snuggle into, while the girl puppy continued to zip around, exploring, chewing, pitter-patting about… I thought, well, maybe he’ll catch up…
Over the next couple days, we tried to do just that, catch him up. We fed him in his own little crate/basket, because the bigger pup would wolf down her food and then go for his… He was always climbing up into the nearest lap, after a few minutes of playing, while the other pup zinged and zipped around the room in a little black and white BLUR…
We made an appointment with my vet, for their first check-up on Thursday. I had one week to get them to the vet and address any concerns with the breeder… HO. LY. SHIT. Concerns?
I got their vet charts out and looked them over again… These puppies should be fine, there were no notes about any problems, any concerns… all of the first series of shots were noted… and then a folded paper fell out of the boy puppy’s chart. It was in a pocket that I hadn’t realized was even a POCKET. It was a print-0ut of the puppy’s weight, and his other information, his breeder, his address… and at the bottom of the printout, hand-written in ink: “has heart murmur”.
!!!
Heart murmur? No one said anything, ANYTHING about heart murmur.
I opened the girl-puppy’s folder, and reached in the nearly undetectable POCKET, to find another print-out… at the bottom of which, hand-written in ink, “Has heart murmur”.
I thought, jeesus, am I stupid? Am I insane? Why didn’t I open and scrutinize these folder FOR HIDDEN DAMN POCKETS when I was standing there at the breeders holding a trembling bald little puppy who’d already snuggled his way into the pocket of my hoody sweatshirt and into my very HEART… OH! THAT’s why…
I went to the internet and researched. Friggin’ HEART MURMURS!!!! Of course there were 85 different opinions, 962 different prognoses… stupid internet…
I called Carol. I said, um, er, um Carol? (I’m still not at this point even ANGRY, would you be angry, would you be insensed, would you be irate? Yeah, most people would, but I’m… well… ME…) I said, Carol? Did you see this paper in the vet folder that says these puppies BOTH have heart murmurs. She said, NO!!! She didn’t know anything about it! And I believed her. I still believe her. I don’t understand why her vet didn’t VERBALLY tell her, why it was just a tiny notation stuck into a secret pocket in a health record… Shouldn’t her vet have said, these puppies should not be sold? I don’t understand any of this…
So Carol says to me, she says, take them to your vet, see what he says, if you want to return the puppies, you can, or you can exchange them for the two remaining, unsold puppies… Okay, I think, at least I’m not STUCK, I guess… but we love them, they are our puppies…
Flowere Childe and I took them into the vet’s office, in a crate. She wanted to carry them, she wanted to show them off, she was so proud of them, she wanted people to OOOOOooo and AWwwww… But you can’t do that in the vet’s, you have to keep everyone contained… So we get shown into the examination room, she whips them out of the carrier, she’s so excited for someone to SEE them, she can’t wait for the vet to SEE them, I can tell this, because of the way she’s acting, she’s overly fussing over them.. and I’m the same way, I expect the vet to walk in and MELT over the cuteness…
I should know my vet by now. He’s not so much a “melter”. He looks like a Bulldog, actually, he’s a big ol’ barrel’chested, pink-skinned, crew-cut… burly thing… And he’s real dry too, he’s harsh-like… I don’t actually like him very much on a personal level, I guess, but he doesn’t intimidate me, I kinda josh with him some when he’s really abrupt, I let him know he’s being… well… REALLY ABRUPT…
So he walks in, glances at the pups, our beautiful, beloved little pups, we’re so proud, aren’t they the most beautiful things you’ve ever seen, and he says, “So, how is it you came into possession of these two mangy dogs?” That’s almost verbatum. He also, during the course of the examination, expressed his dismay that these pups would be OFFERED UP FOR SALE. And also, in no uncertain terms, that anyone would be stupid enough to buy them. He didn’t much sugar-coat it either, and it stung. And it angered me. Because I loved them, mange, and heart murmurs, and holes in the skull and all… That’s right, I said hole in the skull. The bigger puppy had a soft spot in her skull. He said it could be nothing, and it could be a problem, but… probably not… probably…
He could only detect a heart murmur in the boy. A soft spot in the girl. And mange in both. He scraped and examined under the microscope, but he said it was indeterminate mange, it could be the short-term, easy-to-cure-but-highly-contagious kind (sarcoptic?) or it could be the long-term, difficult to cure-but-questionably-contagious kind (demodectic)… Either way, he said, you don’t start out that way, with brand new pups. And the heart murmur was pretty bad, as far as heart murmurs go. This pup was going to have problems. And he also suspected intestinal parasites. Just to icing that cake.
He advised me not to exchange for the other puppies either, as they were all of the same genetic make-up… And also the mange..
I cried from the vet’s to home. And I also made the decision to return the puppies. I didn’t agonize over it. But I knew what was ahead of me, breaking it to the kids… and actually, physically returning the puppies…
It rained all day Friday, dreary, cold, charcoal sky… Flower Childe and I set out around noon, for what should have been a 90 minute drive… I asked her to load the puppies, figuring she would carry them down in the travel-crate. Instead, she wrapped them each in the baby-blanket they came from the breeders in, and planned to HOLD THEM all the way there. I said, you should put them in the crate. She said, I want to hold them…. It was awful. She sat behind me in the van, because we have airbags in the front seat…
I cried most of the way there. I couldn’t follow my directions, it’s a straight shot North to this lady’s house, but I took a wrong turn at Hermitage, and headed 20 miles BACK DOWN SOUTH towards home!!! I pulled over in friggin’ NEW CASTLE, to figure out what the hell I had done, I stared at the map, and I just couldn’t process what I was seeing, I couldn’t read the tiny towns, I couldn’t tell left, right, north, south… I knew what was happening, I knew I was having some sort of hysterical blindness, and that’s not exaggerating, I knew my own eyes were betraying me for a PURPOSE, so I stopped, I didn’t allow myself to freak out, even though, you know, hysterical blindness is the perfect opportunity for doing a little freaking out, if you are so inclined… I just breathed…. and told my daughter, I’m having trouble here, it’s not making sense.. I think it’s stress… I just need a minute… She put the puppies in the crate and came up to the passenger seat and looked at the map. We pieced it together then, what had happened, I had back-tracked 20 miles south, it was done, there were no sense getting upset about it, even though I hate with the fiery intensity of a THOUSAND HELLS getting lost and back-tracking and losing time on the road!!!! I just said, I have to shake it off, shake it off, get through this, I don’t want to do this… just get through it…
So that’s what I did. I found Carol’s house, it was right where I left it, 6 days and a thousand-miles of heartache before… We handed Carol back the puppies, she snuggled them and coo’d over them… And she put them back in the pen with their mom and the other puppies… We talked a little about the vet visit. She reitterated that she did not see the paper about the heart murmurs either… She said her vet didn’t say anything… She showed me the other two available puppies… It was a bit awkward, but I was able to say, thanks, but no thanks…
and we left.
I had asked CArol before, on the phone, I said, if we do return the puppies, what will you do with them? She said, well, if they have serious issues, I will keep them here with me. As pets. That’s what she said. And it helped me, to think that they would be there with their mother…
I looked on Carol’s website this morning, for the first time since Friday. She has the puppies back up for sale, with brand new pictures. You can see the mange on the boy puppy’s front legs, right in the picture, tiny dotted bald patches. .. But what you can’t see, is that little tiny hole in his fluttery little heart. Or the one he left in mine.
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