Part II: June

(If you have not read the previous post, “What Happened to June,” you can find it by simply scrolling down past this one.)

At this writing (7:45p.m. on Monday, September 10, 2018 to be exact), June is still missing. And I am still hopeful that she will be found and returned to me… unless she didn’t survive her first night out alone, in which case there is nothing that anyone can do. But I try very hard not to think about that.

Harry Cauley told me today, “When you have a dog taken by a coyote,” (which, tragically, he did--two, in fact) “it tests what you really believe about nature.”

This post is not meant to be a philosophical musing about whether there can be good or evil intentions in Nature, or whether the Universe loves and watches over my June-bug with the same care afforded the coyotes in my neighborhood. But if I am honest, that question continues to loom in my mind, as much as I work to replace or suppress it.

Also occupying my thoughts is this:

Several days after June’s adoption, I was sifting through all her paperwork, sorting out what I would need to get her licensed, and I came across a handwritten note attached to her spay certificate that mentioned a problem had been identified with the kneecap on her left hind leg. She was still wary of being touched in those first days, so I had not had the opportunity yet to give her a bath or a belly rub, but I had noticed a strange stiffness to that back leg when she walked. I called her to me right then and ran my hand down her leg. Inside her thigh was an ominous lump. So the next day we were off to the vet.

As soon as he examined her leg—palpating and manipulating it hard enough to make her tremble all over, though she never cried or growled or tried to squirm away as the vet tech and I held her steady—his eyebrows drew together and his forehead wrinkled.

“I don’t like what I’m feeling,” he said, “and I don’t understand it.”

Moments later the vet tech led her away for x-rays, and I paced around the room, anxious, worried, texting a friend for comfort and support.

She came back to me wagging her tail.

“We gave her a few treats,” the vet tech said. “She was perfect.”

Of course she was.

What wasn’t perfect was her leg.

“Come on in this other room,” the vet said, “you’ve gotta see this.”

The x-ray of her leg was appalling. “Extremely distressing,” was the phrase the vet used.

Somehow, at some point, June had sustained “severe trauma” to her leg, so much so that the end of the femur was twisted horribly, the condyles (those rounded protrusions at the end of the femur) unable to fit correctly into the grooves in the tibia.

“That lump we were feeling is possibly a mass of bone fragments,” the vet said, “not her knee. Her knee is over here on this side, displaced by the twisted femur.” He frowned again deeply. "I don't know how this happened to her, but I find it extremely disturbing." As did I.

“So what do we do?” I asked, still staring at the screen, still trying to process what I was seeing, how she was possibly walking—no, running—what had happened to render this dog’s leg in this condition, how many months she went enduring the pain with no treatment and no comfort in her injury.

“Nothing.”

“Nothing?”

“There’s nothing we can do. We can’t untwist her bone.”

“So… What’s your prognosis?”

“Well, eventually,” he said, turning off the screen, tidying up the room, making like he was about to leave, and never meeting my eyes, “she will develop arthritis in that leg.”

“And I’ll know this…?”

“She’ll let you know. It will be very painful for her.”

“And then…?”

“And then I’ll prescribe painkillers. Because that’s all we can do.”

“So this will be years from now, right? I mean, she’s still a youngster. She’s not even two yet. And we still have lots of daily walks and playing in the dog park ahead of us.” I stroked June’s head. Scratched behind her ears.

The vet looked up sharply at this and finally looked me in the eye. “I want only moderate exercise for her,” he said sternly. “Nothing exuberant.”

“But how long until…?”

He looked away again. “A year. Maybe two.”

And with that, he was hurrying out of the room, muttering something about catching Dr. So-and-so to show him June’s x-ray as he’d never seen anything like it before.

June got a few more treats as I paid the bill. Her enthusiasm in eating them distracted me for the moment so that I didn’t cry until I was back in the truck with her. Then, of course, I cried all the way home, rubbing her back as she lay curled in a ball in the passenger seat, telling her what an amazing girl she was, that phrase, “nothing exuberant” running on a continuous loop in my head as I recalled the walks in the woods we’d already had, June filled with the joy of life until she was bubbling over with it. And I assure you, it was absolutely contagious.

It took a day or two for me to fully process what the vet had said. At first, I had to work through all that sorrow for what June had endured all alone. When I finally came out from under that cloud, I began to think more practically. Well. We would just get a second opinion. This was not a death sentence. We would stay positive and I would watch her daily for any signs of favoring the leg.

I had already started looking for an orthopedic specialist when June went missing.

As I mentioned in the first post about June, these ramblings were supposed to have been told with June lying just behind my chair, on her favorite dog bed, not from this quiet room without a dog in it. But I feel compelled to tell the tale of her bum leg now because it’s meaningful to the situation. My girl is a fighter. She’s a survivor. She has the sweetest temperament, but she is also tenacious. Whatever is happening to her now, while she’s away from me, I pray that she summons all her resources to stay safe.

I am still hopeful… and hoping everyone is joining me in the one powerful vision of June coming home where she belongs.