Cricket gets Fixed

            When Cricket was six months old, it was time for her to go to the vet to get spayed. She’d had all of her shots and reached the required weight and the earlier we got it done the less traumatic it would be for her, or so they said.

            My previous dog, Dina, didn’t get spayed until she was eight years old, because my father forbade it. We had to wait until my parents split up and Dina came with me and mom before we could take her to the vet and even find out if the operation would be safe, or helpful at her age. She’d spent years having false pregnancies and hormonal mood swings that left her half crazed and hiding under beds. Finally having the operation meant that her second eight years were much calmer, and happier than her first eight.

            I wanted to do everything right with Cricket and we had no plans to breed her, so the surgery was in her best interest, health and mood wise, but it still seemed wrong to make such a big life decision without her input. It seemed wrong to call such a surgery “being fixed,” as if humans would feel like they were improved by becoming sterile.

            I was conflicted, but we decided to get the operation done anyway.

            The long day started for me the night before the surgery, when we had to search out all of her treats and rawhides and put them away so she couldn’t sneak food after nine o’clock – because having food in her belly would make anesthesia dangerous. No one said she could die, but that’s how it reverberated in my head. I trusted the vet, and the girls who worked in his office, but I was still afraid. They might lose her special squeaky toy, or cut the wrong things out. Or they could return the wrong dog to me and I wouldn’t know the difference.

As soon as we’d dropped her off at the vet the next morning, I went home and started cleaning the apartment; the floors in particular, because Cricket liked to participate too much, chewing on my hands, fighting the broom, destroying the mop, and barking at the vacuum cleaner. This was my one chance to get the work done, unobstructed.

            But with each passing hour, I felt younger and more anxious in the silence of no puppy. I didn’t feel like a warrior mother, ready to break down the walls of the animal hospital if they hurt my baby. I felt inexplicably helpless. Cricket was my fluffy, happy girl, full of life and full of piss and vinegar, and I was afraid that the surgery would change that about her, depress her, make her too much like me.

            We called the vet at One thirty in the afternoon, to see how the surgery went, and they said she was fine and sitting up in her cage, but would need a few hours to recover before we could take her home. I should have felt relieved, but I didn’t. I couldn’t relax, or focus on much of anything. I grated sweet potatoes for a new latke recipe, walked to the library for knitting books, vacuumed again, but I kept thinking: I want puppy. Where is puppy?

            We had to wait a while when we reached the vet’s office, because they’d found her chewing on her stitches and had to clean her up all over again, and add the plastic Elizabethan collar to stop her from reaching the stitches. When they brought her out, she pawed the collar off her head onto the floor. So that was a few more minutes of figuring out how to loop the plastic collar through her own collar to make it stay on and, finally, she was ready to come home.

            I examined her in the backseat of the car while mom drove: her scar was raw, like meat, as if her skin was on inside out. The stitches were black.

            She struggled walking into the house because she couldn’t see past the collar to figure out where the walls were. And she was exhausted. I carried her to her puppy bed, but even then, she couldn’t get comfortable.

            But once the drugs wore off and her stitches started to heal, she was puppy all over again. She didn’t roll her eyes at me and point at her scar and say, Bad Mommy, the way I expected her to. She only hated me a little, and she milked it for a few weeks, asking for extra treats and scratchies and curling up with grandma whenever possible. And of course she healed. I’m just not sure I did.