White Hot Fear

I woke up to Marley crying. And I jumped out of bed, and found her crouched on three legs inside her crate, with a front paw up in the air and tucked close to her body. And while she wasn't screaming, it felt like she was to me. And in that instant of almost full awareness, I thought the worst...

A had a friend (Erik) who I drove with to Ohio to pick up his dream dog with him a while back. We left at 5 am, in the beginning of a pretty dangerous snow storm. Ten minutes into the trip, getting on to the beginning of Route 80, I spun around and drove into a snow embankment. (This, of course, did not deter me, just took a few years off of my life, I'm sure.) We drove through New Jersey, completely through Pennsylvania, through the tip of West Virginia, and then into Ohio. It wasn't the Ohio that I knew and loved, it was an extension of the worst ideas I've ever had about West Virginia, actually. There were "tree houses," named by yours truly, which jutted out of hillsides, and had trees breaking through them, straight through their ceilings. But as long as their confederate flags waved proudly, rooftops seemed to be of little importance. Once we got to this breeders street, she instructed us that she was 20 miles down the road. A residential street that lasted 20 miles! Absurd. And calling was no option, there aren't many cell phone towers in that part of the world. The winding road around this never ending mountain was the most treacherous I have ever been on, barely narrow enough for my SUV, there was a five foot ditch and jagged mountain rock on the inside part of the road, and a very clearly visible drop to oblivion on the outside part of the road. We were screaming at each other without oncoming traffic. When a rogue pick-up would drive towards us, I honestly thought I would pass out and never wake up. We made it. He met his dog, who we named Miles, because, well, miles is what we went for him.

If you would have ever told me that I would love a Chinese Crested, I would have told you that I don't like rats, or hairless cats, and that you lied, a lot, for sex or drugs. But Erik was right, he grew on me. That little sweet dog who didn't have an angry bone in his body. (Not that I think most dogs do.) Actually, Miles only had one bone in his body, and it came at full attention whenever Marley was near. He would hump the air for minutes, even after she got bored of pretending he was anywhere near where he thought he was. He cuddled and loved being brushed, and played for hours in a fairly low energy way.

Erik called me at work one day... He had taken all three dogs to the dog park, and Miles snapped his front leg. I could barely hear his frantic story about needing me to meet him at the Vet's office over Miles' screaming. Long story shorter: his broken leg needed surgery, and metal rods and screws and time, and isolation, and caution. A few months later, I was dog sitting for Miles, he was almost healed, and I left for work. As I stepped off of the elevator, heading home again, I heard the unmistakably painful Miles screams again. I ran in, and he was frozen in position, looked like he had been mid-spin, and his "good" front leg was dangling in front of him. I picked him up, screaming deafeningly in my ear, and called my mother screaming to come pick me up. Thank you to the emergency Vet that night, who let me know that I was right, and his leg was indeed broken. I couldn't have been sure with a separated bone almost coming through his leg. It's hard being hurt, I can't fathom being hurt but not understanding anything about it.

So, everything about that experience came flooding back to me, at super sonic speed and without control. It was hard to take a deep breath. How quickly could I drive to the animal hospital? How many months would this set me back on moving? And it doesn't help that Marley's eyes are so sad, and she was looking at me, crying, and I didn't know how to help. I pulled her out, lifted her up, and knew the problem. She had pooped, and had a dangler hanging from her butt connected by a long strand of my own hair. Why, you might ask? Because she likes to eat lint balls, clumps of dust, and I guess a stray hair every now and then. I pulled out the hair, her front leg dropped down to normal, and she licked me and ran off to find another dust ball. This is my life.