jumpingfish

How do I tell this further? I have the timeline jumbled. The details of doctors and Xray and MRI are not essential. So let’s just skip all that. 

1. Doctor Ben

First of all, about my brother…

He was always there. He called. He texted. He asked how I felt. He gave advice based on experience with his patients. He pushed hard to make sure we understood that I might need to go to the ER even in this time of COVID-19. I felt his hand on my shoulder from far away, his presence by the bed. Day and night, he was there, helping us, reassuring us. There were really three of us in the house.

Thank you, Ben. I love you.

2. The Pain Clinic

“The MRI shows that you have a massive lumbar disk herniation,” my doctor said. Surgery was a possibility, but to start he referred me to a pain clinic for a lumbar steroid injection.

There were three people sitting outside the clinic in hazmat suits and goggles and masks. They asked the usual questions about COVID-19 and took my temperature. They looked confused when I said I could not sit in the chair they pointed to. They were helpless when I said the same about the wheelchair.

“He cannot sit,” Trudy told them again. “He needs to lie down. We called ahead to let you know.”

One of them started to push the wheelchair against me from behind. But another took me to a waiting room with a bed where I laid down and the pain subsided. 

When the doctor came in, he had me sit up, and the cramping pain instantly returned. He told me to push my knee against his hands, which I was unable to do. His eyes widened. He jumped back and threw his hands up.

“Oh,” he said. “You need surgery.” 

It sounded as if he was saying that he wouldn’t do the injection, but I must have misinterpreted, because they led me to the procedure room.

3. The Injection Procedure

There was Lidocaine. And there was the steroid injection into my spine which the doctor guided with the help of a fluoroscope. None of that hurt much. Ok… not true. The cramping was much, much worse. Still, in less than a minute, the Lidocaine was numbing things a bit, and I was able to slowly roll over and sit up. As I sat there, the doctor rattled off observations and instructions and next steps. 

Having absorbed nothing, I asked, “Can you talk to my wife? She’s outside.”

“Sure,” he said.

He turned and walked away. In the event, his discussion to her did not include the certainty of surgery, which was a relief to us. Meanwhile, it wasn’t clear how I was going to stand up. Or walk. Or get to the car.  

4. Sign This First

I stood and slowly walked a few steps. The staff were holding me by each arm.

“I need to lie down,” I said at the doorway.

I expected them to take me to a waiting room. Instead, left me standing at the counter of the nurses’ station.

“I really need to lie down,” I said.

“You need to sign this,” they said. They handed me eight sheets of paper and a pen. My vision was getting fuzzy.

“I need to lie down, now.” 

“Sign this first.”

I turned around, and walked to the nearest waiting room, the flustered staff scrambling after me, one of them pushing a wheelchair into me from behind. I crawled onto the bed and laid back. The pain was instantly gone.

Trudy came in. Cue angels singing. I handed her the papers and explained what we had to do.

Eight sheets of paper. Ten paragraphs on each. A blank space beside each that I was to initial. It took a long time. Trudy would read each paragraph and hand the papers to me. I would sign, and then ink in the upside-down pen would stop flowing.

Did I tell you? Ten paragraphs per page. Eight pages. So yeah — it took a long time. At some point, one of the staff came in. 

“It’s sure good that we brought snacks, because you’re keeping us from lunch,” she announced and then left.

I can tell you this now, as I think back on what happened from the vantage point of someone who has recovered…

1. Going Jogging

It seemed like a good idea at the time: go for a short jog on Monday/Wednesday/Friday while we were all locked down at home. A lame substitute perhaps for the 5K races that Trudy and I had been running in better times a few weeks earlier, but it seemed to be a good plan from both a physical and mental health point of view. 

That first Monday was fine. It was just a slow jog, after all, so how could it not be fine? And Wednesday was fine, too. It was a brisk, sunny day — warm enough that I wore shorts, cool enough that I wore light running gloves. It felt good to be moving, although my lower back was stiff as I stretched afterwards. Still, mild lower back soreness has been with me for a long time, and I hadn’t stretched for a while, so whatever.

But the soreness got worse during the day and even worse into the next. 

“Do you want an ice pack?” Trudy asked on Thursday night as we lay in bed. 

I groaned a meek “yes” and then a relieved “aaah” when she returned and slipped a frozen pack behind my lower back.

2. Getting Out of Bed

Friday should have been my third jogging morning. I was looking forward to it.

“How’s your back?” the Fair and Industrious Trudy asked.

“Kinda worse,” I said, not really thinking anything of it.

I rolled over and started to get out of bed. Instantly a severe, cramp began in my lower back, spread into my glutes, wrapped around to my hip flexors, and shot down my quads and shins.

“Oh!” I instantly yelled. “Oh, oh!” 

I yanked my legs back onto the bed, rolled onto my back, and lay flat, panting, and motionless.

Something was definitely not right.

…and nobody’s home.

1. The Moon

“What a beautiful moon tonight!” Jenny said. She attached three pictures of the Kentucky full moon, which looked strangely like ours — big, smiling, round, white; thin, wispy clouds; a glowing streetlight in the foreground.

“We saw it!” I replied. And I told her about our venturing forth last night.

It had been three weeks since I’d run my car, Trudy’s electric Bolt being the obvious choice since we’ve been sequestered. It had been three weeks, and I was wondering about the tires and the brakes and the battery. And feeling bad about the Ash seeds and Oak leaves and pollen and other detritus making it look abandoned. So we ventured forth into that good night.

2. A Drive-By Visit

We got in the car, I at the wheel and beside me the fair and industrious Trudy holding Izzy. We drove north on an empty highway. We drove to a park near where I used to work once and another time before that — a park with a forlorn playground and a silent pond and a gravel path going around.

I told Jenny about this. About how we had gone for that drive and taken a walk and seen that moon, which made me want to say, “Guardate la bella luna!”  And I told Jenny about how on the way home, we texted some friends and had a drive-by visit with us in the car and them on the sidewalk. How we chatted about family and work and about trips cancelled and plans for maybe later. 

Old-school: you drop in on friends unannounced just to talk. New-school: you do it from a socially acceptable distance.

1. Morning

The day started out cloudy, which can be a good thing when you’re locked up at home, easily distracted by blooming flowers or blue sky or green grass. So we got right to work in the morning, Trudy in one room, I in another, both of us clicking on keyboards and talking on teleconferences. (In truth, the fair and industrious Trudy rises before the sun and is already at her desk before I stumble out some time later, lucky as I am not to have to worry about billable hours.)

Izzy of course, was up and eager as soon as the fair and industrious Trudy went into the kitchen. Charlie, on the other hand, was in no such rush. He never is, Zen dog that he is. And so, as is always the case, Charlie slept in, visibly comforted by the ample space given him on the bed now that the man and the mommy were gone.

And sleep in he did — until he didn’t. He fell out of bed with a crash, and when Trudy found him, he was spinning frantically trying to get up, unable to get any traction with his out-of-socket hips, the situation made worse by the mess he was spinning in.

2. Charlie

Charlie has been our senior dog for three years. Our Zen dog, blinking his eyes slowly from various positions of meditation. Our police dog, keeping watch on the house and yard, walking patrol around the peripheries, keeping Izzy in check should she misbehave, which she often does by his estimation.

But his fall today was a bad one. Afterward, he could no longer stand reliably. And as the day went on, unless he was napping in Trudy’s lap or mine or a dog bed on the floor, he couldn’t walk, and he couldn’t drink. Trudy had to hold him up so that he could eat breakfast, which with her aid he did with vigor — ground turkey and quinoa and celery and carrots and a little something extra for enticement. So at least he did eat a big meal.

But during the day, we would find him sitting Zen-like in the middle of a room, his collapsed hind haunches refusing to hold his weight anymore. His gaze suggested he was resigned to his plight. But when we’d lift him up, he’d turn in tight circles to the left, spinning around his z-axis, craning his head to the left, falling down when we’d let go. So we took Charlie out to the car in the pouring rain, and the three of us drove to the vet.

3. At The Vet

A vet tech came out to the parking lot and took Charlie inside. A few minutes later, the doctor, who has known all our dogs, called us on the phone from inside and told us what she could without telling us what to do. And as we sat without him in the car in the parking lot, we realized that this was his last day. 

For situations like this, even on shutdown days like these, they have a protocol. After they inserted a catheter, the doctor came out to the car with two masks and led us inside. Two masks and they let us go inside — a measure of their empathy. 

Charlie was lying on a table in a dog bed with his front left elbow neatly wrapped in a pastel blue bandage and his head propped up on a tall pink pillow. He looked up at Trudy as she bent toward him, his eyes as clear as that day he came home with us three years ago. She picked him up and rocked him in her arms. Trudy looked down at him. 

“I’m sorry, Charlie,” she said. And she began to cry.

She handed him to me, and I rocked him in my arms and held his chin between my fingers. He gazed at us as we traded him and wept.

4. The Back Forty

“You’re going to a new body,” the doctor whispered to him as she gave Charlie the anesthetic and then the final shot. “You’re going to a new body where you’ll be strong.”

I’ve never done this before. I didn’t realize this. It doesn’t take long. They fade away so quickly. So little time for one last kiss. I wasn’t ready for this. They go limp in your arms. And their eyes stay open. Charlie’s last sight was of his loving mommy’s gaze. She loved him so much. He was such a wonderful dog. We are so grateful that he spent his last three years with us.

“Don’t worry about anything,” the doctor said. “Go on home.”

When we stepped outside, the rain had stopped. The sun was shining from behind some white billowing clouds in the west. And as we looked to the east, we saw a rainbow. Charlie’s rainbow. Its colors were bright, just like his eyes. And it arched across the sky, out somewhere along the periphery.

Then just as quickly as the sun had come out, the sky was dark again, and it started raining. The two of us drove home in silence.

We know where we will bury him — out in the strip of yard we call our back forty. Out past the chain link fence. Out where the compost piles are. Where the sheet of corrugated aluminum that he loved to walk on lies on the ground. It was a place he patrolled regularly. He was even out there once this morning, teetering and turning, barely able to walk, but patrolling it, because that was what he was supposed to do.

Out there in the back forty. Under the apple tree. That is where Charlie will lie.