Spike
/
Photograph DAVID MAYOCCHI
It is not quite a week ago, and I am driving home to Brisbane from south west Victoria to help my husband David and son Otis who have been carrying a load, and to be with our dog Spike in her last days—although I don’t know that yet.
I was heading to Tasmania to finish a novel, hiking the fourteen-day Great South West Walk en route. On the Monday morning, following a few days without signal, I emerged high above the Glenelg river to learn from David that on Sunday, Spike had fallen over in the kitchen and couldn’t stand up. She’d been tired on walks for a couple of days before that, and hadn’t eaten, which was rare. Assuming it was a tick, David and Otis had taken Spike to the animal hospital. The on-duty vet team thought it more likely she was in heart failure—a murmur had been detected earlier in the year, our own vet had detected it recently, and we were booked to see a cardiologist in January. The hospital staff delivered clinical information neither David nor Otis understood, asked them to decide if they wanted Spike resuscitated, and then whisked her away to an oxygen cage, saying her status could ‘change quickly’, sending my twenty-one-year-old son home certain they would be calling in the middle of the night to say his companion of fourteen years had died. They put Spike on a medication to make her heart work more efficiently, and a diuretic to clear fluid from her lungs.
After the call, I walked the fastest route, road not trail, into the little town of Nelson, to find transport either to an airport or to my car seventy kilometres away. When I mentioned heart failure, Ronda at the visitor centre—who’d lost three dogs, one in her arms on the way to the hospital—told me I wouldn’t get there in time. ‘But of course you’ll try,’ she said, kindly. Ronda gave me the number for Gary, who runs the All About Us Bus hiker service. ‘If you can’t get Gary,’ Ronda said, ‘I’ll drive you to Mount Gambier when I finish work and you can fly from there to Adelaide or Melbourne and on to Brisbane. I know the flights,’ she added. ‘I used to work for Qantas.’
And then, hope blossomed in the form of Dr Elizabeth, an internal medicine specialist who’d cared for Spike (and us) a few years before, to check something that turned out to be a seasonal allergy. Elizabeth told Otis they had a better quality scan this morning, and she wasn’t sure heart failure was the cause of Spike’s collapse. Maybe it was her old back problem, revisiting. And Spike had a history of pancreatitis, so maybe that was involved. Otis and I turned this into hope; Spike’s back could be fixed, and pancreatitis could be managed. I called Gordon from the Great South West Walk friends group to confirm there was telephone signal in the second week. ‘And if you need retrieval, you can call me,’ Gordon said. ‘We help in emergencies.’ So on Monday, the bad day that quickly became good, we hatched a plan that I would continue my hike back to the car and decide what to do after that, once Spike was out of hospital.
Kate and her friends had canoed down the river I’d hiked alongside—we’d shared a campsite on their first night and then called hello a couple of times during the days—and they came into Nelson just after me. They told me they’d pray for Spike. Melissa, who I met at the caravan park where she was staying with her husband, four daughters and a Cavoodle named Charlie, brought over a bowl of roast potatoes, just because, and brought Charlie. My friend Kim, who’s lost two loved animals recently, was by my side on text, and Louise, who is always there by phone and who knows things, said it might be time to let Spike go soon. Yes, I thought, far in the future.
Elizabeth told Otis that Spike had something happening in her kidneys of concern, and diarrhoea, and they took her off the diuretic and kept her in hospital for three days. When she came home, on the Wednesday, I was on the trail again, but it soon became apparent to Otis and David that Spike was still unwell, little appetite and breathless on short walks. I checked in whenever I had signal but Otis bore the brunt of care and talking to vets while David was at work. On Friday, Otis asked me to come home. I called Gary who, within the hour, picked me up in a carpark three kilometres from a campsite on Cape Bridgewater, dropped me at my car in Portland and charged reasonably when he could have charged whatever he liked. On Saturday, before dawn, I started this three-day drive home.
When I arrive on Monday, it is both not so bad, and worse than I could have imagined. Spike eats the steamed chicken and rice I cook, and it makes us happy to see her eating again, but she cannot walk more than ten metres on flat ground without becoming puffed. We take her to our local vet clinic at Red Hill where Fraser, Steph, Bonnie, Marie, Mel and their colleagues have cared for Spike since she came to us at eight weeks old. Spike failed puppy school here, spending the classes hidden between two bags of food on a shelf while the others rollicked around on the floor. They gave her a certificate but she didn’t learn much other than that DOGS ARE VERY DANGEROUS and she was DEFINITELY NOT A DOG. Spike is afraid of everything except the humans she loves, and especially their food, her lifelong passion, and all the vets have treated her for some sort of contraband eating, chocolate from a dining table when no one was looking, macadamia nuts because we didn’t know, sultanas from the floor.
Today, we see Steph, who learned early that a constant stream of treats made Spike less nervous about visits to the vet. Steph says she doesn’t think fluid is building up in Spike’s lungs, which is positive, but the heart murmur is more pronounced than in November—I register the surprise on her face when she puts the stethoscope disc to Spike’s chest—and there is still something off with Spike’s kidneys. The next day, we return, as Spike’s resting respiration rate, which Steph has told us to measure, is too high. Steph keeps her at the practice for the day, initially intending to flush fluid from her lungs with a diuretic, using IV fluids to protect her kidneys. But Spike’s respiration rate comes down at rest later that day, and Steph thinks the higher rate might be upper respiratory tract congestion. The kidneys are still a problem, but Spike has a urinary tract infection, and maybe that’s the issue, so Steph prescribes antibiotics. Spike ate some chicken, Steph says. I rekindle my hope, telling myself that once the infection is better, Spike will be too. That evening, when Elizabeth calls for an update, I tell her the news is good—‘Give Spike a pat for me,’ she says at the end of the call, and means it. We will know more when Spike sees the cardiologist next Monday.
Spike’s resting respiration rate remains low that Tuesday night, but on Wednesday, it goes up again, and it doesn’t come down at rest. We begin to understand—Otis first and then David and finally me— that Spike is mortally ill. She wags her tail rarely, and only weakly, when one of us returns to the house, or when our former neighbours Gail and Adrian visit. She eats hardly anything. She doesn’t get up on the beds, preferring to be on the floor on her own, often moving away from us, something she would never normally do. She can’t walk more than one house front before she needs to be carried home.
We start to talk about how much suffering we will let Spike endure. We know she hates being in strange places among strangers—once, we had a call from a night nurse at a hospital when she’d been in for something minor and they’d intended keeping her overnight because of the anaesthetic: ‘Can you come and pick up your dog?’ the nurse said flatly. ‘She’s upsetting all the other dogs, who actually are sick.’ Spike has spent three of the last seven days in hospital, and then another at the vet. The list of drugs she is on has grown from one to three then five then seven. On the next Monday, she will be spending still another day away, with the cardiologist.
On Thursday during the day, Spike’s respiration rate goes up further and breathing starts to look as if it’s an effort for her. We are pretty sure her abdomen is swelling up. I watch her pull air into her lungs. It happens so quickly. At some stage, we decide Spike will not be going back into hospital, and then, that if she is suffering, we will let her go. None of us is sure we’ll be able to manage it, just that all three of us have come to that place. It’s hard when medicine seems to offer hope.
I call Red Hill in the afternoon and speak to Bree, a recent addition to the practice who hasn’t treated Spike, and she gives good advice about making sure we check Spike’s respirations in deep rest, which we do; it’s not reassuring. Spike doesn’t eat during the day at all, but Steph had started an appetite stimulant, and I am grateful for that, because just before bed, Spike eats some mince, with at least a shadow of her old gusto. Her breathing gets shorter, more laboured, and all through that night, on the floor of our room, she is wakeful at times. We sit a vigil with her, carrying her when she wants to go outside to the back yard as she can’t keep her legs up on the slippery wooden floorboards anymore. She stands on the grass unsteadily, does a wee, tries to walk around and then we come back in. I am most frightened she will become distressed if her breathing becomes too difficult. I call the hospital in the wee hours and ask if there’s any more we can do to make her comfortable at home until we can contact our vet, but the person on the desk tells me there’s not and I should bring her in for assessment, confirming, when I ask, that Spike must be taken away on her own, which we have said we will not do again. After the call, I realise that all I have on hand is the cough mixture with codeine that Steph prescribed. If it comes to it, I decide in those dark, dark hours, I will give her as much of that as she’ll take.
By dawn, Spike is holding her head up, extending her neck, trying to find the air. With the sun, she settles on the back verandah, and David sits by her, stroking her gently whenever she wakes and lifts her head, seeing her back off to sleep, the deep wisdom of his own body guiding him. I call Red Hill when they open at seven. Bonnie, the vet who cared for Spike after one of her culinary adventures led to pancreatitis, squeezes us in on a fully booked morning. On the way in the car, Spike surprises us, raising her head out the window to feel the warm sun and wind on her face, one of her favourite things. We drive around the block a second time so she can feel it again, fast down the hill so the wind is strong. When we tell Bonnie we think it’s time, she says that animals can trick us for a long time about how much pain they are experiencing, but once they can’t, it’s awful. We’re not there yet with Spike, she says. You are doing the right thing, however hard it feels. Bonnie gives us strength we don’t have, and we will remain grateful to her.
Bonnie takes Spike away for just a few moments to get her ready, which Spike hardly notices, and when they return, she lays Spike on the bench on her side looking at David, all three of us with our hands on her. She’s still breathing those ragged breaths, and then not, and it is as close to perfect as a death could be. Bonnie leaves us alone with Spike’s warm body, telling us to take as long as we need. A few moments later, Mel from the practice, who cut Spike’s hair, knocks on the door and asks if she might come in to say goodbye. She pats Spike so softly. I love you, she says, tears in her eyes.
I am in that netherworld of grief now, disbelief peppered with jags of tears, and guilt—should we have waited, gone one more round with the hospital system?—but mostly what I feel is shocked sadness. Spike will never jump up on the bed again, using, in her later years, the step stool Otis built for her. Can that be true? She will never eat our underpants again, or possum poop, or pull so hard on the lead on the way up the street to get to dinner she almost chokes herself. She will never again sniff under Otis’s door on the way in from a walk to check he’s in there safely. She will never set herself up under David’s desk on a Saturday. She will never wander over and sit on me to demand a pat when I’m doing yoga. I pushed her away sometimes. I can’t believe I did that. I’d give up yoga altogether for just one chance to abandon the mat and spend the hours with her.
Spike’s life was a gift, to us and to Gail and Adrian and Ellen and Fin and Georgie and Kim and Astrid and Luka, and many others. I want to thank her. I want to say I was only strong enough to let her go because she taught me what love is, the one, consistent, unconditionally loving creature in our house, with a great fondness for young people and their smells. And food.
To all those kind strangers who carried me home to be with Spike, you have my gratitude, and to the people who helped Spike pass from life, and those who helped us in her passing, thank you from our whole family.
Vale Spike MacColl. Come back as a dog. You were ace at that.