Love Is the Best Medicine (19 page)

“Have a safe flight,” I said to be saying something.

“Thanks,” said Sonja Rasmussen. And then, as if it was important for me to know, she added, “My mom’s name is Sandi. I think you will like her.”

T
HIS
time I was taking no chances over the location for our meeting, and I had a specific room in mind, a room situated at the end of a corridor, purposely set away from the hustle and flow of the hospital. It is as inviting as such a room can be—subtle, with warm lighting, a noticeable contrast to dispassionate fluorescent strips. There is a large couch, comfortable chairs, easy-on-the-eye, tasteful art on the walls, plenty of boxes of tissues, and pamphlets, reading material
on euthanasia, coping with loss, the stages of grief. In the past, this room has offered a sanctuary, a quiet refuge for owners to say good-bye to their pets. But on this day, for the first time, I would meet a stranger and tell her how I failed her and her dog, how that good-bye came too soon, and how, thanks to me, she never got to be a part of it.

I knocked before entering, stepped inside, and closed the door behind me, sealing my own fate.

Sandi Rasmussen remained seated on the couch as I walked over, introducing myself, a somber timbre to my voice, as though I were about to tell her the bad news she already knew. I offered her my hand, wondering if she might refuse to shake it, but she took it, and I felt as though her grip was more than a formality, intended to hold me, to provide her with a moment to look up and into my eyes. I imagined I would be doing the same thing in her position, searching the depths, hoping to discover all the hidden characteristics that make me tick.

“Will you be honest with me? Are you genuinely sorry for what happened? Was I right to trust you with the care of my precious Cleo?”
She might have been asking any one of these questions as her big russet eyes stared inside mine and I had no choice but to let her in.

Without a word she gestured for me to take a seat, this woman in a pink turtleneck sweater, woolen scarf, and glasses. There must have been a winter coat hanging up nearby but I didn’t see it. I backed up and into a chair opposite, sitting forward. There was nothing comfortable or relaxed about what I had to do and I wanted my posture to let her know I took this responsibility seriously.

“I’m so sorry to meet you under these circumstances,” I said, and Sandi nodded, exuded serenity, and forced a smile. “If I may, I’d like to go through everything that happened with Cleo, from the beginning to the end and if, at any time, something I say doesn’t
make sense, please, feel free to stop me, and I’ll try my best to answer your question or try to make things clear. Does that sound okay?”

The words written here might sound slick and rehearsed, but I assure you, sitting in that room, with the tremble in my voice, a thick layer of dread and helplessness coated everything I said and did. Though I wanted to give her a synopsis and eulogy at the same time, I tried to focus on my simple, premeditated plan—do whatever it takes to make things bearable for this woman.

Her nod filled the room, cued up my nervous throat-clearing cough as a prelude to my speech.

“Firstly, I think we need to bear in mind that for all Cleo’s various blood tests, everything came back as normal. We did look for an underlying problem, but never found one.”

As soon as the words got away from me I realized how defensive, how arrogant this sounded. Cleo’s backstory
was
important, the source of our niggling doubt that her tendency to break was something more than bad luck. But this opening smacked of “don’t blame me, it’s not my fault.” Sandi’s subtle recoil felt like a slap, an unspoken demand for me to start over.

“I mean … what I’m trying to say is … Cleo
appeared
to be a healthy young dog. I examined her the morning of surgery and her lungs were clear, her heart sounded fine, and she was a happy …”

“I wonder if I could hear about the anesthesia,” said Sandi, her voice startlingly soft, her interjection catching me off guard, though her sentiment felt almost apologetic. Of course she wanted to get to the details. She already knew the punch line.

“Sure,” I said, “yes … of course …” Any mental image I had of the salient points I needed to cover in my synopsis dissolved. I had lost my place, my rhythm was gone, and I could tell Sandi sensed it too. Involuntarily my open palms were sliding back and forth on one another, slick with guilty sweat like those of a criminal about to confess. I tried again.

“Cleo’s record was carefully reviewed by another specialist, Dr. Maganiello, and based on her findings an anesthetic protocol was …”

“No,” she said, talking over me, once again her soft cadence more effective than if she had screamed. “I just …” She paused, collected herself on a breath she held before letting go, leaving me hanging in the tension between us. “Please,” she said, her gaze dropping away from mine, momentarily breaking the connection, before coming back to me, letting me catch a heightened, desperate level of intensity in her eyes. “I just need to know what happened.”

Sandi Rasmussen delivered a plea that begged me to bag the cold medical explanations and jargon and simply tell her the truth. Even to my own ears I had sounded uncertain and worst of all, unconvincing. If I wasn’t careful this conversation would turn into what I had feared all along—an inquisition.

Then, for the first time, I noticed Sandi was wearing a bracelet on her wrist, and as I looked closer I could see it held a gold heart pendant engraved with a single word,
Cleo
. Not that I didn’t already appreciate the importance of this dog in this woman’s life. Not that I wasn’t already trying my best to make this tragic encounter meaningful. But seeing her name, written in gold, was like a cue card, a keyword that brought me back—focused, lucid, and in the moment.

The story started to unfold with the anesthetic protocol in simple, understandable terms—why we chose it and what it was intended to do—and a delicate account of exactly what transpired, how we reacted, what went right, what went wrong, the emergence of the fatal heart rhythm, Cleo’s failure to respond to all our measures.

Sandi listened intently, crying freely, making no attempt to wipe away a single tear, a detail I noticed and I wondered if I was meant to notice.

I paused for a second, giving my words a chance to sink in, giving Sandi a reprieve before I spoke about what I considered to be a particularly important point.

“I’d like you to understand that I had to make a decision about when to stop trying to save Cleo.”

Sandi regarded me and I sensed she was pleased that I was bringing up this point without being asked to do so.

“I had to make a judgment call. I could have tried to perform direct massage on Cleo’s heart. It would have meant cutting her open to do it. Normally I would have left the decision with you, the owner, or in this case, Sonja. But as you know, Sonja wasn’t available. There wasn’t time to deliberate. I had to rely on knowledge and experience and what I would do if Cleo were my dog. The option to keep going seemed futile, maybe even gratuitous. I truly believe now, as I did then, it would not have made the slightest bit of difference to the eventual outcome.”

Sandi stood up, took a few paces away from me, as if gathering herself. I didn’t know whether I should just shut up and let her have the floor, but I felt like there was still one critically important detail that needed to be discussed.

“One other thing,” I said and Sandi turned to face me. “There’s this question that keeps bugging me and won’t go away. If I had a chance to do it all over, from the first moment I met Cleo, knowing what I know now, would I have done anything differently?”

Sandi nodded and her eyes summoned my answer.

I shook my head.

“I’ve thought about this a good deal over the last twenty-four hours. And a big part of me wishes there was somewhere to point, even if it means pointing at myself. I don’t know what I missed. I don’t know whether there would have been anything to find even if I knew where to look. Perhaps the postmortem examination will provide some answers. But for right now, I don’t think I would change a thing, apart from how everything turned out.”

Sandi bowed her head, fingers working Cleo’s bracelet. She moved forward and stood over me as she spoke.

“I came a long way to meet you today and not because I am angry at you.”

Her self-possession was disarming, the calm and assurance in her voice unnerving in someone who had probably not slept and hardly eaten anything during the past twenty-four hours. I swallowed down the lump in my throat.

“I came here, needing to meet you, face-to-face, so that you would understand.”

I nodded but on the inside a part of me flinched.

“And, I need you to do something for Cleo.”

As soon as she spoke her dog’s name, I could hear the love in her voice, but confusion had taken a hold of my brow. I tried hard to twist it into concern and nodded again.

“Let me tell you a little something about my Cleo. You’ve met her, so you already know that for a Min Pin she was an absolute sweetheart.”

I smiled, and so did she, and something gave a little between us.

“Cleo loved people. She was my transparent dog. What you saw was what you got, as though you could see into her soul. And she loved to socialize. In the first four months she was with me, I made sure two hundred strangers picked her up and held her. We went to schools, retirement homes, malls, anywhere with people and noise and distractions. I had her meet men in hats, men in sunglasses, men with mustaches, men with beards. I got her used to skateboards, strollers, bikes, and motorbikes.”

This was not what I had expected. Where was the agony? Where were the accusations? I had failed this woman and her dog and here she was, on a mission to compress the essence of a dog’s life into a short story. She was considerate with her words, weighed their impact before letting them fly. I could have pretended to listen, my smiles, my nods, my laughs motivated by politeness and relief. I had anticipated confrontation, even hysteria, and here was
reminiscence and, without a doubt, joy. Her narrative was simple, perhaps ordinary, but it was her passion that had me entranced.

“Cleo loved to swim in the ocean. I know, weird for a Min Pin. She was always polite, never bit another dog, and she cared about other people’s feelings. Dogs’ too.”

A memory pushed forward and Sandi smiled.

“She used to go to a doggy day care and they looked after this sheltie who always sat alone, off to the side, trembling and frightened to play with the other dogs. And I would drop Cleo off and watch how she would carefully sidle up to her, inching her way closer and closer until she and the sheltie made contact. I’d pick her up and the girls would tell me that all Cleo did all day was sit next to this nervous little sheltie. And this went on for days, Cleo passing up her chance to play with her buddies so that she could sit next to this stranger and somehow make her feel better. And slowly, like kindergarten kids in a playground, Cleo won her confidence, convincing the sheltie no one was going to get hurt and it was okay to have some fun.”

I didn’t say anything, but the clinician in me was starting to feel sentimental and exposed. You take the kids to see a Disney movie and you’re the one pretending you’ve got something in your eye while they’re the ones indifferent to the plot and spilling popcorn on the floor.

Sandi was laughing.

“What?” I said.

“Well, the only dog getting hurt at day care was Cleo herself.”

I sighed into a smile. I liked her attitude. This woman should have been sleepwalking, stumbling through a fog of sorrow, but she had it together, her composure unnerving. To her credit, her words did not have the polish of a prepared speech. Instead they glowed with the warmth that comes of speaking from the heart.

“Cleo loved children, she absolutely loved them. Anytime we were out in public, if she saw or even heard children, she insisted we go
and see them. She would whine, tug on her leash, whatever it took to reach them. She would stand on her back legs, paw at the air, and insist they come down to her level so she could climb onto their lap and sit there, hoping to be petted. We don’t have any small children in our family, yet for some reason she had this attraction to kids.

“Of all the places we would visit, airports were her favorite. She was my constant companion and she always came with me on business trips, so while we waited for flights, Cleo would look for children. Find a group of kids and yours truly would be right in the middle of the mix, entertaining her new fans. She loved to do tricks and by five months of age she knew how to sit, stay, lie down, get off, give me five, roll over, leave it, kiss, shake paw, and spin. I don’t know whether she was more popular with the kids or their parents grateful for the distraction.

“There was this one time when we were in the Ottawa airport and Cleo was pulling her usual stunt, making a group of kids ooh and aah, when all of a sudden she left them and trotted over to this little girl who was sitting off to one side with her mother. Standing on her back legs she pawed at the girl’s chair, got her attention, and very gently licked her hand. The little girl checked with her mother before patting Cleo’s head and slowly, over about ten minutes, just like with the sheltie, Cleo made contact, climbing onto the girl’s lap and gently lying down. This was not Cleo around kids. Normally she would be out of her mind with excitement, yet with this little girl, Cleo was being careful and gentle. I looked over at the mother to make sure everything was okay and I noticed she was wiping away tears. When their flight was called she came over to me to thank me for bringing a smile to her little girl’s face. The girl’s name was Megan and they were on their way to the SickKids Hospital in Toronto, where Megan was being treated for bone cancer. It was so strange, this mother thanking me for what Cleo had done, for what this little dog had instinctively known was the right thing to do.”

And this was where I lost it. As a veterinarian I have always been able to keep my emotions in check in these difficult situations with clients, staying strong as part of my responsibility to the animal, especially during the gentle good-bye of euthanasia. But this time was different. The animal that had brought us together had already moved on, painlessly and peacefully. Maybe it was relief, the wait over, the encounter heartbreaking and sad but not bitter, not angry. Or maybe it was the woman running the narrative, the ease with which she conveyed her dog’s essence, so simple and understated yet brimming with pride and the privilege of having had any chance of sharing Cleo’s presence. Or maybe it was the subject matter, a dog with a gift for making a sick child smile, lost forever. For whatever reason Sandi Rasmussen split me open.