A long weekend has ended. Our version of doggy ICU took the medical officer and her vet tech to see Vega through two bandage changes, lots of drugs, trips outdoors, changes of bedding, food hand delivered. This morning we handed her off to Sano Vet Hospital again, where Kate and the vet discussed human/animal differences.
It was a delight to me to see the Kate that emerged from the weekend. In spite of three long nights and a lot of intensive care, she looked youthful, energized, happy. Or, I should say, because of three long nights and a lot of intensive care, she looked youthful, energized, happy. She’s not been down, so this was an uptick from an already good place. Made me feel good.
Hopefully we’ve got the worst part of Vega’s recovery behind us. She’s looking and acting more and more like her old self.
As you might imagine, dogs have been on my mind a lot this last week. Because we’ve had multiple dogs all of our marriage, and many of those were of the short-lived Irish Wolfhound breed, we’ve experienced the puppy hood and adult lives of 17 dogs. Each dog was unique, an individual in every sense. Each one of them, too, enriched our lives as companions, as fellow travelers on the ancientrail of life. At the same time, as I wrote a few weeks back, they also had (and have) their own lives, lived in the woods, wandering our property and following whatever doggy instincts and choices drive them.
Thinking about this, about the absolute value of each dog, a value not reducible to species, breed, position in our pack, or by our affections for them, I realized that their lives, though shorter than ours, had much in common with us. When our dogs die, that absolute value which existed during their lifetime lives on in our memories and perhaps the memories of friends and family. But, when we die and those who knew them die, their presence, their existence will die out, too.
Hilo
This is the same notion as the second death which occurs for each of us when the last person who remembers us or has memory of us dies. The highest percentage of human beings, no matter their level of accomplishment or the meanness of their daily life, wink in and out of existence in the same way as our dogs. A percentage so small as to be negligible remains behind in history books, in their art, in noble works, in architecture or political achievement.
So, the dogs we have loved and with whom we have lived, are a microcosm of the human experience. Their existence matters and mattered, not because of something they did or did not do, but because they were and were in relationship with us and other members of the pack of their time. In my opinion this is a very positive view of both canine and human life. It is the living, the being alive and in relationship that matters most, not the degree or the wealth or the works.
Yesterday Kate and I went into the operational area of the vets to watch Vega’s wound get bandaged. Kate will have to replace the bandage three times over the weekend. The surgical wound had an opening next to it about 3 inches in diameter, revealing muscle underneath.
Kate asked to help and was directed to the drawer with the gloves. She put one on and held the bandage in place with one experienced finger while the vet put in anchoring stitches that would hold tie downs for the bandage. She looked so complete there, familiar with the operating room as she is from years as an operating nurse and nurse anesthetist. It was a pleasure to see.
She and the vet talked medicine while he sewed, putting in six anchoring stitches around the wound. He explained that dogs metabolize anesthetics differently than humans. They have, he said, sticky blood, so the dosage of, say, dilaudid, used in a dog would do serious injury to a comparably sized human. When giving Kate some injectable dilaudid, he also explained there was no need to swab the injection site with alcohol. No way to sterilize fur.
Vega meanwhile was under a blue paper cover, a hole cut in it approximating the area around the site where the vet worked, and on a metal table about chest height. As the vet put in the 5th of the 6 stitches, her tail began to wag. She had begun to come to.
She’s been through a lot since the amputation. Visits to the vet. Probing and debriding of the wound and it’s recent opening. I can tell she’s tired of it and wants a return to normal life. Unfortunately, not for a while.
Let’s make America great again. Degerrymander Congress. Encourage immigration and the resettlement of refugees like we promise on the Statue of Liberty. Repeal right to work laws and Taft-Hartley. Restore Glass-Steagall. Make sure no one goes without medical care, a decent education or affordable housing. Raise the minimum wage nationally. Make it clear that public lands in the West will not only stay public, but will be subject to tighter restrictions on use for profit. Make sure emissions decline by 80% by 2050 and fall to zero by 2100. That’d be a good start.
We could even get red, white and blue ball caps. “Let’s make America great again” on the back and one of these ideas on the front. Collect all 8!
Eliminate Fox “news.” I know, this is censorship and would run afoul of the First Amendment, so it won’t happen. Still.
Another tack is to recognize what makes us great right now. Our pluralistic democracy has plenty of rents in its fabric, but we’re still the country built on a political idea, not an ethnic group. In other words, even with our flaws we’re still, as my old buddy Ronald Reagan used to say, a shining city on a hill. We invent things, come up with new ideas, push boundaries. This land that is our land has mountains, deserts, oceans, farmland, prairies, Great Lakes and mighty rivers. It is a natural wonder and we get to live here. Our economy is strong and resilient. It could be made more so by throttling back corporate power and the flood of money into our political life.
One more idea. Let’s seek the things that unite us, rather than those which divide us. Here’s a specific example. Many of the folks from my hometown of Alexandria, Indiana served in the military. Their parents, and most of them, were also members of a labor union, the UAW. Currently, support of things military is a wedge issue for many of high school classmates, one that seems to line them up on the Republican side. Even so, their awareness of economic justice issues and one of the best solutions to them, labor unions, lines up with those who want progressive change in the workplace and in work itself. Perhaps a pro-veteran, labor union positive policy position could nudge my friends from home back toward a liberal perspective.
The roads are clear. The sun is shining. The snow on the roof, the stairs up to the loft and what remained after I cleared the driveway has begun to melt. Colorado for sure. Not Minnesota. If we’d had the snow in Andover that we’ve had here, we’d be barricaded with steep white walls around our home.
Vega experienced a setback with her recovery. An infection set in and we’ve had to severely restrict her movement while hitting her with even more powerful antibiotics. With a drain in the amputation site she’s getting better, but it means a bit more drawn out road to full mobility. We’re in doggy hospital mode.
We’re working on our trip to Korea and Singapore. No tickets yet, but soon. Dog boarding has already been arranged. As with our cruise around Latin America, it will be a major expense.
Chinook winds brought us warm days, several in a row. Snow melted in the unshaded portions of our yard, though several inches remained over most of it. Today, though, all is white, curvy and gently rolling. We got 10 inches + overnight. Another powdery snow and it’s still falling. When the weather predictions for snow come out, we’re almost always in the area targeted for more snow. And this year, most of the time, we’ve exceeded the predictions.
Right now the snow falls in big, fat flakes, what I’ve come to think of as flour sifter snow. Somewhere above us an angel or an aeronautical giant has a huge bin of snow, a gigantic screen on the bottom. They’re working that bin back and forth, back and forth. The lodgepole’s branches, already bent toward the earth, bow down even more. The aspen outside this window (I’m in the house in our home office.), our only deciduous tree up here, looks on, placid and stripped down for the season. Waiting.
The solar panels wed us even more to the cycles of weather and the sun’s angle. When snow covers the panels, no production. When the sky is cloudy, production diminishes. As the days lengthen and the sun rises higher in the sky, production increases. The solar panels are our photosynthesis. We have become plants. Sunshine = energy.
Vega update. Well. She bounds up the stairs, comes down them easily. Eating well, getting outside and moving around. Last night she got her wish and went back into the garage with her sister and Gertie, our German shorthair. She basically wants things to return to normal. She’s free of that painful left leg, able to move and sure ready to.
Her surgical wound has developed some leakage, but we’re taking her in this am to get that fixed. No evidence of infection.
Dogs don’t know quit. I’ve watched enough dogs recover from surgery, bad bites, and die from disease to know that dogs stay with life as long as it’s available to them. They truly live until they die. This may be true for other animals, too, but I know dogs and it’s pretty damned impressive.
We human animals could learn about living and dying from these lovable critters.
As the chinook winds have eaten our snow cover and dried out the grasses and downed trees, the fire hazard went up to a red flag warning on Wednesday. That means that if a fire happens, it has a good chance, a very good chance, of getting out of control. Not that I needed more to concentrate my mind on fire mitigation.
The chainsaw has sat idle for some weeks now as arthritis and snow cover combined to keep it in the garage. Though I could get out now, I haven’t. On some days the winds have been too high, on others I just didn’t feel like it. I still have several trees to remove, almost all now in the back, a few trees to limb and several trunks to cut into fireplace size logs for curing.
That I can do. What I also want are external fire sprinklers. They exist. It’s possible to imagine a system for our home, but external sprinklers are not part of the fire mitigation culture here. Even the Colorado State Forest Service recommended against one in a letter to me: “…too many variables that could go wrong with the system, including losing power during a wildfire, or forgetting to drain the system during cold weather and the pipes freezing.” Well, we have a working generator. At last! And, draining a system…well, we can get that done.
Still, because of this hesitancy, the folks who do fire mitigation have not developed products or services for homeowners. So this week I’m going to start contacting irrigation companies. They understand the technology and might be able to construct our system.
When I had the assistant chief of the Elk Creek Fire Protection District come out and do a fire mitigation analysis for our property, he said that external sprinklers do work and they would work here. Just not many folks doing it. Well, we’re gonna be among them, one way or the other, and I need to get this work done before May.
Not used to being the slow one, but in our tai chi class, now in its 6th week of 8, I am. It’s ok though. I need repetition and once I get it, I’ll have it, so speed of learning is not so important here as quality over time. Physically co-ordinated things have never been my shining moment.
The weather has been warm and in mid-winter on the eastern slopes that means chinooks. Warm = windy at this time of year. Still learning the weather patterns. It has made for outstanding electricity production. Yesterday’s output is below.
A long weekend has ended. Our version of doggy ICU took the medical officer and her vet tech to see Vega through two bandage changes, lots of drugs, trips outdoors, changes of bedding, food hand delivered. This morning we handed her off to Sano Vet Hospital again, where Kate and the vet discussed human/animal differences.
