What My Dog Taught Me This Summer

A pet parable.

If we have learned anything over the past week, it is that Americans love their pets. So let me take a detour from my traditional musings to tell you a story about my dog Mimi, the pet pictured above. It has been quite the summer for her.

As her white face suggests, Mimi is getting up here in years — twelve of them, in fact. She was a rescue from a Tennessee kill shelter. During the depths of the pandemic my family got super-bored and ran a DNA analysis of her. We discovered that she had fourteen different breeds in her. Mimi might very well be the most emotionally intelligent member of the Drezner household. When one of us is feeling sick, Mimi will usually keep us company in our bed while we recover. She is great with kids and a bit iffy with other canines, though she gets along great with all the neighboring dogs. What I am saying is that she is a very good girl and is ridiculously cute. Her ears are adorable and prehensile, a trait she shares with Yoda.

Here’s another recent picture of her sleeping:

In the late spring and early summer, we started noticing Mimi drinking a lot more water than she used to. Ordinarily, she slept through the night but started needing to be let out multiple times during the evening. Her energy started flagging. We had traditionally let her on most of the furniture, but she began having accidents, so we had to put a dog diaper on her. It was getting to the point where my spouse and I felt like we were parenting a newborn again.

We took Mimi to the vet and received a diagnosis of Cushing’s disease, which matched some of the symptoms. Cushing’s is sometimes associated with a brain tumor, which did not bode well for her future. Mimi was prescribed meds to try to slow the disease symptoms, but they functioned a lot like chemotherapy. She was weaker than before, barely eating and constipated. Mimi lost a considerable amount of weight; her ribcage became visible, and her harness loosened up because she was becoming a skinny bitch.

My wife and I could see the handwriting on the wall, and quite frankly, we were dreading it. Both of our children were home for the summer, and they grew up with Mimi. My daughter in particular is very, very fond of our dog.

End of life decisions are never easy. My spouse and I agreed that our short-term priority was getting Mimi through the summer alive and defer any end-of-life choice until the fall, when both of our children would be out of the house. Our daughter kept saying, “maybe they will find the right medicine for her!” with so much hope in her voice. I was… less optimistic. Mimi was weak enough so that we were picking her up to get her into our bed for a spell.

Anyone who has had a dog knows how this story usually ends. In our case, however, something rather unexpected occurred last month.