Morgan Rose-Marie

He Knows: The Dog Dies in This One

I

A few years ago, when I was still living on a small farm in Colorado, my dog Shash explored the pastures while I labored through barn chores. Occasionally, from a far corner of the field, she’d spot me—dropping flakes of hay or opening gates for the horses—and it was as if I’d been lost to her for weeks. She shot over the drought-hardened ground, her body a chiseled red arrow cutting through the stalks of dry grass, her curly tail unfurled behind her, the only time it was ever straight. This is my favorite image of her: a dart right to the heart.

Shash loved me with a fierceness that frightened me at times. I knew she’d fight to the ends of our ever-expanding universe for me, die for me, kill for me. Instead, several months ago, I killed her—or at least that’s how it felt, still feels when I grieve.

Like most dog owners—like most people who have loved and been loved—I have dozens of stories I could share: how we found each other, how she got her name, how she could jump above my head from a standstill, how she ran through the snow with her head down and mouth open to shovel it in, how I wish any one of these was the story keeping me up all night at my keyboard when it’s this one: the story of how I lost her trying to save her and how that was just the beginning. Grief is its own universe where space expands and time with it.

Waking up to puke wasn’t unusual, especially during our farm days when Shash believed you had to eat something to figure out what it was. Colorado was three years gone, and this morning something was hanging out of her rear-end.

Her primary care vet didn’t do emergencies. The vet down the road wasn’t taking new patients. Another vet didn’t have any open appointments. Finally, a voice on the other end of the phone said, “We can see her immediately.”   

This was the first of many choices that I go back to and relive. I turn onto the highway heading south, to the clinic on the hill, and I drive Shash to cheery employees who smile and laugh and who will ultimately deliver her a death sentence. I think about how if I’d only driven the same highway north, to an emergency clinic 45 minutes away…

In Malcom Gladwell’s analysis of airplane accidents, he reveals how it’s never just one event that brings down a plane but a series of events that come together in just the wrong way—the plane needed emergency maintenance, the airline cut corners, the pilot was improperly trained, a diversion south put the bodies on a collision course.

The X-rays revealed a bowel obstruction, and surgery was recommended. On the phone with the vet, I understood surgery wasn’t really recommended, it was necessary if I wanted her to live. It seemed simple then.

That night I got the call that her surgery had been successful. She would be okay. The vet told me he’d removed what appeared to be piece of rug that ran from her stomach, through her intestines and out the other side. A through line. A lifeline the Fates were trying to cut but I ordered cut out of her. The string was removed, but that didn’t save her the way it was supposed to.

As soon as I got Shash home the next afternoon, it was clear she hadn’t been ready to be released. She wouldn’t eat, wouldn’t drink. I took her back, and later I would again wish I had gone elsewhere.

I’ve made plenty of wrong choices in my life knowing better: the times I waited way too long to end a relationship, the times I said something I shouldn’t have or didn’t say something I should’ve, all the times I failed to appreciate how little time we have in this life. And yet, this wrong choice, when I didn’t—couldn’t—know better, hurts more than any of the others.

Assistants took Shash back and injected subcutaneous fluids to hydrate her. Shash looked a bit like a camel when they returned her to me, a small hump of water, jelly-like above her shoulders. Knowing what I do now, I recoil thinking of how the water they pumped under her skin must have felt, stretching what remained of it.

As one assistant handed me the leash, she said, “Shash was burned a little during surgery by the heating pads.” Another assistant identified a bald spot the size of a thumbprint on Shash’s back, mostly hidden by the fur around it. “Oh, I hate it when that happens,” she said. It must happen regularly, I thought. Must not be a big deal, or they would make it one. Nothing more was said about it, and the spot was so small. So easy to forget.

We returned home for only a couple hours. When Shash’s every exhale came out a whimper, I took her back to the clinic for overnight hospitalization, certain she’d been discharged too early. That the stomach surgery was too major. I would learn later I was wrong, though not about her needing to be in hospital. The ground was flying up to meet us before I even realized we were falling.

The next day when I picked her up, Shash was acting more herself. At home, she drank and ate, and I breathed for the first time in days. By now my expectations had been tempered and I understood recovery wasn’t going to be a romp in the dog park, but it seemed we were out of the woods.

Three times a day I ground her pills then folded them into burger patties. My house stunk of pan-frying, but Shash improved. Her potty breaks turned into short walks which became longer walks. Slowly but surely, my dog returned to me. We’d be running soon enough.

Then, the stitches and staples were removed and the cone came off and the triumphant story of recovery I’d been writing in my mind for the last two weeks fell away with the tufts of fur that Shash ripped off her back, exposing a wound the size of my palm, and I saw that actual recovery stretched farther and farther ahead of us like a highway chasing an always-retreating horizon north.

I’d pieced together that the palm-sized wound was the thumbprint-sized burn, which had never been that small, not really. That’s just what they’d told me. Perhaps what they willed themselves to believe.

I returned to the clinic with pictures. At the front desk, an assistant looked at them, disappeared to the back to find the vet, and then reappeared with instructions to continue antibiotics and apply an ointment twice daily.

A few days later, the wound looked even bigger. I understood it wasn’t growing, that the wound had always been the size it had been, and what had changed was how much of it I could see. I returned to the clinic with new pictures. This time the assistant took the pictures to the vet, and somewhere in the back he saw them. He looked at the photos of a burn the size of a human hand with its fingers splayed out and then looked away. The vet stayed back there, but the assistant returned to supply more of the medicine and the same instructions.

I wanted to believe this was enough. To trust—as I was being told—this would heal her. But I couldn’t.

Heating pads are used in almost every surgery on dogs. They are necessary to prevent hypothermia when a dog is under anesthesia. Though not common, burns from these heating pads are also not that rare. In veterinary medicine, burns are categorized by their thickness: superficial partial thickness, deep partial thickness, and full thickness, which are comparable to first-degree, second-degree, and third-degree burns, respectively, in humans.

From my own research, I realized Shash’s burns were at least deep partial and extensive treatment that was likely required, but that’s not what I was told when, a few days later, I demanded the vet see me, see Shash.

In an exam room, the vet said he suspected Shash had a skin reaction to the heating pad but couldn’t prove it. I’d never heard a burn called a skin reaction, but I suppose it is the skin reacting to heat. It’s an inevitable reaction, though. Apply too much heat, and the whole world will burn.

This, of course, isn’t what the vet meant. He meant the fault lay in my dog’s skin, in her. It was his way of defending, or maybe convincing, himself. As if I’d come here for him and not for her. Though I asked a list of prepared questions, he didn’t ask a single one about Shash. When an assistant came to take her back, I insisted they shave her entire back. I wanted us to see it all.

After a few minutes examining her, the vet returned to the lobby without her. The assistant explained, “So you won’t be distracted.” I shuddered.

The vet extended his estimated timeframe for healing from 2-4 weeks to 1-2 months, but his treatment recommendation remained the same—no bandages, just antibiotics and ointment. “The burns are only superficial partial. If you want, you can bring her in every two weeks, and I can look at the burn, clean it if necessary.”

Shash came through the door then. It looked like more of her back was burned than was not. Now fully exposed, the burn over her hips was the size of my two hands put together, and on her shoulder was another one the size of a hand. We were both tiny particles in a great universe, growing greater, but it shrunk for me in that moment. The whole world was a very small, very burnt thing.

In essaying the loss of her mother, the love of her life, Cheryl Strayed called healing, “a small and ordinary and very burnt thing. And it’s one thing and one thing only: it’s doing what you have to do.” When the Earth burns, the fire can leave behind a more fertile ground: the whole world, a phoenix. But rebirth is only a possibility, not a promise. Even if something new takes its place, what is lost is lost forever, and you keep going or you don’t but the world does regardless. 

I moved on autopilot, loading Shash in the backseat of the car and taking off north. I called the emergency clinic 45 minutes away to tell them I was coming, but the woman who answered said all burns were immediately referred to the university hospital even further north.

When the university vet came into the exam room, she looked me in the eye and said, “I’m going to start this conversation by saying you’re looking at $4-6,000 to start and a long road ahead.”

She explained Shash would need to be hospitalized for at least four months. I saw Shash sprinting through pastures, then I pictured her drugged in a hospital kennel for months, an hour and half from home, a different kind of shot to the heart. 

This was just one of the many times I have wished dogs could talk—Shash could have explained that it wasn’t her stomach but her back that hurt after surgery. I could explain now that life would be miserable, but just for a while, that she’d hurt, but not forever, that she wouldn’t see me every day, but I hadn’t left her. But I couldn’t explain any of this to her. If I put her in a hospital, all she’d know was that life was miserable, she was hurting and I was gone. Only I would have the comfort of eventually.

The vet continued to say they would do their best to ensure her quality of life was “not terrible,” but she’d need to be sedated or at least injected with pain medication daily.

“She doesn’t seem to be hurting now,” I interjected.

The vet nodded. “She’s in a honeymoon phase, and her body is doing a really good job protecting itself. The scab-like substance that’s covering her burn is called an eschar, and when that comes off and her skin and all its nerves start to grow back, it will be excruciating.”

Excruciating: From the Latin word for torment, excruciare. The “ex-” meaning “out of, from” and “cruciare” meaning “to crucify.” The feeling that comes from or out of crucifixion. This is the pain that led Jesus to cry out, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”

If I were ready to be honest with myself, I’d guessed this, maybe known it. I came here to arguably the best emergency animal hospital in the state for a second opinion because I knew the first opinion was wrong. And yet, that first opinion had offered me something I wanted very badly. The promise of healing, easy and painless. It was so hard to let go of that even if I hadn’t ever fully believed it. It felt like I had a choice about which reality I lived in, and this feeling continues to haunt me. I wanted to believe the wondrous lie. How much more insidious this makes that deceit.

“The other thing you need to know is that burns have a high risk of infection. Her wound would need to be cultured regularly,” the vet explained. “Burns this severe will heal, but you can count on complications.”

I knew the choice I had to make, but I couldn’t make it yet. I took Shash home. For just a little while longer, I would let myself believe she was fine, and for a short while she was.

When the edges of the eschar began to lift, her back looked like the surface of the ocean as a storm blows in. I knew the sun was setting on the honeymoon.

In the days leading up to the last, I made the decision again and again, working through the choice and always coming to the same conclusion. In a way, it didn’t feel like a choice. Just like I couldn’t have put her down instead of having the original surgery, now I couldn’t put her through the suffering that healing would require.

I want to believe in the Rainbow Bridge the same way I wanted to believe that her healing would be easy and painless. Instead, believing that we have only this one life and knowing hers was going to be unbearable, I chose to end it. This is a truth my own body will bear until I leave it.

My favorite memory of Shash is her flying to me, but—at least for now—whenever I think of Shash, it’s not this image I see. Instead, it’s the vision of her in the backseat as I drive south to the clinic on the hill, of conspiratorial links forming a mean chain that will bring us down, of a flame-consumed universe, of her finally sinking beneath the sleepy waves.

II

Shash would have fought to the ends of the Earth for me, and I’d made the call to put her down. It was a virile strain of guilt. What happened wasn’t okay, and even though she was gone, I wasn’t ready to stop fighting for her.

At that time, I had no idea how similarly impossible the experience of seeking justice for her would be to the experience of seeking care for her.

I began by emailing the owner of the vet clinic to share my story and to ask for restitution—knowing that he couldn’t give me Shash back. The owner responded promptly that he’d investigate. Two weeks later I hadn’t heard anything, so I checked in and he again replied quickly, apologizing that family emergencies had delayed him. Then another four weeks passed without an update, and I came to understand nothing was going to happen.

Quietly, I filed an official complaint with the state’s vet medical licensing board.

I also posted an online review of the clinic. A quick and angry response from the owner informed me that if only I hadn’t taken this to social media, there would have been a better outcome for both parties. He admitted my review was fair, but had I not considered the morale of his staff and the reputation of his business?

I had, of course. What I considered more were the animals in his clinic’s care. I considered how the vet burned Shash so severely he didn’t want me to see her before he talked to me. I couldn’t save Shash, but maybe I could save someone else.

Carol J. Adam’s Sexual Politics of Meat exposes how our culture turns both women and animals into absent referent, where their lives are taken away to satisfy another person’s pleasure. A woman’s body under a male gaze. An animal’s corpse made meat. Women’s disempowerment is used to reinforce animals’ disempowerment, and vice versa, in an endless cycle.

Making an official complaint to the state’s veterinary medical licensing board wasn’t hard to do once I found the website. It looks like free ones I made on Geocities as a child. Though its description of the complaint process leaves a lot of questions unanswered, the complaint form itself is straightforward. In 1,600 words, I described the ordeal in as much detail as I could. I attached pictures and documentation and clicked “Submit.”

I began looking for an attorney. I spent a lot of time sending out emails, submitting contact forms, and making phone calls. Most never got back to me, but a few did. One was particularly generous with his time and explained how my best course of action was to pursue small claims. Simply put, my case would cost more than I was trying to win. In our justice system, that’s how much Shash’s life was worth.

After filing my complaint in November, it was on January’s agenda. In reading the meeting’s minutes, I learned the board agreed to take up my complaint. They claimed jurisdiction and recognized a violation of the law had occurred. That felt like a win.

What the vet had done to—and not done for—Shash was not okay. And it wasn’t just me saying so.

In his last email to me, the clinic’s owner had been right about one thing: I alone couldn’t hold him responsible. Still, he wrongly assumed that by telling me I couldn’t do anything, I’d give up.

Months passed, and finally in July, the board and the vet reached a settlement. The resulting report reads: “Due to lack of monitoring of the use of a heating device, the dog experienced thermal burns.”

The vet was fined and required to complete a course on Post-Operative Complications and submit a number of medical records each quarter for review.

The clinic’s owner had told me, in various words, that I was hysterical. Throughout what would turn into a year-long ordeal, I would be made to question myself. Not only was I educated, but I also educated many students on the ways women are made out to be unreliable witnesses to their own lives. Awareness of power dynamics is not enough to save you from them.

I cried reading the document on my computer. Validation. Relief. And still, grief.

I also filed a small claims case, and almost a year to the day after Shash’s surgery, I entered a municipal court room, its walls decorated with the portraits of the men who’d manned the bench.

Months before court, seeing my anxiety about it, my therapist asked me to consider if I could honor Shash and be loyal to her in another way. She explained, “One of the things that keeps coming up in our conversations is how protective she was of you. Think about how protecting yourself now would honor her memory.”

I allowed myself to imagine Shash still alive. Able to protect me now. I gave myself permission to let the idea of a lawsuit go, but I couldn’t. Shash wouldn’t have walked away from a threat to me even if that put her own well-being at risk. Walking away might protect me now, but it wasn’t me I was trying to protect.

I had practiced my story, getting it down to 8 minutes since all the information I could find online suggested I’d have a small window to speak. Nothing in this story ever went to plan though.

The judge began by asking if we wanted mediation. “I’m open to it, your honor,” I said.

“My client is entitled to…” The clinic’s owner had arrived with an attorney, and as soon as he opened his mouth, I understood how things would go.

The judge cut him off after a couple minutes. “So, that’s a ‘no’ then for mediation?”

Before I even had a chance to speak, the attorney began, “Ms. —- is not prepared to prove medical malpractice.”

“I have the state veterinary medical licensing board’s report,” I countered.

“You do?”

“Yes.”

“You do?” He asked again.

“Yes,” I repeated, handing my copies over, the attorney stepped back to whisper to the owner. He whispered at about the same volume he spoke, so I heard: “How’d she get these? Why haven’t I seen these? Did you know about this?”

Then, he was back to talking to the judge, explaining, “It doesn’t matter. The vet board has different standards. Anyway, this case should be thrown out! She can’t sue the owner. He didn’t do the surgery. Which was a successful surgery, by the way.” My vision went black for a second.

A green light floats at the end of a dark dock in The Great Gatsby. It belongs to the careless people who occupy F. Scott Fitzgerald’s 1920s: people with an abundance—of money, of power, of privilege—who speed through the streets of the world they own. Our roads are littered with the bloated bodies of deer, decaying raccoon corpses, and opossums with babies still tucked in their pouch. A century later and has anything changed?

The attorney continued, “Contract law gets subsumed by medical malpractice. I haven’t prepared a brief, but I can.” He named several cases.

The judge looked at me. “Do you understand what he’s saying?”

“Yeah, I can’t sue the clinic because the law categorizes this type of case not as a contract violation but as medical malpractice.”

“In all my time, this is the first case of this kind I’ve heard here in my court. So, I don’t know what the law is. He is saying he can write a brief. Would you like me to ask him to do so, and then give you time to respond once he does?”

I thought of Fitzgerald’s words: “They were careless people…they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made.”

“I believe he knows,” I finally said.

The judge looked at me. “I don’t take anything for granted. Are you sure?” I understood he wanted to give me every possible chance. I stood before him fighting for a dog already dead, and the clinic’s owner stood behind an attorney who offended common sense and common courtesy.

I had to take a second, not to decide but to be able to say the words: “Yes, I’ll dismiss.”

Months earlier, my therapist had warned me, “When your case is over, Shash will still be gone.”

She was right, of course. But the loss of the case was also a new, expanding world of grief. I felt subatomic in the aftermath, my existence condensing in ever-expanding space. Everyone who’d learned what happened to Shash had been horrified. It was only the law that didn’t care. But the law is the law, and I’d known going into court that it wasn’t written to protect me or Shash. Whether or not the attorney could write up the brief he claimed, I knew these people would find some way to avoid accountability. If my report from the vet board wasn’t enough, nothing was going to be.

Earlier, the judge had asked me if I had an expert witness—meaning, a vet—to testify. After I explained I believed my documents from the vet board and the university vet did that work, he said they showed what may have happened.

“So, I need someone who was in the room when it happened?”

I understand the need to protect medical professionals like vets. But who protects the animals? Who speaks for them? Who can be their witness?

This isn’t the story we like to read. I wanted to write that my dog recovered and lived. When I couldn’t write that, I wanted to write that I got her justice. That’s not the story I lived—it’s not the story many of us live.

Despite what the loudest voices may say, it shouldn’t be this way. In the cosmos, one life matters as much as any other. If that is not at all, if life has no meaning other than the meaning we give it, I cannot fathom the arrogance of arguing one being’s life matters more than another’s.

Until we give voice to those who can’t speak for themselves, until we amplify the voices of the least among us, none of us will be heard over the loudest voice telling us we don’t matter.

Shash mattered to me. She mattered.