Baxter has cancer, but he doesn’t want anyone to feel sorry for him.
The word from home on my dog come from two fronts: A disappointing pathology report and heartening dispatches from Mom.
The pathology report, performed on the tennis-ball sized tumor vets removed from Bax’s liver last weekend confirmed that it was malignant. It’s apparently a relatively slow-moving form of cancer, so it’s hard to tell how long it will hold off.
By the looks of things, it should be a little while, at least. Mom reports that Bax is doing surprisingly well, able to get out and walk and, most importantly, keep food down (his repeated vomiting, likely because the tumor was pushing on his stomach, was what landed him at the vet in the first place).
Word is, he’s now back to fighting with Mom’s dog, George, over possession of rawhide treats and the fam is even having trouble keeping Bax from trying to jump up on the furniture (it’s for his own good – no jumping allowed because he still has about 12 staples cinching together his surgical wound).
During his followup visit yesterday, the vets were reportedly also surprised at how quickly he’s recovering – once they were able to get him to come out from under their table and stop shaking (he clearly hasn’t forgotten what the put him through last time).
So it seems the surgery has at least prolonged his life.
It’s hard to know how much time he would have left even without the cancer. When we got him from the Humane Society in 2005, he was listed as three years old. But the first time we took him to the vet, we were told, “Oh no, this dog is much older than that. So we think he’s somewhere between 9 and 12 now.
Which is not young for a 20-pound dog, but we got a little spoiled because our last dog, Shaggy, made it to 17.
To understand my attachment to Baxter, you need to know a little bit of my history with Shaggy. She and I grew up together, essentially. We picked her up at the shelter on my fifth birthday, shortly after we moved to a new house with a nice big yard next to the Sauk River.
I lived in that house until I left for college and she was always there waiting for me when I came in, madly wagging her tail. After angst-filled days of junior high and high school, I’d come in, drop my backpack on the floor and just sit there on the stairs with her and let her remind me that, in the words of Stuart Smalley, “I’m good enough, I’m smart enough and dog-gone-it, people like me.”
At the end of my senior year of college, I landed in the hospital, my circulatory system torn apart by meningitis. While I was there, Shaggy, her sight and hearing almost completely stolen by age, developed pneumonia. I never got to say goodbye.
A year later I was still recovering, at home in Minnesota and confined to a wheelchair while I rehabbed what was left of my legs. Mom and I decided it was time to get another dog.
So we went back to the Humane Society and, as I wheeled past one cage after another filled with frenzied, barking dogs, I came upon a furry, white-and-brown mutt sitting calmly in a corner, unfazed by the chaos.
“That’s the one I want,” I immediately thought.
His name was “Bear,” but I renamed him “Baxter” after Ron Burgundy’s dog. I needed a little comic relief.
As soon as we got home, I used my arms to push myself out of the wheelchair and onto the living room couch. Baxter looked up at me for just a second, then jumped into my lap. From then on, we were best buds.
He was really the perfect dog for that time and situation. He wasn’t much for running, so he didn’t mind at all that I couldn’t run, or even walk. The one bit of physical activity he did occasionally enjoy was retrieving one of his cloth toys so we could play tug-of-war. And that was actually quite good physical therapy for me. It helped me strengthen the grip of the right thumb that was going to have to get me through most every manual task for the rest of my days.
Most of the time all Bax wanted was to sit next to someone and be petted. And he didn’t mind if it was me with my torn up hands. He didn’t care about the scars or the missing fingers and he taught me not to care about them as much either.
God gave me a great gift when he set that dog in my path.
So it was tough leaving Bax when I went east for grad school, and I had been hoping to bring him here to Topeka with me, after the busy legislative session.
But now I’m sure it’s best for him to stay home with Mom, Dad, Grandma and Dan. His greatest joy has always been being around people and at home there’s almost always people around.
He’s done so much for me, he deserves that love and attention for as long as he has left. As long as he has that, he'll be happy, cancer or no cancer.
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