Shelley arrived in the back of a big white pickup truck at about 3pm on Tuesday.

She didn’t have the name Shelley yet; she was still just ‘the very sweet grey female surrender about four years old’ to everyone.  Her paperwork simply called her “Surr.”

I didn’t hear the truck pull up.  It was a regular workday and I was in the downstairs office as usual, completely immersed in the computer.  I was expecting her to arrive some time soon but I must have been far too engrossed in work to hear the wheels roll up the drive.

Knock knock.  “Um… Helen is here with a dog for you”, said one of the staff, carefully opening my office door.  The door being somewhat blocked by the bodies of the two Huskies I call my own, lying hard up against it like an eight-legged draught excluder. This was their usual position, and one they were not easily disturbed from.  I grabbed the spare leash sitting on my desk and headed out, swinging the door widely as I went, and sending Ashi swooshing gently across the floor with the momentum.  She goes flying this way regularly and she must enjoy the ride else surely wouldn’t keep coming back.  At least that’s what I tell myself to feel less guilty about the thud she makes when she hits the wall.

“Hi Helen, nice to meet you, thanks for coming all this way”, I said, waving her in.

Helen is one of the rare breed of rescue volunteers willing to give up her time so homeless dogs can tear up the back seat of her truck, chew through her leads and spread pound pong on her towels while she ferries them around the state.  Today she had brought me Shelley, the latest rescue dog to be sprung from Renbury Animal Farm.  Shelley brought something too – the stench of chlorine disinfectant all the pounds use to combat parvo.

When I saw Shelley in the back seat I had the usual mix of emotions.  A combination of ‘oh she’s beautiful!’ and ‘what the hell is that?’ – I admit I’m one to have an occasional ‘I’m fine if it’s behind glass but please don’t open the door’ moment.  She looked, like most pound dogs, somewhat disheveled but her eyes were bright and alive and when the door opened she was two feet out of the truck before Helen caught her and pushed her back in to unclip her collar.  Shelley had her reprieve and was coming to me to care for her as a foster home until she was on her feet again and could be adopted by a new forever home.

We’d heard about Shelley through the grapevine, something that’s quite common in rescue circles.  Strange emails from people you don’t know end up in your inbox informing you almost anonymously and in about dogs in need at this or that shelter.  The kind of emails Columbian drug lords use to organize shipments of things that ASIO works very hard to intercept.  Short and sharp and signed in a pen name that defies tracing.  The name of Shelley’s drug lord was Jane, and she’d sent me a two-line message from Hotmail the day before to let me know about Shelley.  She described her as “due immediately” which in rescue terms means she could be put down at any time, almost certainly because she was a surrender.  Pounds don’t have to hold dogs that are surrendered and can take them straight out the back for a needle if they have no room.

It doesn’t cost too much to get a dog out of the pound, and Renbury is pretty good on that score.  Shelley was $125 and for that she was held overnight, vaccinated, chipped, registered, heart wormed and all wormed.  Cheaper than the vet!

On the way from the truck to the dog run Shelley gave a few well-timed coughs and stopped to look up at me with big brown eyes.  Damn.  She had kennel cough.  And wow, she sure had a talent for the sad-eyed face.  Well, if the kennel cough was the same flavor Kita brought from Renbury two weeks before, all my dogs were now immune so what the hey, bring it on.  Of course Renbury also had parvo so Shelley was still heading for isolation for a while.

It turned out that Shelley didn’t have parvo, or at least she showed no ill effects.  At four years old she may be an adult carrier or have symptoms too mild to detect, but having a carrier around isn’t a problem – unless you have puppies.  Canine parvovirus is classified ‘ubiquitous’, which means technically it’s everywhere, so to me whether Shelley had it or not wasn’t important.  All the dogs here were over 12 months and vaccinated, and even for new fosters coming in, it was less risk than keeping them at the pound.

I took Shelley into the dog run, closed the gate and turned around to size her up more closely.  Poor girl.  She had part of her left ear missing, a good dose of fly strike on her right ear and an elegantly placed cut across her nose that was scabby and in need of cleaning.  On the upside, she had wonderful, marvelous teeth, so clean and shiny they gleamed.  She obviously worked hard at keeping them that way, because when I left she started cleaning them again on the wooden gate, trying to buzz saw her way out of the compound. In the end she must have decided she either wasn’t going to get out, had made enough sawdust for today or realized her teeth were clean enough to start with.  In any case she stopped chewing and moved on to the more serious business of howling.

To be honest she was not a bad howler, nor was she a bad chewer.  She was just feeling hardly done by, but then she had endured three days in the pound, almost two hours tethered to the back seat of a strange truck and was now condemned to solitary in an unfamiliar dog run.  Heck if you did that to me I’d be onto my local member quicker than you can say “civil rights”, so a couple of howls weren’t out of line.

The howling stopped before long.  Mostly because I was bathing her and it’s quite hard to howl through soap bubbles.  She needed a bath, her coat was oily and dirty, her skin was flaky and she still had that awful Clorox disinfectant smell that takes weeks to disappear, and I didn’t want a dog that smelled like a hospital corridor.  After her bath she decided to leave off the chewing and howling, go back to the sad eyes and just leave it at that.

Time passed and she nursed herself through kennel cough, helped along by a particularly distasteful course of antibiotics.  The pills may have helped, but then again her kennel cough could be viral or bacterial so who knows.  I figured if nothing else the taste would take her mind off her throat, which was probably raw and tender inside.  When the worst symptoms passed and she was well enough the vet let her be admitted for desexing.

Of course her cough was still somewhat infectious, so desexing was one of those in-and-out-and-then-we-can-breathe-again affairs.  She was in by 11 and ready to go home by 2.  It was all by special arrangement, to minimize the impact any contagion would have on the vet’s regular business.

That afternoon when I picked her up she looked really good.  She had that chemically happy expression that only a horse-sized dose of painkillers can bring, with the glazed over eyes and the tail that wags for no reason.  She probably had no idea who I was or what was happening, but she was just fine with the world however it came, and obviously enjoyed the way things looked through her methadone haze.  Back home she was understandably in the mood for sleep, so curled up quite happily and dreamed her heavily medicated dreams for a few hours.  When she woke up that evening she wasn’t much into food, and so refused her dinner.  Of course, on medical advice, I still had to give her the last of her antibiotics pills, and as I pushed them down her throat I couldn’t help thinking they really don’t make much of a meal, and maybe someone should develop antibiotic kibble?  You could call them Bacteri-o’s.  Okay, so my mind was wandering as much as hers.

The next morning was Sunday, and overnight she’d swapped her sad eyes for her really sad eyes.  She looked utterly miserable.  She’d had a peaceful night’s sleep on a very comfortable foam bed, one that even had a velour towel draped on top to keep her from the ravages of a bare mattress.  It wasn’t lack of sleep though.  Something else was not quite right.

When you own a dog – or a baby – you tend to lose your bashfulness.  You monitor bowel movements closely and spent a lot of time scrutinizing pee to check if it’s maybe too dark or too light, too much or too little.  In the morning she looked to be peeing just fine, and apart from walking to and from the back yard on leash she’d had no other physical activity since the surgery, and no contact with other dogs.  It was strict bed-rest for her, but for some reason she was slowly going downhill.

Mid morning the vomiting started, just a little at first and only bile.  She still wasn’t in any mood for food so she hadn’t eaten now for 36 hours.  She was still drinking fine and was as bright and alert as the painkillers would allow, so there wasn’t any reason to panic yet, some nausea can be expected after surgery.  Yet something was definitely wrong.  I reached for my handy Google guide to the universe and started researching doggy illnesses related to fever and vomiting. Parvo came up again and again but I’d already talked this over with my vet long before, and Shelley’s symptoms didn’t match.  Moreover I already knew that parvo has had way too much free publicity and so tends to be heavily overdiagnosed.  By mid afternoon I was on the phone and talking my way past the receptionist to the vet, knowing they were only open to emergencies on Sundays and would not be keen to talk to an overprotective hypochondriac like me.  Sigh, they really are quite accommodating and do very well to put up with my demands.  Except the receptionists know me by voice now, so if the Sunday calls are going to continue maybe I’ll need to work on a new accent.

“Keep her off food and water for 24 hours” was the vet’s advice, and I was happy to comply.  I was told I could also skip one dose of the antibiotics which the vet thought might be irritating her stomach and causing the vomiting.  It sounded like the right therapy for now, Shelley was still alert and with rest she might reach equilibrium soon.

Mid afternoon passed and evening came.  She was throwing up more often now and I was running out of paper towels, not to mention clean covers to put on her bed.  It wasn’t her fault, and she looked so distressed each time it happened, as if she knew she was making a mess and wanted to apologize.  Poor thing.  I caught myself pacing around the room a bit and realized I was more worried than I’d let myself admit.  The light outside was going, and with it any chance to get in touch with my vet again before tomorrow.  It felt like it was going to be a long and lonely night ahead, and to top it off as if on cue, a dark grey thunderstorm was rolling in.

At 9pm and three vomits later, my instincts were saying ‘enough’ and she needed more help now than I could give her at home.  She wasn’t getting any better and in fact I could see her getting worse as the hours passed.  I began weighing up the risk of waiting till morning to get her to the vet, versus being over-reactive and rushing her to the emergency clinic. If she stayed home she’d be sleeping in the bedroom so I’d be able to keep a close eye on her but the possibility of dehydration was still on my mind.  And of course there was still the uncertainty about was causing all this that seemed to magnify the problem even more.  I decided to wait another hour and see.

Just then she threw up a fourth time, and this time the bile was dark.

“Hello, Emergency Clinic, can I help you?”  She was going to the vet.

With some dogs when you look into their eyes it’s easy to miss the personality they show and you could be forgiven for simply seeing a vacant, empty stare.  It’s not so easy to do that with Huskies.  They look back at you.  A Husky’s eyes will tell you exactly what they think and feel, their whole emotional lives are written right there on their face.  It’s not hard to read them and it’s more about empathizing than idealizing, and when you look into the eyes of a dog like Shelley as I did that Sunday night, you see trust and dependence and pleading more clearly than at any other time.  It’s never about the effort it takes to help make a difference in a dog’s life, but it’s even less about the effort when the dog really needs you.

The thunderstorm chose that exact moment to burst forth in torrential downpour, and the dozen steps from front door to car soaked me to the skin.  The car trip was fun in a masochistic kind of way.  It was pitch black and the roads were starting to flood, but somehow I still managed to get into a groove, switched on the radio and pretended it was a normal evening’s drive.  I even had some fun playing with the rear windshield wiper.  Since I’d had the motor fixed in spring it had never rained hard enough to use it and I’d been dying for a chance to try it out.  Such trivial things kept me occupied, maybe I was avoiding reality.

The whole drive a voice inside my head was saying “What the hell are you doing?”  Because of course none of the days since Shelley first landed with me were what you’d call the smoothest, but then taking this stuff on was self-inflicted wasn’t it.  Now here I was squinting to find any signs of lane markers as I hurtled through a 90 zone, sick dog in the back with the possibility of projectile vomit coming at me through the cargo barrier at any minute.  But surprisingly the voice in my head wasn’t angry, it had an innocuous and wonderfully unobtrusive tone to it, much like elevator music.  Perhaps it was the Kenny G track on the radio that was helping me stay centered.  In the end reality kicked in and I realized none of this was so bad, Shelley wasn’t at death’s door and the emergency vet was only fifteen minutes away.  Besides, I like Kenny G.

Emergency vets are a strange place.  I was a first time visitor and so the receptionist was helping me get my details in the computer.  At the same time a woman was in tears in the next room, the distress in her voice was patently obvious.  I’ve only heard crying like that a few times before and it’s something you don’t forget.
“Surname?” asked the receptionist.
“Peterson”, I replied, “s – o – n”.
The muffled sobbing drifted into reception through the pink door that divided the rooms. Tap tap tapping sounds on the keyboard obscured the sobs momentarily.
“Dog’s name?”
“Shelley.  E – y”.
A burst of sobs started anew and reverberated around the room.  The tapping keyboard had no chance of hiding the sound this time but I swear the receptionist timed her keystrokes in the hope they’d cover the noise.  It didn’t work.
“It sounds like the saddest part of your work”, I said, nodding in the direction of the pink door.
The receptionist smiled weakly and nodded, “We just had to put her dog down” and went back to her typing.

Shelley was seen almost immediately and we were led to a consulting room around the corner.  I gave the vet Shelley’s whole history with as many details as I could recall, and he checked Shelley over thoroughly.  His diagnosis was not conclusive but he was thinking he wouldn’t need to keep Shelley overnight and that she would be okay until morning. Maybe I had over-reacted?

Just then a Staffy arrived with breathing problems and the nurse came running in to get the vet, who excused himself in a rush, grabbed some items from the shelf and hurried out.  Shelley and I waited for a while.  Eventually Shelley got bored with waiting and decided to throw up.  She and I coordinated to deposit the mess as neatly as we could in a corner of the room, then went back to sitting on the exam bench to wait.

The vet wasn’t gone long and when he returned he picked up from where he left off, saying Shelley could go home now.  I just pointed meekly at the corner and said, “She threw up again, sorry about the mess.”
The vet paused to consider this new turn of events.  A moment later he was firm in saying, “She’s staying overnight, I want her on a drip.”

By the time I finished driving home the rain had stopped.

The next day Shelley was transported from the emergency clinic back to my regular vet, which is great service if you think about, or would be in happier circumstances.  I swapped phone calls with the vet throughout the day but the diagnosis was still inconclusive.  Shelley had ultrasound tests to look for internal hemorrhaging but the results were unclear.  Slight internal bleeding from her spaying wounds was still a possibility, and she apparently had thickened intestinal walls due to some kind of irritation, but at the end of the day she was showing some signs improvement and apparently had not thrown up for some hours.  In fact by the time evening came around she was ready to pose with the staff for her eight by tens, and was only too happy to do so when I went to see her.  To see the look of recognition on her face and the light in her eyes when she first saw me coming was an unexpected but wonderful surprise.  She turned into a happy wiggly puppy and the pain dropped away from her face, it was delightful to see.  Despite the improvement though the vet still recommended she stay overnight for observation, and to see if the vomiting had truly passed.

The evening at home without her was distinctly lonely.  Meal time passed and there was one less bowl to prepare, it’s those times when you really notice a dog is missing.  It was sad to think of what Shelley had been though but the consolation was that she was in the right hands and the hope that she could come home tomorrow gave something good to look forward to.

Now I’m convinced doctors spend a lot of time practicing their inscrutable voice so they can give you bad news gently when they have to.  When you get a phone call from them you never know whether it’s good or bad until you’ve had a chance to understand and consider all their words.  The next morning’s call from the vet was like any other except for the news that Shelley had worsened overnight.  The vet had done another ultrasound and x-ray first up and was disturbed by what appeared to be a blockage in her intestine.  His report was that the shape and material was not readily recognizable, but that it looked flattish and round.  “It could be anything”, he said, “we will need to go back in to find out, and if it’s a foreign object we can remove it quite simply with a small incision along the bowel.”

This was not the news I had been expecting.

When you’re faced with a choice like that there really isn’t any choice, you have to keep moving forward.  To do nothing is only an option in theory, a by-product of our logical thinking, and when you live in reality you choose from the options before you that get you to your goal.  Shelley had to get well and if another procedure was needed then maybe that was the best stepping stone to recovery.  It was the only choice available.  “Go ahead”, I said.  “I hope it goes okay”, was all I could think of to say.

For Shelley, if ultrasound and x-rays could not find out what was wrong, then her best option was to find out first hand, this is often the way of things in medicine.  One investigation leads to another until enough has been discovered to make a diagnosis.  Test after test must be done, and in this case, the test was being done by scalpel and human hands instead of test tube.

My heart really wasn’t in my work that day, but at the same time it was a welcome distraction to worrying about Shelley.  I’ve never thought of myself as impatient or someone who suffers from an insatiable need to know things, but that day I simply could not wait to find out what it was that had found its way into Shelley’s bowels.  I racked my brains about what Shelley could have gulped down in such a short time over the weekend. Did she find something in the car to swallow in Saturday’s trip from the vet?  The back of the wagon is a dedicated dog area and I don’t keep anything of that size and shape back there.  Did she eat something at home?  What do I own that’s flattish and round and of indeterminate material?  I couldn’t come up with anything, but couldn’t leave the question alone.

The next call from the vet was late afternoon, “It wasn’t an obstruction, I checked her out from stomach to rear end four times and there is no blockage.  Her lymph nodes are exceedingly swollen and her intestinal walls really are thickened due to irritation.  It looks like a viral infection that’s causing her ileum to stop functioning, and without her intestines moving fluid through properly she’s having to vomit.” I understood what he was saying, her intestines had stopped working, the infection was causing fluid build up in her stomach and without moving the fluid through the bowel the only way out was to throw it up.  Shelley didn’t have parvo but she may have the next best thing.

I went to visit her again that evening. She was in the main procedures room under constant supervision by the nurses and still groggy from the surgery.  She smelled of diarrhea, something that she had started passing after the last operation, but the smell wasn’t important.  The eyes were still there and she was still happy to see me, even though the newest fog of methadone was even thicker than the last.  In the end she was stable and resting so I had to be happy with that.  She had the right medications and the plan was to give her fluids to help her fight the infection while the illness ran its course.  The vet would keep her again overnight and hopefully we would see an improvement tomorrow.

Shelley’s final destination is not clear.  Today, at the time of writing her story is incomplete and she is still at the vet’s under supervision.  It’s Wednesday and thankfully her condition has improved again.  Another visit this evening saw her walking about and bright eyed, keen for endless pats and rubs behind the ears.  She’s even holding food down now so she’s finally on the mend.  She’s had a tough time and she’ll need two weeks more to recover, but it was worth it.  The worry, the effort, the cost are nothing to see her back with happy eyes again.

She hasn’t yet found a home, but it’s early days and she’s in no rush to go.  When she finds the right place and is good and ready to leave, she’ll move on and hopefully brighten the life of a family for the next five or ten years of her soft furred, brown eyed, Siberian life.  Despite the dramas, she’s not been too much effort.  It takes some time and money but like all our dogs she gives back plenty when she sits on the sofa at night with her head in your lap and falls asleep while you stroke her fur and tell her she’s a good girl.  Life should be like this for all dogs, and with a little effort more to find her a new home, Shelley’s will be for the rest of her days.

- Andrew Peterson
1st March 2006
andrew@basis.com.au

 

 

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Shelley’s case is not the usual one for rescue dogs.  Most pass in and out of their foster homes with apparent routine and without any medical difficulties.  The story is always familiar.  The dogs are brought from the pound or surrendered by their owners, they are cared for briefly by their foster owners and they pass into the hands of their new forever home when the time is right.  Shelley’s path just had more bumps along the way than usual, but if she ends up a lifelong part of a loving family’s life the journey will have been worth it.

Andrew Peterson is a relative newcomer to Husky Rescue and only started working with breed specific rescue in 2006.  Through the guidance and inspiration of those who have already been doing the good work for many thankless years, his experiences have been wonderfully positive and a number of dogs have already found their way through him to loving homes.  Thanks are extended to Mara Herba, Cindy Meadows and Sue Smith for their invaluable contributions and their ongoing and tireless efforts to re-home deserving dogs.  Hopefully their example will inspire others to join in this challenging but rewarding work.

For more information about how to help with Siberian Husky rescue in Sydney, please contact Mara and Richard Herba on +61 2 6236 6404 or siberians@ozemail.com.au.

 

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Read the second and final part of Shelley's story on this site by clicking here