A Day with Betsy

13-year old Betsy is dying of bladder cancer. 

I took the day off from work. I work from home, so I’m not not going to work; I simply am not doing work, though I have a lot of it to do--which is onerous, daunting, and most of all, a blessing. 

In some respects, I'd rather work—to focus my attention elsewhere. To block out everything. 

Work can be a wonderful distraction--with the built-in justification that I am making money as I work, no matter what else I may neglect at the same time. 

Working provides me a sense of control (on good days) over things that have a beginning, middle, and end (sometimes). 

Everything I work on has, like, a built-in timer--a due date. I juggle due dates. They determine my priorities, how I spend my time. All summer long, due dates have been bunching up. Work has been a high priority. 

I sometimes (often) feel relieved that COVID provides an excuse for me not to have to plan family vacations. We haven't gone anywhere or done anything in ages. I take care of the dogs, cats, and horses. I shop and cook and work. 

Occasionally, but not often, I go into a house-cleaning frenzy where I have the motivation, time, and energy to vacuum and do laundry. But, if I don't have the motivation or the energy, I have my fallback position: I don't have the time. And that's never untrue. 

When I work, I'm super focused.  I'm supposed to catch mistakes that other people overlook. I'm not supposed to introduce new mistakes of my own. Moreover, I'm supposed to point out other people's mistakes with such aplomb and good humor that they readily forgive me for doing my job. 

But not today. Today, I am in bed in my room, which is also Betsy's room. Betsy is the dog who is dying of bladder cancer. 

She is lying over there on her old-lady-dog bed. 

When Betsy was young, she could not have a dog bed.  She eviscerated every dog bed I ever bought her, as well as the other dogs' beds. 

I bought the old-lady-dog bed last winter, when I noticed how often she had to get up to change position because the floor was hard. 

Now, I am very cheap when it comes to many things, but I spent good money on the old-lady-dog bed. It was worth every cent. Betsy lay right down on it and didn't move again until she had to go pee.  

The vet says it could be a matter of days, or weeks, possibly months--depending on how fast the tumor grows. The tumor takes up 50% of her bladder. It is positioned in the back, where it may obstruct her ureter. 

When Betsy can't pass urine, I'll know it's her time. 

This type of development--an old dog who has lived a good life having an end-of-life disease--does not seem particularly important these days. I am not inclined to write an epitaph for Betsy, even though the loss of a beloved pet remains, even in COVID times, relatable. Possibly more so now, when many of us cleave to dogs for solace, hemmed in and isolated as we are in the shadow of contagion. 

I'm taking the day to free up my mind to think about Betsy. And now I find myself thinking about New York City, and what disease has done to that city. Can New York still pee? And for how long?  

I'm taking the day to lie in bed with cats. How old are the cats? How much longer will they live? 

Since 2014, I have lost a horse, two dogs, and two cats. 

I replaced the horse with a much smaller horse. I used to have three dogs, and then I had two. Soon, I'll have one. 

And four cats. Recently, we came close to losing a cat--a great favorite in the family. We paid a small fortune to bring him back from the edge. But for a week, he still seemed too close to the edge--not right on the edge, but not a safe distance away from the edge, either. But another week passed, and he came all the way back to center. Now he seems no worse for wear.  

I have a horse that gets younger every year. He came without papers. The first year, the vet said he was 12 or 13. The following year, she said he was 11. The year after that, 9 or 10. The year after that, she said he was 9 again--and that's when I expressed doubt. (I am an editor, after all; this is the sort of pattern of error that I am trained to catch.) I pointed out the unlikely event of my horse growing younger year by year. The vet took photos of his teeth to compare against a chart. Now, he's supposed to be 17, but the vet still says he looks younger.

I took the day off to think about Betsy, sleeping on her orthopedic bed. She has had a good life. It started out badly: We found her in a pitifully underfunded rural shelter in Richland, Wisconsin. She was a five-month-old puppy without a name, sharing a barn stall with one litter mate. She had outgrown the collar tight around her neck. There were dozens of other dogs in the drafty old barn, including a doe-eyed beagle-mix with a half dozen nursing pups. 

Betsy, a black Border Collie-Lab, was fearful and totally unsocialized, but she didn't growl or bite. She recoiled, but didn't growl. She threw up in the back of the jeep several times during the 2-hour drive home. She wasn't an affectionate puppy. But she resembled the dog I had recently lost (Sam).

Bart, our surviving dog—a 105-lb, black and tan, super handsome, Rotty-Lab-Shepherd mix—sniffed Betsy (I named her Betsy on the drive home), summed her up, and gave her his space under the dining room table, where he felt safe and spent most of his indoor time. Having relinquished the table, he hung out with us in the TV room, an uninsulated add-on that Bart had never particularly enjoyed. 

I viewed this magnanimous gesture by Bart as a truly shining  example of canine altruism.

It took 10 months for Betsy to adjust to domestic life, during which time she destroyed our cell phones, CDs, my son's toys, and much else that I've forgotten. 

Bart passed away a year later. We eventually acquired two more dogs, Gretchen and Hank. Betsy became our best-behaved, most well-adjusted dog. It wasn’t a very high bar.

Today, we have Betsy and Zarya ("Z").  Gretchen and Hank passed away two years ago. 

Z, Doberman-Shepherd, reminds us a lot of Bart. At 90 lbs, she's built like Bart, has flying-nun ears, a pencil nose, and the geometry of a reconstructed wolf. She's gorgeous. She's smart. She's human-centric. She's perfect (except for the recurrent bouts of diarrhea). 

So, in a way, Betsy has come full circle, having started with Bart and ending with Z. 

Bart taught her to guard us. And Betsy taught Z to bark at anything that moves. She has tried to teach Z to attack other dogs, but Z remains stubbornly friendly.

It's satisfying to see Betsy so recumbent and comfy, there on her old-lady bed. 

I think I took the day off just to look at her.