A few weeks ago, maybe after the apocalyptic day in New York, when the skies turned orange and everything smelled of smoke because of the Canadian wildfires, Ellie started to cough.
It’s not that she’d never coughed before. In fact, she has a full menu of interesting coughs and sneezes to her name: including the how-dare-you-pull-on-my-leash cough, which sounds like a frog is jumping out of her throat; and the excuse-me-where’s-my-dinner cough, which is more like a whisper, with her head turned away for deniability. But this cough was something new. It sounded like she was choking on something, or suffocating, and then she’d sort of cough up whatever it was and collapse as if she’d run a marathon.
The first time I witnessed this, I was afraid she was going to die right in front of me. I may have taken it more seriously as a result of the debarking surgery that was done when she was still a breeding dog, because the scar tissue from that surgery has made her throat more constricted than it should be.
It was a few days before I witnessed another coughing attack, and I was shocked by it again, especially by the way she seemed almost paralyzed for a couple of minutes afterward, but then she was fine, and I was relieved. She started to cough more frequently after that, but with less seriousness, and I wondered if maybe it was just an allergy, exacerbated by the air quality, and, really, I was distracted. Cricket had been diagnosed with kidney disease and needed fluids every day, and we’d had a car accident and had to buy a new car, and I’d had to go to five or ten doctors’ appointments, and prep for my second oral surgery (the follow-up to last year’s surgery), and that’s only the top line of the chaos that was going on around here, and there was no way to keep up with all of it, so each time Ellie stopped coughing and seemed to be breathing and walking and eating okay, I just breathed a sigh of relief and let it go.
But last week, when Cricket had to go back to the vet for a follow up blood test, and I was between medical appointments, it seemed like a good opportunity to bring Ellie in to be seen as well.
Of course, as soon as we made the appointment for both of them, Cricket, who had been doing surprisingly well, had a downturn. She couldn’t eat and she was woozy, even without the calming meds, to the point where she allowed me to insert the needle for the fluids without a fight. We all went to bed that night thinking this was the end, and we’d have to leave Ellie home the next day, and bring Cricket in to the vet for the last time.
But in the morning, my little phoenix rose from the ashes again, climbed up and down the stairs herself, ate her breakfast and demanded more.
So we went, all together, to the vet, me as the chauffeur in the front seat, Mom sitting in the back with both dogs, so that Ellie wouldn’t have to sit alone back there (Cricket has never tolerated sitting in the backseat. When we would put her in a harness early on in her life, she’d escape within thirty seconds and make her way up to the driver’s seat). With Cricket and Grandma sitting next to her, Ellie got through the ride without crying once, though she was still breathing heavily.
I carried Cricket into the vet’s waiting room, not wanting to have her walk on the hot ground (Ellie refused to be carried), and the vet took Cricket out first, to take the blood, and then focused on Ellie and her cough. I tried to reenact the cough for him, so he’d know what he was dealing with, and he gave me a look and said, “Can you do that again?” It took me a second to realize he was joking. If he has a sense of humor it is very, very dry. He checked Ellie’s heart and looked in her mouth and took her temperature (which she found horrifying), and he gave her an anti-inflammatory shot and sent us home with antibiotics and a cough suppressant for her to take twice a day, and he said to call him in a few days and let him know if she was coughing any less (because if not, he’d want to follow up with an x-ray).
And we were free. This visit, which, for a few hours there had seemed like it would be the last time I ever saw my Cricket, turned out to be routine and quick. When we got home we were all ready for an afternoon nap, maybe me more than everyone else, to be honest.
Both dogs were thrilled with their treats (with their separate meds hidden inside) once the naps were over: Cricket discovered a great love for sardine juice, and Ellie discovered that she had no such great love and stuck with pieces of chicken.
Ellie coughed less for a few days, though she became more and more picky every day about the treats within which we could hide her pills, but then the coughing came back, and Ellie was barely eating anything at all. We called the vet and he said to stop the antibiotics, because they might be causing her lack of appetite, but keep up the cough suppressants for a few more days and then call back.
Pretty quickly, though, it was clear that Ellie was getting worse. She was breathing heavily, leaving treats uneaten (where Cricket could easily steal them), and refusing to walk more than a few feet at a time. So we called the vet for an emergency appointment this morning and brought her in, and as soon as he saw her he said she didn’t look good at all. He took an x-ray and said her heart was huge and misshapen, and there was fluid collecting around her heart. He gave her a shot of a diuretic and told us he would send the x-rays on to a specialist and then let us know what medication she could take going forward. But, he said, she could collapse at any time. He couldn’t explain how she’d gone from having a little bit of a cough to being in heart failure within a week, but most likely the cough had been caused by the enlarged heart in the first place, pressing on her trachea.
Ellie’s home now, still breathing heavily, but peeing rivers, which will hopefully relieve some of the pressure on her heart. But my heart is overwhelmed. Cricket is oblivious: sleeping on Grandma’s lap, eating well, and barking her frustration at all of the attention her sister has been getting. And now we wait, to see what comes next.
If you haven’t had a chance yet, please check out my Young Adult novel, Yeshiva Girl, on Amazon. And if you feel called to write a review of the book, on Amazon, or anywhere else, I’d be honored.
Yeshiva Girl is about a Jewish teenager on Long Island, named Isabel, though her father calls her Jezebel. Her father has been accused of inappropriate sexual behavior with one of his students, which he denies, but Izzy implicitly believes it’s true. As a result of his problems, her father sends her to a co-ed Orthodox yeshiva for tenth grade, out of the blue, and Izzy and her mother can’t figure out how to prevent it. At Yeshiva, though, Izzy finds that religious people are much more complicated than she had expected. Some, like her father, may use religion as a place to hide, but others search for and find comfort, and community, and even enlightenment. The question is, what will Izzy find?















