Low to the Ground, Loves to Chase Birds

Springtime is here and soon I will celebrate the anniversary of my dog’s adoption. We’ve packed a lot into the last four years, both good and bad, and this is my tribute to her—including a rare photo of your mysterious blogger in the wild. Without further ado…

Part I: The Doggening

Muriel was a promise made to my wife early in our relationship. When she moved into my house from her studio apartment, amazed my mortgage payment was less than her rent, she wanted to adopt a dog. I wasn’t as enthused. “There’s too much going on,” I said. “We’ll get one when you’re done with fellowship.”

Fellowship seemed far away. She was a resident then, in year two of what felt like 8,000 years of training. That meant a paucity of free time—she regularly pulled 30-hour shifts—and a tremendous amount of high-interest debt. Her med school loans were more than double the outstanding balance of my mortgage.

Our position felt tenuous then, and incompatible with her desire for another pet. My Crohn’s and arthritis were not yet well-controlled. I worked full-time, did side jobs at night, and took care of everything at home. That included providing care for two cats, one of them older and in poor health. Adding a puppy to the mix seemed like a recipe for disaster.

Years passed. Residency concluded. We married during fellowship, in the thick of a Crohn’s flare. I started Humira four days before the wedding, injecting the loading doses at our kitchen table under the watchful eyes of my betrothed and a pharmaceutical company nurse. Life gradually improved. Soon my sacroiliac pain receded enough that I could again roll over in the middle of the night. Two scopes later, my intestines showed signs of healing.

As her fellowship graduation approached, my wife was ready to collect her canine prize. “Let’s find our dog!” she exclaimed. What she meant was “Hey, you, find our dog.” She didn’t have time to peruse canine personal ads. The ink on her first attending contract was dry and she’d jump directly from fellowship to the next stage of her career. She had, inevitably, chosen a rapaciously demanding gig.

We reached a puppy compromise: I wanted one old enough to sleep through the night, but agreed to take it to work with me daily to avoid the cost of doggy daycare. During my lunch breaks I sent her listings from shelters and rescue groups. Frequently there was a catch: “Not yet housebroken.” “Aggressive toward cats.” “Goes on cross-country crime sprees if left unsupervised.”

Muriel, her description read, loved children and wasn’t prone to murdering cats—though she was, we were reliably informed, low to the ground and loved to chase birds. She was housebroken. She looked terrified in half her gallery photos (we later learned those had been snapped shortly after she was surrendered by previous adopters and taken to a new foster home), and so excited in the rest that her tail was a blur.

Something about her excitement struck a chord in me and I forwarded her page to my wife, who didn’t respond. Not being in a rush to acquire a dog, I didn’t ask why. The search continued, and more than a week later, when I saw Muriel again, I was compelled to resend her profile. The response came quickly: “Muriel!” That night, we made a list of questions for her foster mom.

Part II: Average Working Intelligence

A friendly woman named Andi called the next day and I strained to hear her over yelps and squeaks. Seven-month-old Muriel was playing with a fellow foster puppy. I ran through our questions and none of the answers gave me pause. She didn’t resource-guard and was only a destructive chewer of toys, not limbs or faces or furniture.

“She’s got a silly streak,” Andi noted. “I try not to bring the fosters into my bed but she was so upset when she got here that I spoiled her. She likes to sleep on me with all her legs straight out in the air.” She shared a bit of Muriel’s backstory. As Birdie said in All About Eve, it had everything but the bloodhounds snappin’ at her rear end.

If we were to adopt her we’d be her seventh home in seven months. Andi swore the problems had all been caused by humans, not Muriel. In one instance she was acquired by an elderly woman who couldn’t keep up with a puppy. The woman then rehomed her with an even more elderly friend who also lacked the energy to properly care for such a young dog.

All the stories were like that. There’d been a man who kept her crated for 18 hours a day, an arrangement that was not to her liking. The final family to surrender her was headed by a single working father who refused to crate her during the day, instead leaving her unattended in his backyard, from which she repeatedly escaped. The second or third time neighbors found her frolicking in traffic, he phoned the rescue.

“She cried and cried when she was taken from those kids,” I was told. The constant upheaval in her living arrangements had understandably left her with separation anxiety. My ability to take her to work made us her ideal family. That sealed it for me. As long as my wife agreed, I said, we’d take her. Andi was excited that we were fellow gays; she’d been fostering with her wife for years.

We met our dog that weekend in a Dave & Buster’s parking lot halfway between our home and Andi’s. She and her wife looked like the Indigo Girls. Muriel ran over, tail wagging, freshly bathed, and greeted us with abundant kisses. I PayPal’ed her adoption fee, showed them the receipt, and we were handed her leash. Without a second thought, she hopped into our car.

The long drive to Home #7 was an instant, disgusting bonding experience. I sat in the back with Muriel, who we’d been told didn’t experience motion sickness. Andi was used to hauling her around in a truck and now, in a sedan, things were different. Muriel leaned on me woozily, occasionally vomiting. Buckets of viscous drool soon coated the towels on the bench and saturated my clothing. By the time we got home I was so drenched in saliva that it was hard to undress so I could shower.

The next Monday, our first together at work, began inauspiciously. We were the only souls at the office early that morning and I was distracted as she circled my legs a few times. Her leash was quickly wrapped around my ankles and she didn’t listen when I told her to stop. The leash tightened as I tried to extricate myself. She knocked me to the ground, where I looked like a cartoon hostage. “This isn’t going to work,” I messaged my wife a few hours later. An exhausting day for us both was capped by her refusal to get into my car so we could go home.

The next day we did it again, minus the comic pratfalls, and the day after that, and eventually we fell into a rhythm. She was learning so fast that we were briefly convinced she was a genius and joked about starting a college fund so she could attend a prestigious university. Then we began obedience training and her behaviorist broke the news to us: Muriel had average working intelligence. That became obvious soon enough, when she kept getting trapped under the (unobstructed) kitchen table and we realized she had trouble backing herself out of corners.

On graduation day, the trainer wanted to snap a photo of the three of us—Muriel and her moms—with her diploma. During the 30 seconds or so we needed to be still, Muriel barked and wiggled in excitement. We were at a playground and children had just shown up, children she wanted to ditch us to meet. Her trainer laughed. She made friends with my coworkers, clients and a UPS man who carried Milk-Bones in his pockets. Without fail, she was crowned Employee of the Month every month for nearly two years, until we left that job for greener pastures.

Part III: She’s Too Young for That

We first realized something was wrong with Muriel in December of 2019. Normally a balls-to-the-wall kind of dog, she was uncharacteristically quiet and unexcitable one day and I wasn’t sure why. Even the arrival of a jumbo bag of Pupperoni hadn’t piqued her interest, but I noticed nothing abnormal about her physically. That night she retreated to the corner of another room, away from us, and hunched and shook and cried when we tried to touch her.

At the 24-hour emergency vet, a heavily pregnant veterinarian was largely dismissive when I told her something was wrong. Muriel was no longer hunched over. How do you explain to an expert that you’ve spent almost every waking moment of the last 18 months with your dog and are more familiar with her emotions than your own? Muriel and I were simpatico in ways that mystified my wife. “You’re so far up that dog’s ass…” she said in response to my expertise on everything from Muriel’s self-bathing schedule to her bowel movements.

The vet didn’t take an x-ray, confident it was a pulled muscle, and prescribed an NSAID and 72 hours of inactivity. We got home at 2 am. Not wanting to disturb my sleeping wife, who had to be up early, I conked out on the couch with Muriel on top of me, much as Andi once described. In the coming days, weeks and months, her problems continued. There were many trips to her regular vet, who initially thought her leg was the culprit. Then she realized it was probably her back.

A tall, outdoorsy lesbian who loves camping and scuba-diving, this vet threw everything and the kitchen sink at making Muriel feel better. When I told her the episodes seemed to involve muscle spasms that subsided by the time her appointments rolled around, she looked like she had an idea she wasn’t sure she wanted to share. “If she were older, I’d say we might be looking at IVDD,” she finally remarked. “But she’s too young for that. The youngest I ever diagnosed was my own dog at four, and that was unusual.”

Muriel was only two, but as soon as she said that, I knew we were doomed. When I rehashed the details of the appointment to my wife and told her how I felt, she gently suggested my pessimism was informed by my unusual personal history and that I shouldn’t be so negative. I’d been a precocious medical outlier myself, one of the youngest patients in a multi-state region to be diagnosed with my disease and have a series of major new surgeries for it. Once you’ve been a statistical anomaly, numbers lose their power to reassure you.

At a specialty animal hospital, an emergency medicine resident evaluated Muriel and agreed with our vet that the problem was likely IVDD or the similar-sounding LS disease. She was referred to a neurologist at the same clinic. He recommended an MRI, which we authorized. Two thousand dollars later, with the radiologist’s report in hand, he confirmed it: Muriel had lumbosacral disease. We could continue oral medication and try a series of epidural injections, or we could schedule surgery.

Pandemic restrictions meant that if she had surgery we’d not be able to visit her. In normal times, visits are encouraged to promote faster recovery. Additionally, Muriel, who made great strides in overcoming separation anxiety pre-pandemic, had backslid during lockdown. The surgeon said it was rare but he occasionally had patients who responded shockingly well to the injections. He felt Muriel’s youth and otherwise robust health made it worth a try.

We already knew our dog was rare, so we agreed to it. That was in April of 2020. For almost five months, Muriel’s pills had dominated my schedule. That would continue through the end of the year. There were periods when she took three medications up to three times a day. Every few hours, my phone buzzed with reminders: Prednisone! Pain meds! Gabapentin! She developed Pavlovian responses to the alarms and related noises. 

Most disturbingly, the sound of pills rattling in their bottles enraptured her as if she were a Jacqueline Susann character. Muting my notifications provided no relief—the slightest hint of a Greenies pill pocket bag placed gently on a kitchen counter could rouse her from the deepest slumber. If I even thought about unwrapping a slice of American cheese for med-smuggling purposes, she instinctively perked up. I often heard her drool hit the floor as she awaited her “dolls.”

Part IV: A Whole New Dog

Pain and prednisone disrupted Muriel’s sleep, which in turn disrupted mine. She had to be taken outside frequently while on steroids, which increased her urine output. We began a nightly ritual of watching The Nanny on Cozi TV until she fell asleep. Then I’d join my wife in bed until Muriel’s whimpers resumed between two and four AM, the infomercial witching hour for Jane Seymour, Courtney Thorne-Smith and Crepe Erase, a name that sounds extra strange when you’re severely sleep-deprived. If she didn’t wake up until Make Room for Daddy was underway, it had probably been a good night.

After those middle-of-the-night potty breaks, Muriel struggled to get comfortable. Unwilling to let her suffer alone, I started pushing her giant Costco dog beds together, fashioning a makeshift mattress that could accommodate my short frame. I would pet her until she could lower herself beside me (or, most uncomfortably of all, onto me), and we would sleep until the 6 am pill reminder went off. We did that for around 16 months.

Before the first in her series of spinal injections, we were warned it could take months to see the full effect. In the meantime, she was to be as inactive as possible until we were instructed otherwise, and was typically confined to the living room. Cumulative months of having to keep an obstreperous young dog restrained took a toll on all of us. I felt like a failure every time she had to be leashed in her own backyard when she wanted to run free, just as I felt like a failure for not being able to keep her healthy.

Prior to her ordeal, Muriel was famous for her zoomies. Our house was the size of a shoebox but its yard was huge, and she ran laps around it at high speeds, sometimes leaping through the air joyfully as she flew past us. Her trainer, having observed the speed and athleticism with which she romped, suggested agility training. Neighbors stopped on evening walks to watch her and laugh. One told me she normally disliked dogs but that Muriel’s happiness as she took flight was infectious.

It’s true. In our time together, she has taught me a great deal about happiness and seizing it, gleefully and unapologetically, whenever you can. I am, by nature, excessively cautious and reserved. Muriel is constitutionally the opposite. If she wants your attention, she demands it. If you don’t oblige, she takes it from you. She’s unafraid of getting hurt or lost or causing an imposition. The only thing that might bother her, besides Yorkies (she hates small, yappy dogs), is missing out on an opportunity, even something as small as diving at barely visible food crumbs or accompanying me on a stroll to the recycling bin.

These days, she’s fortunate enough to again have opportunities for adventure. She’s down to one medication twice daily, though we’ve been warned there will likely be times when we have to reintroduce old pills. Zoomies are indulged on a modified scale—we moved to a home with a smaller yard that is more easily accessible to her if she ever loses her mobility. We currently sleep through the night again, and in our own beds.

Last summer, we saw her scuba-diving vet one last time for an allergy shot before we moved. As Muriel leapt from the car and danced around in excitement, her doctor looked shocked. “What did you do to her?!” she asked. “That’s a whole new dog!” Our triumphant mood was punctured a few minutes later, when she continued, “I mean, it’s like she has a piece of dry rot in her back, but she’s moving so well!”

It’s never far from our minds that one day, with or without warning, Muriel might suddenly experience paralysis and require surgery. Nor do we forget that such procedures aren’t always successful. Until that day comes, I try to take my cues from Muriel, whose only care in the world is outrage about her new neighbor, a Westie who never shuts up.