A Health Update on Atticus

Atticus climbing Chapel Rock on Pine Mountain last week.

I never worry about protecting Atticus in the wild.  Bears, moose, raccoons, porcupines, skunks, raging rivers, sheer cliffs, powerful winds, high heat, subzero temperatures, howling blizzards.  He’s handled all of these easily enough and knows himself well.  Nature is where he is most at home.  He’s a part of it and equal to it.  It’s where he belongs and it’s where he blossomed. 

Where I feel the need to protect him is in society, whether it’s in brick and mortar villages or on-line communities.  If you read our book, you know that I raised Atticus as an individual, to be “his own dog."  More importantly than his size or his breed has always been his right to be an individual.  I like that his journey has been a distinct one.  It’s also been a respected one, and not just by me, but by those who know him well. 

So you’ll excuse me if I am a bit vague when it comes to some things pertaining to him, because I do my best to keep him out of the all-encompassing boxes we tend to throw upon dogs.  In our little world, I never really noticed his breed or paid heed to it.  Instead, I’ve considered him an equal when it came to the peaks we have climbed over the last nine years.  With all we’ve been through together, he’s earned the right to be my equal.     

Recently, my hiking partner has been struggling and not only in the mountains.  On our regular twice daily one and a half mile walks around the Village of Jackson, he’s suddenly been lagging behind.  He’s always led; I’ve always followed.  It’s typical to see him twenty or thirty yards ahead of me, hugging the side of the road as oncoming drivers looked upon him with a curious eye.  But over the last six weeks, something’s happened. 

He starts out beside me, but after the first quarter of a mile he drops behind and I wait for him. 

Half way around the loop his tongue comes out and we stop and get a drink along the shores of the Wildcat River or at the counter of the Backcountry Bakery and Café. 

On the last third of our walk, his panting has been noticeable and while I never pretend to know much of what he’s thinking, it has been clear, as he trails behind me that something is terribly wrong as he looks up into my eyes with what I guess to be sadness.  After the walk, he often spends ten minutes panting heavily. 

This is a far cry from two months ago when we hiked to the top of North Moat and back.  It is a ten mile round trip with some darn steep sections. He handled it perfectly, always ahead, and looking back to check on me.  It was like all our old winter climbs.

The other morning we did Pine Mountain, which is more off a walk than a hike.  It’s four miles of easy going, other than one steep climb that we skirted.  The only time he pushed ahead of me was when we reached the viewpoints, which he knows by heart.  He’d trot ahead, his tongue would hang out, sit to look out over the landscape and when I caught up to him all I could look at what him.  My heart was pulled downward into a sea of sadness.  It looked as though the years had finally caught up with him.  So gray. So tired.    

Over the recent handful of days, the difference between who he was two months ago and who he had become is shocking.  He no longer trots forward to greet friends.  He seems to be a different dog.   

This led us to meet with Dr. Rachael Kleidon this morning at North Country Animal Hospital. She knows my hiking partner well and has worked with us for a few years now.  I had already filled her in on all that was happening when I sent her a text last week.  Chest x-rays showed his strong bones and that beautiful heart of his.  No signs of any major problem.  His heart is a bit bigger than when he was young because he’s had a lazy heart murmur for six years that Rebecca Malakoff, a cardiologist at Angell Animal Medical Center, keeps track of on a yearly basis.  Blood was drawn; an ultrasound performed.  We spoke of our options.

Rachael will call and confer with Rebecca today and we’ve got a plan to implement that has to do with a medication Rebecca’s been expecting to have to prescribe to Atticus sooner or later,  but was always surprised he hadn’t needed it yet.  Perhaps that’s the work of all those mountains.  Who knows? 

Traversing the curiosities of the human body is difficult enough for doctors, but non-human animals are all the more difficult because of the language barrier.  It can be a lot like putting together a puzzle, seeing which piece fits where and trying to figure out the mystery that lays behind the discomfort. 

Soon enough we’ll take a trip into Boston to see Rebecca Malakoff, but for right now we are in Rachael Kleidon’s caring hands and I feel pretty good about it.  Rachael tends to err on the side of caution and whenever we’ve worked with her it’s gone well.     

Rachael did point out that what is going on with Atticus has nothing to do with the chemotherapy he went through in the latter five months of 2013.  It’s a heart thing.  He’s growing older. 

Rachael feels confident that we will be able to figure out the problem and it won’t keep Atticus off his mountains if we fit together the puzzle in the right order.    

This was our first step in taking action against whatever is robbing Atticus of his breath and the pleasure he takes being in nature.  There will future steps, but today it feels good to have a plan of action and two good doctors looking after him.

For now, he gets to continue being Atticus M. Finch, and soon, we hope, he’ll be back to doing what he most enjoys. 

Looking at him sitting on the banks of the Ellis River and watching it pass by our backyard I smile at his peculiar spirit and I’m looking at a text that was just sent by a friend who has surrendered to nature as much as we have.  It reads, “How can we not love the lives we lead?”

Amen to that life, to the mysteries and challenges, peaks and valley.  Amen to it all.