I got my dog, Mira, in November of last year, after several months of debating with myself about getting a cat and then realizing that I was hesitating because, actually, I wanted a dog. I sent in some applications, heard back from a shelter that thought Mira (then named Mirage) and I would be a good match, then went to meet her.
I knew before I went that she’d been abandoned in a trailer with a bunch of other animals, for who knows how long, because this is something that people sometimes do to animals, don’t ask me why. I think many of the other animals were dead when they found the trailer; I think they told me that at the shelter, though that sounds so horrible that surely it can’t be right. Before that, she had lived in a pen outside for several years, also with a bunch of other animals. I guess someone would go by and feed them periodically. I think the first year or two of her life were pretty normal — she lived with a man in a house — but at this point she’s almost six years old and the majority of those years have been probably pretty horrific, even by a dog’s standards.
I waited in the little enclosed yard at the shelter, and she walked in all big and shy and very nervous. She didn’t want to meet me; she didn’t want to meet anyone. I’d brought treats, but she didn’t want them; she just paced around and avoided looking at me or at my friend Lillian who’d come with me or at anyone else who was there, because why would she want to look at anyone, why would she believe that anyone would not be a danger to her. It’s not difficult to understand why we, people, act the way we do, when we think for even a single second about why animals act the way they do. It’s all just facts leading to feelings.
Eventually, I lay down on the ground on my stomach (see photo), and she walked over and ate some treats out of my hand, and she was still really scared (you can see from the photo that her tail is tucked between her legs) but she let me pet her.
Mira had heartworm when I adopted her. Heartworms are parasites that live in the dog’s hearts, lungs, and blood vessels. They look exactly like cooked spaghetti, and they cause permanent damage to the organs and tissue they inhabit. The shelter where I got Mira didn’t know how long she’d had the heartworms; all they could tell me was that she’d completed the first part of the treatment, which is a month of antibiotics to prevent infection, and that she was ready for the first of three rounds of injections, the first of which, as I understand it, sort of puts the heartworms to sleep, and the second and third of which actually kill the heartworms. The injections left her debilitated and disoriented. She was so weak during this time that I had to lift her into the car to get her to the treatment center.
The time after the injections is the most important, the vets kept telling me. She has to be totally still. No barking. No playing. No running. No walks longer than ten minutes. No excitement. Apparently, what happens after the injections is that the worms die and decompose in the bloodstream. If the dog’s heart rate goes up, those dead worm pieces can cause embolisms or blockages or strokes. “I’ve seen some dog owners just not take that seriously, and that’s when the dogs really get into trouble,” the vet told me. “She could die.” I kept asking for how long, how long should I keep her quiet, how long should she rest, how long until she can just be a dog, and they kept saying just, as long as possible, as long as you can do it until she gets a heartworm test, six months after the last injection. I gave her the pills they told me to give her; I covered my fingertips in peanut butter and shoved the pills in the wads of peanut butter and let Mira lick it off and trusted the pills would do their job.
She coughed a lot the first couple of months I had her, and she was really lethargic, which are both symptoms of “moderate” heartworm disease, I learned. She got over the cough, with time, and started having more energy, which made it progressively harder to keep our walks short. Her growing energy kept me going outside even in the deadest, coldest of winter. Even on the days when I felt like there was no life to be found or to be lived anywhere, there I was, outside and alive.
Mira tested negative for heartworm yesterday. I didn’t realize until today that I had been holding my breath for seven months, that as I did all the things they told me to do, I was also acutely aware that if I messed it up, she might die. I didn’t want her to die; I wanted her to live, so I did all the things they told me to do and thought about her living and not dying.
Somewhere in all this, I remembered the song “Me & My Dog” by boygenius (Lucy Dacus, Julien Baker, Phoebe Bridgers), which reaches its yelling-big-guitar apex at the following perfect, perfect verse:
I wanna be emaciated
I wanna hear one song without thinking of you
I wish I was on a spaceship
Just me and my dog and an impossible view
Sometimes my apartment feels like a spaceship full of all the things that no one knows about me, from where I send dispatches of select information like Houston, we have a problem and hope to hear back from someone far away, though I still have to solve the problem all on my own. Mira is here in the spaceship, every day a reminder that the problems are worth fixing if for no other reason than their solution is the precondition for fixing hers. I have to put the oxygen mask on myself before I can put it on her, and before I can, finally, exhale.