A (NEW) UPDATE ON LOUIE

Well, so I took Louie to the animal hospital last night, and he stayed the night and had his biopsy done today on his swollen lymph nodes. I picked him up after work and was told to wait in a room so that the technician could speak with me before I took him home.

You know the drill: Keep the sutures clean, don't feed or water the dog too much in the first couple of days after surgery, keep an eye on him outside (in fact, walk him to do his business like you used to do when he was a puppy), excise the horseplay if you have more than one dog, etcetra, etcetera.

Just...when I was waiting for Jackie the Tech to come and talk with me, I kept eyeing Louie's stuff that another worker there had left in the room with me, on the table, in a little plastic purple-bone-ringed bag. His Zip-Loc bag of food that I had brought, had he been hungry the night before. His red leather collar, with the little metal tag that says "Louie," and then, below it, my telephone number. The red bandanna that I've been tying around his neck. I'd taken them out of the plastic bag and they'd just lain there, on the metal examining table...and I'd just felt such a powerful sense of loss, I could hardly hold back the burgeoning tears. I'd known that they were just fragments of, not him, but, still, I couldn't help my thoughts.

I'm not going to dive off into MemoryLand, right now--that's a post for a different day--but, oh man, dem were some tough thoughts.

Jackie the Tech came in and explained to me what they'd done. They'd biopsied the nodes below the nodes that we had all noticed and that the results would be known in about five to seven days. The vet, who was off that afternoon, would call me with the results. Jackie told me that not just the nodes we noticed were swollen, but all of Lou's lymph nodes were found to be swollen. She also imparted that, during the chest x-ray I'd agreed to, they'd not found "quarter-sized dots," which would imply lung cancer, but that they had found what they reckon are bronchial lesions. The heartworm test came back good, but his liver count was elevated--not alcoholically-elevated, but elevated, like 15 to 20 points too high. "Wow," I'd said, half-joking, "sometimes I give him a little beer; would that elevate his counts?" She'd politely laughed. "Not unless he drinks like a fish." I'd smiled. And had thought, And what rambling wreck shall I call my King Louie?

And she'd left and brought him back into the room, and I had seen nothing but My Louie. A little drug-drunk, with a shaved and sutured area on the left side of his neck, but My Louie. Adorable and inquisitive, little puppy face still peering, bright-eyed, from the whitened muzzle. And my heart melted. With pack-pride. With love. Just. As. It. Always. Does.

And always will.

So the new and abridged update on Louie is this: I'll wait, for five to seven days for the biopsy results, and thus the chess game will enter another stage.

One thing changes, though. Per the doctor's orders, I'll have to keep the two dogs separated for a spell--maybe two or three days, maybe longer. No horseplay, you see. That could screw up the sutures.

Okay, then. Louie sleeps upstairs. With me.