I Will Never Be the Same Because of One Horrible Veterinarian (Still, the Story Has a Happy Ending!)

Last summer, I took my dog Luna to this giant green park in the center of Barcelona where she could run free. Parc de la Ciutadella. I spread out a maroon blanket in the partial shade under a tree and put in my headphones to give Bon Iver's new album a real listen. Luna went prancing around and around, sniffing everything, ignoring social norms, barging into picnics and giving unsolicited kisses. When she was tired, she plopped down beside me while I fed her pieces of jamón; “8 (Circle)” played in my ears on repeat, quickly my favorite song on the album.

It gave me trouble talking about how I was feeling in the days after I heard the news. Learning to talk about grief without sounding sentimental is neverending. Maybe grief is sentimental? Maybe that's ok? Writers are taught to avoid sentimentality, despite floods of emotion that pour and pour and pour in. A few months ago, I got the news that Luna almost certainly had an aggressive form of cancer. She had been staying in Milwaukee with my parents while Omar and I got settled in Mexico City, and I was soon enough coming to bring her to her new home. Some excessive licking of her rear end led my mom to notice a strange mass in that area, and after they brought her to the vet, I got a paralyzing phone call with the news.

For the first twenty-four hours, the only thing I knew how to do was cry. When I brought Luna in for her biopsy, the vet was surprised, saying that it was going to be expensive, that the tumor was in a difficult place to safely remove, suggesting that the best option was just to let her live the rest of her life out until the suffering became too much. It was clear he thought I was making a mistake and wasting my money for all these tests and this minor surgery to remove the tissue.

It was not helpful to hear how it would be ok. Or about the circle of life. Or about her returning to the source. I already know those things, and they don't make the pain feel any less suffocating. What about when I want to bury my nose in her furry neck, or smell her popcorn paws, of listen to her snore, the only snoring that I’ve ever felt peaceful listening to, what would I do then?

Luna and I have been together since she was a baby, 10 years. There isn't another being who knows me the way she does. She and I have an other-worldly connection, where verbality has become obsolete—we communicate with body language and telepathy. We speak to each other in the silence, through eyes and smells and movements and most of all, energy. I did not want to/could not imagine having to live without her. In the wake of this reality, finding the breath that usually comes so naturally had become like begging for air in a black vacuum.

I woke up a few nights before the news, around 3am, frantic and terrified from a nightmare where I couldn't find Luna after searching the streets for hours. I shook Omar awake in near tears. He told me it wasn't real, to relax and go back to sleep. Two days later, I woke again in the night, this time vomiting, plagued with some kind of full body sickness, afflicting my head, my gut, my muscles, my energy, my everything. All day I slept, until late afternoon, when Omar came into the room to tell me to call my mom immediately. And that's when she told me about Luna, barely holding herself together enough to speak.

In 2007, when Luna and I first met, there began my lessons in what it means to love without barriers, to feel internally connected to another living creature. I am certain that the nightmare and the illness are intrinsically tied to my connection with Luna. Connection between humans happens in a different way, because we can talk to each other. Verbal language is helpful, but it can also easily create holes in communication. Without the ability to talk, another type of communication develops in its place, and it is by its very nature deeper, more intuitive, a transfer of energy, and thus begins to feel mystical, cosmic, magical. The only thing I can think to compare it to is how a blind person’s sense of touch and smell and hearing become stronger without the ability to see. This connection has been growing and growing through all these years together. All I could think and feel was: I don't know how to lose her. I don't know how.

I guess these are things we have to learn as they are upon us.

I get a letter to my email, Lenny Letter, every week. Honestly, I don't usually read them, but the title of that week's was "Denial, Anger, Bargaining, Depression, Acceptance." So, I opened it, because it felt like a clairvoyant pang of survivalism, like the letter could have some wisdom to impart that would make even a tiny piece of this more manageable. The letter mentioned the fact that American culture has a hard time being open about their grief. That the way is to be "strong" and "resilient" as we deal with loss, instead of asking for help when we need it.

With the kind of pain I had been feeling, it made it so much worse to try and pretend to be strong, like an extra burden or pressure on top of the already avalanching landscape of grief. I am strong sometimes, but it’s not a constant state. We are also allowed to be weak, we are also allowed to be sad. There is nothing wrong with being weak and sad during moments of intense suffering. Humans are not static beings. We fluctuate constantly, especially with our emotions. That Lenny Letter came at just the right to to remind me of this before I had the chance to sink into a defective thought spiral--not what I needed at that moment, and not what Luna needed.

On the airplane flying from Mexico City to Milwaukee, I was listening to that song by Bon Iver, “8 (Circle)” on repeat for hours and hours, weeping intermittently and anxiously awaiting the moment I could hold Luna for as long as I wanted, to see her beautiful face, to gauge her state. The song transported me back to that afternoon at Parc de la Ciutadella, as I knew it would, and even though it made me cry, I needed those hours to let myself feel sadness. A flight attendant kept bringing me tissues without saying a word, reminding me, like the Lenny Letter, that grief is ok, that I was not alone.

I had written to a friend right before the plane took off, a sort of desperate plea for advice from someone I knew would understand how I was feeling. She told me that Luna knows my every emotion. That I will have to tell myself over and over that it's my job to make her trip from this life to her next, back to the source, as painless and filled with as much love as possible, whenever that may be. She told me that Luna also knows herself, that she is sick, and she will look to me for help, for how to be. Everything I do will affect her, as she reads me even when I'm not aware of it. So whatever time she has left, I would have the ability to fill it with love. And that is what I decided to do until I would have no choice but to continue with the last act of love and kindness, which would be to let her go.

Another friend reminded me that dogs live in the moment. They don’t think of tomorrow; there is only now. I am Luna’s mama, and another enormous part of my job is to make all her nows full and full and full of the best stuff life has. With her, it’s not enough to pretend to leave negative thoughts and anxiety behind. Imagine it’s like pretending to believe in god to get into heaven—obviously god, if he is the god you think he is, will know what you’re up to. Luna is the same. There can be no pretending. I actually would have to be full of the light and love she was going to need (and I would need, for that matter). She and I would be able to give each other what we need. It didn't mean I couldn't be sad sometimes, but it did mean that negative thoughts must go. A lesson for the ages.

My parents had been taking care of Luna off an on during my moves to and fro around the world, and they are the best doggie grandparents. They spoil her with walks and treats and affection and everything she could want. She runs the house. The couches are hers, the beds are hers, the yard is hers. When my mom cooks, she lets Luna lie in the middle of the kitchen floor, navigating around her. When my dad walks her, he lets her sniff every tree, every bush. And Luna’s Uncle Jake had changed his life around and offered to drive her down to her new home in Mexico City in early March with me. We were going to have a magical road trip together, all of us. Luna LOVES road trips.

The biopsy results took some days to come back. In the meantime, Luna spent her days smiling, energetic, eating, napping. She didn't seem to be in any pain. Those were signs that she had at least a solid chunk of life left. Whether that meant six months, a year, two years, whether she needed surgery, if surgery wouldn't help, if the cancer had spread, what mattered was only the love I would continue to give her every single moment. I have always felt like the luckiest person alive to have met this Luna. And I’m telling you, even the nonbelievers, our telepathy is real--for this I am even luckier, as it has the power to continue past this visual plain of existence.

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I was loading Luna into the car to bring her to the beach on Lake Michigan on a particularly warm Wisconsin day a week later. After checking my phone constantly for news from the vet, I had finally decided it was time to relax. Luna was happy as they come in the back seat. I sat in the car to text my friend who was coming with us to the beach when I saw I had a voice message from the vet. My heart rate sped up, my breathing was uneasy, but I didn't hesitate in listening to the message. I listened to it once, and then I listened to it again. A different vet from the one I had seen was saying in the message that Luna had an inflammation and to come get the medication asap. I couldn't breathe. He didn't mention anything about cancer or dying or sound serious at all. I immediately called Omar. Then my brother. Then my dad. Then my best friend. Probably some others too. I couldn't believe it. Actually, I was terrified that the vet was wrong. Maybe he had the wrong file. Why didn't he mention the cancer? I called and talked to him for a minute, having trouble breathing still. He said I should come by later in the afternoon and the antibiotics would be ready, that she has no cancer, that the inflammation should be cleared up completely within a couple of weeks.

I was in a state of shock and relief, amidst some frustration and anger. There is a lesson in everything, and I suppose what I have learned from facing the idea of Luna’s mortality is to pay more attention to our connection, to remember to look directly at the invisible chain between us and let it sink in, sink in how lucky I am more often. Not everyone has what I have with Luna. The me that has become me with her presence in my life these almost 10 years is owed in mountainsful to her.

A more heavy and frightening lesson is one of doctors. Though I have never been given cause to mistrust doctors personally, that I was unable to see beyond my personal experiences is a lesson in and of itself. I am not sure why I have felt such a blind trust in their words and opinions, but I have. And now I don’t. What does that mean? I guess that humans are imperfect, no matter their degree of study, no matter their supposed specialization, and their way of thinking is generally going to be full of unseeable biases. I have to remember that when I encounter doctors, and everyone, I guess. The weirdest thing is I thought I was already doing that. Never have I gone around so unquestioning of a group of people (or, now that I'm thinking about it, I am wondering what else I have been blind to). This veterinarian, being so sure that Luna had cancer as to suggest that it wouldn’t be worth the money for the biopsy/tests, that was part of his bias. Maybe it was because the neighborhood of the clinic wasn’t particularly wealthy (he suggested that only if my family had “deep pockets” should we move forward with anything other than euthanasia). Maybe it was because he was from another country that does not value (as a culture) their pets the same way that I do. I don’t know if that's true or not--I'm only left guessing. But his bias was omni-present in his advice in hindsight, which led to an overwhelming amount of premeditated sadness, when the results of the unrecommended biopsy came to show that what she has is an inflammatory lesion treatable with some prescription pills.

The best way I can describe my emotional flip after the phone call where I learned Luna does not have cancer is to imagine this: you are in an airplane that is going down, about to crash, and then suddenly, it’s not crashing anymore. Now, you’re flying steady in the air, smooth and calm. It was an abrupt turn that led me to listen to the voice message from the clinic over and over to assure that something hadn’t been mistaken. Even then, I continued to have this sinking feeling that someone was going to call and say that they again made a mistake, and she does have cancer. In my logical brain, there was no way for this to happen. Her medication was working; the inflammation subsided and subsided.

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Here's something that's true. After what happened with Luna (it has been months now), my heart is not back to normal yet. I wonder if it will ever be. I have choked into tears thinking about her mortality, and mortality in general more than a few times in the last months. I like to pride myself as being logical, strong, understanding of the temporary state this life is. So why cry then, if I get it so well? I don't know. Should I feel lucky that this experience has now begun to better mentally prepare me for the inevitable deaths of people I love? Should I feel sad that I am occasionally overcome with grief preemptively at the thought of losing people, when I could have continued unscathed without that veterinarian's unsavory judgment? Should I try harder to accept that this and we are all temporary instead of just thinking I already have accepted it just because I understand it? Obviously I know the answer to these questions. I just had to ask them to myself. I had to. I will always have to.