One Month Later

Ellie isn’t doing well. We had hoped that after her urinary tract infection cleared up, and her heart medications were adjusted, she would get some of her energy back, and it seemed to be working for a few days. But then, after eating her breakfast and taking her medications one morning, she threw it all up. We didn’t worry too much, until the same thing happened again later in the day. We called the vet’s office, too late to bring Ellie in, and the substitute vet told us that if Ellie kept vomiting we should take her to an emergency clinic, but don’t spend too much money, the vet said, because Ellie doesn’t have much time left. She left us some anti-nausea medication at the front desk (a liquid, because Ellie was still resisting her pills) and by the next day the vomiting had stopped.

But Ellie was still refusing any food soft enough for us to hide her medications, so we had to crush her meds into chicken broth and use the medicine dropper (from the anti-nausea medication) to get them into her mouth, or at least near her mouth. After she’d had her medication she was willing to eat some chicken treats and a Greenie, but when we took her outside for a walk she just sat on the grass catching her breath, looking frightened. I had to carry her back inside and then she just stretched out on the floor for hours. I don’t know when it started, but by the next morning we noticed that her belly was bigger than usual, despite her recent weight loss and limited diet.

            So we called the vet again. Our regular vet seems to have cut down on his hours, so we had to see the substitute vet again, even though I didn’t like what she’d said about spending money on Ellie. Why tell us to take her to an emergency vet clinic, notorious for overcharging for every pill, and then tell us not to spend too much money? But we were really worried about Ellie, so we went in and sat in the waiting room for an hour until the substitute vet could see us. As soon as we went into the examination room, the vet used a needle to check if Ellie’s abdomen was filled with fluid, and found nothing. She was so sure that fluid retention had to be the cause of the distention, but another needle stick came up empty too. She told us that it could still be fluid but she just wasn’t finding the right spot, or it could be something else, and she’d have to do an x-ray to see the cause of the swelling. But, really, you shouldn’t spend too much money on diagnostics given how little time she has left, she said, contradicting her own advice, again. I tried not to scream at her, because it wouldn’t have changed anything, so I just asked what she would be looking for on the x-ray and if she could just treat the possible outcomes either way. She gave Ellie a shot of the diuretic she takes in pill form every day, and suggested Gas-x in case the swelling was caused by excess air in her belly. She also recommended an appetite stimulant, which finally sounded like a good idea, and the vet tech demonstrated how to get the pills down Ellie’s throat in a way that they would actually stay down. The vet tech also gave us a week’s worth of Gas-x, to go with the liquid version of the appetite stimulant, and we paid for the meds and went on our way.

Mom sat with Ellie in the backseat of the car while I drove, all of us shell-shocked by the message the vet couldn’t stop repeating, that Ellie was going to die very soon. When we got home, Mom went to take a nap but I sat on the couch, staring blankly at the TV, holding Ellie in my lap (at least until she pulled away and stretched out on her own, she’s not a big cuddler).

Within a few hours the appetite stimulant had kicked in and Ellie was able to take all of her medications with pieces of chicken, and she even ate a full portion of her wet dog food, which she hadn’t been willing to eat in weeks.

            The next morning, though, even with a new dose of the appetite stimulant, Ellie wasn’t very eager to eat and only swallowed a few of her pills with her chicken. I had to give her the last two pills the way the vet tech had demonstrated (shoving them down her throat, closing her mouth and massaging her throat. The vet tech also blew into Ellie’s nose, but I skipped that part). Finally, by dinner time, Ellie was ready to eat again and we were able to give her all of her medications, though she turned her nose up at the wet dog food all over again. Her belly was still distended, despite the diuretic and the Gas-x, but she was able to walk down the stairs and outside for a short walk.

            I have no idea what our time line is. Ellie hasn’t been coughing for weeks now, which was the original symptom leading to the diagnosis of heart failure. Instead, her breathing is labored, and even a short walk wears her out for hours.

            It has only been a little more than a month since Cricket’s death, so this all just seems too soon. The other day, Mom and I went to the beach to find stones to put on Cricket’s grave marker. We are planning to scatter her ashes around the bases of the paw paw trees, and leave a few stones to mark her presence there. Cricket loved going to the beach. She loved the way the wind blew through her hair and the smell of the seagull poop and the feel of the sand in her paws, as long as she didn’t have to go into the water, so I did my best to channel Cricket as I searched for stones: bumpy pink ones and flat grey ones and smooth white ones, and one red stone shaped like a heart. I filled a bag with them all so that we will have enough to choose from when we are ready to let Cricket go, which isn’t yet.

            It feels like I can’t finish grieving for Cricket while I’m worrying so much about Ellie. For now, our priority is helping Ellie to feel as comfortable as possible, by making sure she can take all of her medications, and finding the foods she loves the most on any given day. And, when Ellie is up to it, we take her outside so she can sit on the grass, or sit with her grandma on the Birthday Bench, and listen to all of the sounds of the world swirling around her. She really seems to like taking a time out just to listen to the birds and the honking cars and the planes flying overhead. She’s still curious, and capable of joy, even if there are fewer of those moments than there used to be.

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?