Ranger Knees

Ranger’s surgery to correct his bilateral luxating patellas has been completed.  He was in the doggie hospital for two nights and after the first night the surgeon texted a picture of him to us. In the photo the little guy was wearing an Elizabethan collar, otherwise known as the Cone of Shame.  He looks strung out and sad.  If he didn’t have this surgery performed he would be completely lame by the time he was four or five.  His left knee is already arthritic because the distal end of the femur no longer has a groove for the patella to track.  This means his left kneecap dislocates often causing him great discomfort and the right one will suffer the same fate.

How much pain does a dog feel?  Scientists have concluded that they feel pain as much as humans do but they process it in a different way. 

There is little debate about this fact.  The difference is that dogs are programmed not to express pain because in the wild an injury is a weakness and weakness means death by predation.  Because they are masking their pain dogs seem to have a remarkable ability to function while injured, but they are experiencing the same metabolic stresses that humans do and like stoics of all breeds a dog in pain isn’t a healthy animal – physically or emotionally.

Like a dog, a human’s experience of pain is determined by a number of factors: psychological, physiological and environmental.  And although people demonstrate compassion for those suffering from pain, it continues to be seen as a weakness and something to be avoided.  At their best people feel compassion for those suffering because they know pain and it hurts them to see others in distress.  But at their worst humans ignore or discount another’s suffering because they don’t want to experience it in any form.  Alas, as is often the case humans have more in common with wild and domesticated animals than we would like to think because we often forget that we are part of the animal kingdom not an exception to it.

Homo Sapiens have a long-standing relationship (between 16,000 – 32, 000 years) with Canis Lupus Familiaris and there is evidence to suggest that dogs have influenced our behavior as much we have theirs.  Dogs are intelligent.  They scan human faces to determine people’s emotions and they have the capacity to respond to a vocabulary of between 30 to 1,000 words depending upon the breed.

Ranger is a smart little guy who demonstrates both compassion and deception.  He can surreptitiously pick up acorns, a chicken bone that I tossed out side two weeks ago and deer poop (apparently a delicacy) with the stealth of a street urchin.  When I realize that he is holding a morsel in his mouth he looks at me with his jaw open slightly more than neutral and he responds to my accusatory stare with one that says: “What?  I don’t have anything in my mouth.”

This is when I play my master trump card: “Drop it!”

The last time we took Ranger up to the Adirondacks he ran fast, hard and long on Saturday and could barely walk on Sunday.  But every time we went outside he bolted for the door as if his lame left leg wasn’t necessary to sprint across the fields with his buddy Homer, a black lab.   Both dogs are two years old and Ranger, a 40 pound mutt consisting of lab, terrier, chow-chow and probably cattle dog is all muscle.  When I walk him he pulls as vigorously as our previous dog, Otto, a one hundred pound lean German shepherd, did.  Ranger loves to run but he is now in chronic pain.

I had bilateral total hip replacement surgeries before the age of fifty and the similarities between dog and master were too great for me to ignore.  I could not watch my dog (my son) suffer and wind up unable to use his rear legs in just a few years.

What happened and why so young?  Genetics is the answer.  Just as my hips were destined to fail from birth Ranger’s knees faced the same fate, so instead of euthanizing him in the not so distant future we chose surgery.  He was not consulted in this decision and as the procedure rapidly approached I felt guilty for not discussing it with him.  The recovery takes two months and he must be confined to a crate for eight weeks except for bathroom breaks.

I drove him to the vet hospital at dawn.  The facility is an hour away and as we drove with his head resting on my hand he gazed up at me and I felt like I was betraying his trust.  He trotted jauntily to the door curious about what adventure we were in store for this morning.  He looked at me questioningly as if to inquire about our reason for returning to this house of many dogs and cats so soon.  Hadn’t we been here just a few days ago?  They ran the credit card, I signed the receipt and I watched his little bob tailed behind disappear behind a heavy wooden door.

I was now in a void.  The divot beside me in the passenger seat was empty as I drove home.  When I opened the front door to the house there was no supine creature wiggling silently on the rug waiting for me to say hello, so he could approach with his tailless rear-end wagging forcefully.

When we picked him up from the hospital the evening of the third day.  They brought him into the waiting room after an extensive briefing about the protocol for his recovery.  Jamie, the surgical nurse, supported his hind legs with a strap. Both of his thighs were shaved bare and a six-inch scar ran from top to bottom along the lateral side of each meaty drum-stick but the saddest part of him was from the neck up.  His huge Elizabethan collar made it difficult for him to walk.  He was so sedated and traumatized that he couldn’t keep his head up enough to keep the rim of his cone from digging into the ground and anchoring him in place every other step.  I knelt down to greet him and he tried to crawl into my lap.  I stuck my head into the white funnel that cradled his shiny black head to kiss him and to tell him that I loved him and his eyes looked like disco balls.  He was in there, deep inside behind the pain and behind the drugs and what I saw was sadness.  We got him home without incident and the poor guy couldn’t get comfortable.  He slept fitfully and keened throughout the night.  We took turns reading to him and napping.

Now I know what it is like to have an infant.  The only thing that stopped him from crying was when we crawled into the crate with him so he could snuggle.  This usually consisted of him hugging my leg or partially revealing his groin which when healthy is his default position for expressing profound connection.  He loves to have his perineum and inner thighs rubbed.  At present it is a bit difficult for him to spread e’m but he performs a truncated version that allows for a two-finger rub, which elicits the tiniest groan that the human ear can register.

The afternoon of his first full day home I sat just outside of the entrance to his crate and began to cry as he stared deep into my eyes expressing his ennui: a combination of pain and boredom with a tinge of exasperation.  What was missing was accusation.  There was no “You did this to me!” which of course I had.  The credit card receipt for $4,000 sat on my desk as proof.  As the tears rolled down my face a look of concern erased his sorrow and he lurched forward and with stolid determination plowed onto my lap where he settled in like a warm bag of soybeans.

This is why we love dogs.  They love us unconditionally and they want to please us.  Although Ranger was in terrible pain he didn’t want me to suffer.  For the past two weeks our daily routine has been regular.  I feed him, give him his pain meds, antibiotics and a sedative at 5 AM.  I put a towel underneath his belly and attach his gentle leader around his muzzle.  I lift the towel to support his hind-quarters with one hand and steer the cone to avoid the ground and any other obstacles along the way with the other and we begin our odyssey.

He moves like a drunken sailor: the cone bobbing and swaying alternately slamming into furniture and snagging on sharp protrusions on otherwise smooth surfaces.  I lift his skinny ass down the steps (it weighs nothing) and we pause for a moment to breath in the surroundings.  The overly friendly squirrel who hangs out beside the back door stares at us from ten feet away where he has repositioned himself after leaving acorn shards on the stoop.  He likes to tease Ranger by moving slowly and just out of reach.  Ranger has more important issues to attend to but he acknowledges the furry tailed rodent and we head for his favorite pee spot.  The little boy moves slowly on stiff legs and pauses intermittently to listen, look and smell his environment.  Pooping is a big deal at this point but he has delivered several days in advance of his expected delivery date.  That’s my boy!  For a forty-pound dog his turds are substantial.  The opiates he was given and his lack of appetite post-surgery affected his bowels, so we were told not to expect a poop for five days.  He came through on day three.  This Herculean feat was not without incident.  The agony of squatting on newly reconstructed knees to dispel a rock solid dump produced screams that made me wince.  “Good boy!”  He was much improved as I swung his butt up the steps and he kept apace on his hand-feet, I pitched the door open with my free hand having released the towel used to support his hind quarters and back into the crate he went.  “Mission accomplished!”

This experience is a mis-en –abyme.  Ranger, his procedure and his recovery (to the day – both of my hips were done the first week of July) are a microcosm of my experience.  I see me in him. Yes, more anthropomorphism!  We are similar types: we are both high strung, crazed athletes who can’t stop moving.  Pain only adds to the frenzy and recovery is exquisite torture.  After my second replacement for three weeks I couldn’t sleep and I couldn’t get comfortable.  Part of this was my fault: I decided to read Solzhenitsyen’s The Gulag Archipelago.  I thought it might be a good time to tackle some Russian authors.  This was a bad idea that nearly ended in suicide after a physical therapist subluxed my new prosthesis extending my recovery by several weeks.  But I couldn’t justify killing myself after having such an expensive procedure – I might hurt the surgeon’s feelings, but I doubt it.

Now I am caring for a four legged beast I love more than myself.  I see him struggle with the same issues I did but with a much better attitude.  He continues to inspire me and my love for him grows with each day as he becomes stronger.

But this is only the end of week two.  We have six more weeks of recovery and when the staples are removed and the cone disappears on Thursday Ranger will be ready to resume his activities of daily living as they say in the medical industry.  

Unfortunately science disagrees.  This is when the differences between the two of us will come to the fore.  I knew what I could and could not do and although I pushed the limits (especially after my first hip was done – leading 5.10 after seven weeks), I knew when to stop.  The only things holding Ranger back from bolting after a deer and destroying the surgery is me, his mother and the gentle leader.  He is smart and he is going to spend all day in the crate thinking of ways to escape and when we walk him he will be determined to run.

And this is when our similarities will come into conflict.  We both are short on patience.  Yoga and meditation are my tools for dealing with this and Acepromazine (a tranquilizer) is his .  Ultimately this process is his not mine and the pain and anguish he experiences is that of a dog who loves and trusts his parents and we will do everything we can to mollify his suffering.