Last month, three days after my mother died, Laszlo had to have emergency surgery to remove a large tumour from his spleen. He bounced back wonderfully, and we hoped for the best.
When we came back from France, and picked the dogs up from the kennels, he seemed fine, if rather thin. We booked him into the Glasgow University Vet School, parts of which we can see from our flat, for further tests and scans.
The appointment was for Tuesday. By Monday, it was becoming obvious that he was slowing down again. When we picked him up today, after they'd kept him in overnight for further observation and tests, the only course we had left to us was to take him home, keep him comfortable (and spoil him rotten while we can), and wait for the time when we'd have to call it a day.
And there's enough blood loss that the vets wouldn't recommend a course of chemotherapy (because of the side-effects), even if they were confident that they knew which type of cancer he had.
Now, in a purely objective way, this is actually not a bad thing. We knew that the cancer would eventually kill him, almost certainly within a year; his father was riddled with cancer at a similar age. We're due to go to France for a fortnight in February, and a month or two in the summer; the prospect of something similarly terminal happening to him while he was in kennels, or with us in France in a foreign language and a foreign vet system, isn't something I want to think about for too long.
Which isn't to say that Cleodhna and I weren't completely crippled by the news. Margaret dying was comparatively easy: she knew she was old, she'd achieved pretty much everything she was interested in, she accepted death when it would come, and when it did it was quick. Laszlo has only just turned 7, had shown no signs of slowing down before this (Berkeley, just a few months older, is already showing signs of turning into an old dog), and has no idea of what's going on other than he's unwell at the moment.
The dog that, for almost all of his life, we could never tire out, who could run miles upon miles without batting an eyelid, now no longer wants to be taken any further than about a block or two from our flat. It's an achievement if he can go up the three flights of stairs to our flat without needing to rest.
Yesterday, we were stuck in our flat with only our two healthy dogs (and what a good idea it has turned out to be, to get a third dog - when Laszlo dies, Berkeley will still have another dog with him in the flat when we go out). We spent some time being miserable together; eventually, though, we decided we needed to look to the future, and talk about future plans, about getting a parrot (our Christmas presents look like being a couple of books about African Greys that can read bits of to each other), about getting another dog.
I spent a very emotionally taxing hour or so reading up about pet funerals, on the basis that no matter how bad it would be now, it would be worse after he'd died. It turns out that pet funerals are very much like human funerals - you can end up spending a hell of a lot of money on random frippery if you're not careful - with a few twists, such as: 1) if you're not careful, your pet could be cremated along with a whole bunch of other pets, and miscellaneous medical waste, because that's how the law classifies dead pets, and you could end up with a bunch of ashes that are only mostly your dog; and 2) as long as your horse was a race-horse, not a farm horse (commercial agricultural animals are covered by a different set of laws), you can get it cremated for merely £1,000.
Crucially, it turns out that Laszlo isn't anything like as debilitated by injury as some ill or aging animals could be. One of the sites I saw had a check-list of things that it basically isn't fair to let your pet have happen to it - reduced mobility, incontinence, pain, arthritis, etc. - and, thankfully, pretty much the only thing that's symptomatically wrong with Laszlo is that he gets tired very quickly. (Also he's shaved in some strange places because of the tests, so we're keeping the heating on a bit more than we would otherwise.) Our (Greek) doctor at the vet school summed it up as: he's slowly bleeding to death (internally), but in Greece that was considered not a bad way to go. There's no pain involved. When we make the decision that, for his remaining comfort, we should call it a day, our vet will be able to make a house call, and administer a soothing, painless cocktail of chemicals that will let him soothingly die in his own flat, with his own smells, surrounded by his dog and human pack-members.
Why can't we do that with humans?
