From: paul.moor@ggcs.org (Paul Moor) 
Newsgroups: rec.pets.dogs
Subject: Misha & Skeezix  (1/4)
Date: 22 Dec 92 16:22:00 GMT
Distribution: world
Organization: Golden Gate Computer Society BBS - Marin, CA - 415-927-1216
Reply-To: paul.moor@ggcs.org (Paul Moor) 

   From the very beginning, my little fawn-colored, nubbin-tailed
French bulldog Misha had an almost preternatural ability to divine
any intentions I might possibly have about going out.  He detected
the slightest deviation from my customary workaday routine, and
switched on his considerable charm to persuade me I really did
need him, indispensably, to go along.  The destination didn't
interest him, just as long as he could come along and stay with
me.
   My taking the keys out of the inside lock on the front door
would then galvanize him, but he waited -- huge brown eyes spot-
lighting me, bat-ears erect, little black goblin face optimistic
and eager -- frozen in alert position for my decision.  A dog-bis-
cuit treat from me (thank you, Prof. Pavlov) meant he had to
resign himself to stay behind, but if I did reach for his collar
and leash he erupted, almost violently, his joy utterly uncon-
fined.  Usually he punctuated the few seconds before I finally
opened the door with an impatient little dance step or two,
bouncing up and down on his stubby little forelegs.
   On October 29th, Misha turned twelve.  My first French bulldog,
Charlie, had died in Berlin at eleven.  His successor Orje, who
accompanied me when I moved to San Francisco, made it to twelve,
when a stroke cruelly disabled and almost killed him.  The day
before Misha's twelfth birthday last Thursday, I noticed his
unusual panting when we came home from his third, early-evening
walk.  On his birthday itself (in celebration of which I laced his
dry Science Diet Light with a quarter-pound of ground round), I
paid careful attention, and thought I noticed a new rapidity and
shallowness in his breathing.  During the election news that
evening -- turning on the TV always also turned Misha into a
lapdog -- he couldn't seem to come to rest.  As bedtime ap-
proached, his breathing sounded asthmatic.  His temperature proved
normal, though, so I decided against the impersonality of the
Emergency Animal Hospital, but when Misha's regular vet arrived to
open his office at eight last Friday morning, he found us two
waiting for him.
   Dr. Harris took blood and made chest X-rays, then diagnosed
pulmonary edema and gave me two kinds of pills; the results of the
blood analysis would decide whether he'd add an antibiotic.  He
wanted to see him again in a week -- yesterday -- for more X-rays.
Misha responded encouragingly to the medicine, but he continued to
pant, and during his four daily walks he took to scrutinizing and
sniffing even the most minuscule diverting object down on his
level, so that his walks turned into a plod, and finally into a
trudge.  He sometimes wheezed, and sometimes coughed.  Sometimes
an indefinable vocal sound accompanied every rapid, shallow
breath.  It developed very rapidly.
   Yesterday, the morning of the second X-rays, Dr. Harris said
his radiologist would come in late in the afternoon and he'd phone
me that evening.  Around 7:30 came the definitive diagnosis:
"multiple malignant masses -- everywhere" in the lungs.  It had
grown and spread -- and would continue to grow and spread -- just
as fast as it already had.  Cancer restricted to lung tissue
causes no pain, but I heard from Jim Harris that Misha's cancer
would go on confiscating his lungs' still available breathing
space -- more, and more, and more. . . .
   I'd learned something fundamentally important about love -- not
Eros, in Grecian terms, but Agape, non-erotic love -- from an
incident involving Orje, Misha's Berlin predecessor.  Everyone
knows the old clich. about loving someone so much you'd be willing
to die for them.  Walking Orje one day, I saw an unleashed German
shepherd the size of a locomotive charging towards us with the
speed of an express train, unmistakable murder in his eye.
Without even a split second to think, I instantaneously dropped to
the ground and completely covered Orje with my own body.  The
attacker, thank God, found only Orje interesting as victim: he
barked furiously, canicidally, but ignored me personally.  A
chance observer pointed out just what might well have happened to
me under slightly different circumstances.  My spontaneous protec-
tion of Orje made it clear I hadn't really cared.
   And I loved Misha even more than I'd loved Orje.
   Perhaps only the old and lonely comprehend the unique status of
a really beloved pet.  When Charlie sickened and died in Berlin
during the scope of a single hour, his death meant in fact the
extermination of my entire family, and at one single stroke.  The
death of Orje, in San Francisco, repeated that same ordeal.
   Dog shows, prizes, and the like have never seriously interested
me, but I always welcomed any opportunity to brag about Misha, and
he did have plenty to brag about.  The owners of the Clovis,
California kennel where he'd entered this vale of tears spotted
him immediately as "an exceptionally elegant pup", and kept him to
raise as a show dog.  His rejecting dam, unimpressed, refused to
nurse Misha and his only surviving sibling, so he bonded abnormal-
ly early with humans.  The rejected orphan Misha and the house cat
adopted each other, and from then on he never encountered a cat he
didn't try -- with the utmost tact and diplomacy -- to buddy up
with and cuddle up to.  At the age of five, soon after Orje's
death, Misha came to bless my life.  As long as he lived, he had
an almost panic anxiety he'd find himself abandoned again.
   His owners' prescience had proved justified: Misha became an
American Kennel Club champion before his first birthday, and at
two he won the official A.K.C. rating as the second-finest French
bulldog in the whole USA.  I prized him not for that but for his
inexhaustible, never-failing, frequently comical -- even hilarious
-- sweetness; that little tough-guy mug of his camouflaged a heart
of solid marshmallow.  I've never seen any animal match Misha when
it came to attracting spontaneous affection from strangers; during
one single walk one record day, four different people stopped us
and wound up down on the ground, cooing, fondling his ears.  He
accepted such obeisance graciously, as a matter of course, with a
meaningful glance upward in my direction to make sure I saw it and
took it in, but he never did become really blas. about it.
   Before taking him to the vet this afternoon, I emptied his
water pan and feed dish and put them out of sight, along with his
prized Nylon bones, to avoid them as reminders when I would come
home alone; I also dropped his two new medicines into the trash.
   When Dr. Harris applied the tourniquet to Misha's right fore-
leg, to make the blood vessels bulge more accomodatingly, he said
that in only twenty-four hours his peripheral circulation and
blood pressure had deteriorated noticeably, and he might have to
resort to a catheter -- but then he did find a blood vessel
adequate for the hypodermic syringe's merciful needle.  He assured
me I'd done the humane thing by not waiting any longer.
   Around 1985, when Orje had received his own lethal injection,
his body had reacted by inflating his little lungs to the bursting
point -- what medical people call "the agonal gasp" -- and then
expelling that air in an unearthly, outraged howl I can still
hear, and probably always will.  Misha, thank God, gave up his own
little ghost with the same quiet gentleness that characterized
everything about him.  With him standing on the examination table,
me holding him in both my arms, my face buried in the fur on the
back of his neck, his husky, muscular little body suddenly re-
laxed, then his legs gave way, and then we laid him -- gently,
gently -- on his side, and I closed those enormous, glistening,
dark brown eyes for him.  Oh, my little love.
   . . . And so, after a few minutes of unhurried leave-taking, I
left with Jim Harris the thirty pounds or so of physical residuum
my beloved, departed Misha had discarded and left behind him this
afternoon, and came back to an apartment now of abysmal, aching
emptiness.  When I replaced the keys in the inside lock of the
front door, that cyclic act forced me to think back only an hour
or so to how Misha had reacted when I'd removed them.  He'd looked
as eager and optimistic as ever, uninterested in our destination
as long as he could come along and stay with me, and when I'd
reached for his collar and leash he'd reacted, as always, with
that familiar little dance of his, bouncing up and down on those
stubby little forelegs.

                                      [Continued to part 2.]

---
 . OLX 2.2 . "Lungs are caves where grief is stored."