She Moved to Texas

Since the world is focused on the coronavirus right now, I thought I’d shed some light on something more uplifting… cancer! Pascale has officially passed the 30 day mark after her diagnosis of osteosarcoma in the base of her skull. While this post doesn’t offer anything in terms of literature or humor (okay, maybe a little humor), I did feel like it’s important to document what I’m trying to do to help her. To refresh, Pascale was diagnosed in early…

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Things are a lot better than they were a week ago. In case you missed my stress from anthropomorphizing dog relationships, the short version is I was a mix of delight from adopting my new (adorable!) puppy, Lucie, and stress from Pascale seeming to hate her. In the middle of all of this interpersonal relationship dog drama, they both contracted colds. First Pascale got sick, and my vet thought Lucie simply brought home a bug from the shelter, and then…

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As I alluded to, I brought home a puppy last week. The same afternoon the vet confirmed her mass was assuredly cancer, I went straight from sobbing over her in my backyard to going to the closest shelter to look at puppies with a friend. If that chain of events feels illogical, I can assure you that it felt just as strange to me. I feel so, so broken about the short life she’s going to have. The bad days…

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I’ve been thinking a lot about the idea of “borrowed happiness” lately. When people know something bad is going to happen, like a terminal diagnosis or someone bound to be fired on work, they say they’re on borrowed time. If you can find some joy before pending devastation, is that borrowed too? To borrow is to take with the intention of returning. But I’m not sure if time, or happiness, is something you can ever get back. It’s ours for…

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I spent the better part of last week crying over my dog. Like, really crying. The kind of crying that almost sounds like laughing if you don’t know the context. It’s a cruel trick on the body, because your muscles flex the same. When I wasn’t crying, I leaned on friends who were there to catch me. I told her how fabulous of a dog she is, and what her friendship has meant to be. I laid it on real…

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My anxiety often leads me towards ridiculous fears. I’m not proud to admit how many times I’ve diagnosed myself with skin cancer or an irregular heartbeat. It’s easy for my brain to create fiction that’s much scarier than truth. But my heart is breaking as I type this, because I was right when it came to Pascale. Yesterday a MRI revealed a mass growing out the base of her skull. It started in the bone, and is growing into her…

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My Pascale girl is not quite right. It started about two weeks ago, maybe more. At first she had a big hacking kind of cough, the kind that would make her regurgitate water after she drank. She’s gotten kennel cough before and fought it off on her own, but after about four days the hack wasn’t getting much better so I made a vet appointment for her. The day I made the appointment, she started acting head shy as well….

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Last week, I said goodbye to my perfect spaniel. After I wrote the post outlining the details of his cancer, I was flooded with messages of support and love. Those notes gave me so much comfort. Both in knowing that I’m not alone with the immense struggle that is deciding when to release a beloved pet, but also that because everyone echoed that I’d know when it was time… and that it was probably not too soon. I was completely…

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A lot happened in my blogging absence this summer. Some of it was fantastic, but a lot of it was not. I promise to update on happier things soon, but something that’s especially been weighing on my mind this week is Eliot’s health. I got Eliot, the most beautiful dog I’ll ever known, for my 21st birthday. All of my other dogs have been rescues, but Eliot is the embodiment of my deep rooted love for purebred dogs. In his…

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Although I expected conversation to spring out from the post I published yesterday about flying with my large ESA dog (I mean I thought there were things to discuss… that’s why I wrote it!), I admit that there were both more total and more negative comments than I expected. Usually I try to respond to people one-off in my comments section, but felt this subject deserved a its own follow-up post. After my experience flying, I felt pretty uneasy about…

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Both of my dogs are technically Emotional Support Animals, which are similar but different from a service dogs. An emotional support animal or ESA, is not trained to perform any function. Instead, they provide emotional support (it’s almost as if the title tells the purpose…) to their humans who suffer from psychological disorders of some kind. If you’ve read this blog for a long time, you’re probably not surprised to hear I have a psychological disorder… and though I probably…

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