Life with Lilly - Softcover

Pelleriti, Rvt Anne M.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1452500991 ISBN 13: 9781452500997

Verlag: Balboa Press, 2010

Inhaltsangabe

Sometimes events and people change your life. Our lives were changed when we brought Lilly into ours. At 130 pounds she wasn't big for a Great Dane but her impact was. This book is our story of how our lives were affected, sometimes for better, sometimes not. It was always challenging, rewarding and interesting. They say life is the journey, Lilly made our journey enlightening, frustrating, fun and challenging. This book is a window into the life of our ride with Lilly, full of bumps, turns and great love.

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Life with LILLY

By Anne M. Pelleriti

BALBOA PRESS

Copyright © 2010 Anne M. Pelleriti, RVT
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4525-0099-7

Chapter One

There's nothing like hot, hideous dog breath blasting into your face to get your attention. Of course, that's what she's banking on. She lives for attention. Good, bad, it doesn't matter to Lilly. She is the consummate attention addict and always has been. I'm sure I played a big role in ensuring that, but most of it is her.

She must be exhausted. It's only 10:00 am, and the temperature is already in the eighties, with the humidity cranking along with it. The effort it now takes for her to move is monumental—at least that's how it looks. She's nearly eleven years old, which for a Great Dane is phenomenal. She has her health issues. She has lost twenty-five pounds in the past couple of years, which, much to my dismay, I can't find a reason for or a way to stop. She has arthritis in her spine, and she's probably a wobbler too. A wobbler is a congenital problem in several dog breeds with the vertebrae in the neck, causing nerve damage to the spine. They walk like they're drunk because even though the problem is in the neck, it affects the nerves to the hips and legs. She's always been a rear toe dragger, but now more and more she stands on the knuckles of her rear feet. That's actually better than the other way she stands, with a leg pulled all the way behind her, nearly bending backwards. She's completely oblivious to it; she stands there staring at you, patiently waiting for you to give her attention. She gets it too, because it is nauseating to see her leg that way and I have to upright it. Of course the attention and touching make her happy—a twofer.

We have the quality of life conversation more often now, but she still doesn't seem to have a bad quality of life. She sleeps on the couch and the bed and gets canned food twice daily, dry food at her whim, and all the biscuits she wants. I should live so well! Think of it, eating all the food that I want and still losing weight. If I could figure out her secret, I could make fortune!

She has been mostly a good dog, although she and I have had our moments. We adopted her at about eight weeks of age. I'm a registered veterinary technician and work at a small animal clinic across town and one of the guys I worked with had purchased a Great Dane puppy from a local breeder. Several weeks later the breeder called him to say she had a pure white female that needed a home. If he didn't take her, she was going to euthanize her because she was also deaf. Right, he took the dog. Who wouldn't? She was adorable, but what puppy isn't? She was definitely deaf. We stood behind her in the exam room, clapping hands and banging stuff together. She happily lay on the exam table, sleeping.

I think he had her two weeks. I got the phone call one afternoon. I could hear the howling in the background. Didn't I want a Great Dane puppy? When he first got his puppy, we discussed how I had always wanted a Great Dane, but I had a seventeen-year-old beagle mix at home, Juniper. She was just recovering from the death of her housemate a few months earlier. Juniper had spent most of her life in the "beagle way"—nose to the ground, chasing what she could, and sleeping in small places where the other big dog couldn't accidentally step on her.

I was resisting pretty well until he brought her into the clinic again. I was smitten. She was a pudgy little white fur ball. She came bounding into the clinic completely uncoordinated, with big blue eyes and the largest feet I have ever seen on a puppy.

I went home, apologized to Juniper, and informed my husband of the upcoming adoption. It didn't go well. Nearly twenty years before, after we were first married, I spent several months talking him into getting a dog. I always had a dog growing up and missed having one. He finally relented. At the Humane Society, there were two puppies left from a litter of Dalmatian mix. I tried hard to talk him into both. "Hon, we can't break up the family!" No luck. His response was, "I'll never have two dogs." We adopted Juniper two months later. A few years later, he was the one who brought home the third dog, Prima.

Chapter Two

I'd been trying to spend more time with Lilly lately. The previous week, as I left work, I called home as usual to have the "What's for dinner?" discussion. I don't believe we actually ever got to that part. Lilly had had a bad day. She had pooped on the couch and was wearing part of it, but that's not the worst of it. She has a habit of "burying" something she doesn't like, which, according to my husband, she had done with zeal in the couch. She had pushed it into every nook and cranny of the leather couch. To say that John was upset would be a tad understated.

As I hung up the phone, I started to cry. He was furious, and I could understand that. I thought this was it for her because she had done this two weeks before. He was so upset that the next day when we went out to dinner, he tried hard to get me to agree to put her down. It was at that point that I realized he believed that I would take her to work and do it without him. "Oh, I don't think so, buddy!" was one of my cleaner responses. There was no way I was taking on that burden myself. Lilly adored him. I'm an old shoe when "Dad's" home.

When I finally arrived home from work, I was a little more composed. John had calmed down. Lilly was clean from her bath on the deck—bloodied, but clean. She had paced on the deck so much that she had worn down two of the toes on each back foot so that there was not even any nail left. John couldn't put her "shoes" on her because she was wet, so she got new socks. Now when she walked around, she looked like a character from a Dr. Seuss book with long "flappy bits" extending from her feet. Perhaps she's really from Whoville.

She's always been very tolerant of her shoes or socks on her feet. It started a few years ago when we would take her for walks around the block. She would end up with at least one toenail worn to the quick by the time we got home. I would get it to stop bleeding, but within a few hours of carpet dragging, we'd be back at square one.

One day I pulled a sock on the offending foot. I taped it just above the foot and folded the top back over it. It was stylish—very stylish. She never messed with it. Go figure. That was probably because a few years earlier, she had a rather nasty slice in one of her toes. We couldn't suture it, so we bandaged it. What a nightmare. She would have that sucker off in minutes—neatly too, I might add, usually in one piece.

But the socks didn't last long on the roadway, so we started using old IV bags from work. We'd cut off the top, and her giant foot fit neatly into it. We lashed it around her ankle with the plastic tubing from the IV line, and it worked great. When we got home from our walk, if we weren't fast enough removing it, she'd bite at the bow until it was off. She was quite resourceful.

But as the months progressed, her foot dragging worsened, and we couldn't even make it around the block without getting a hole in her "shoe"—a blowout.

So one lunch hour, I went to Target to see if I could find anything that I could fashion into a shoe. They do make shoes for dogs, but they're made to protect the bottom of the foot, not the end and top of the toes.

I brought home leather gardening gloves and kids' beach shoes. The beach shoes actually fit her foot, but after a few steps, they were off. But the palm of the gloves actually fit her...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Balboa Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2010
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 1452500991
• ISBN 13: 9781452500997
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 88
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: preigu GmbH & Co. KG; mail@preigu.de; ; Lengericher Landstr. 19; Osnabrück; Niedersachsen; 49078; Deutschland