Grace is Alive and Well

She bounded into the kitchen tonight – 15 pounds of lab puppy, tail swinging, ears flopping – and I felt like applauding. Almost two weeks ago she was fighting for her life in an oxygen tank. A bacterial infection had gone viral, and then into pneumonia, accompanied by coughing, runny nose, and loss of appetite. Serious stuff for a puppy that only a few days earlier had been lying in a cage at Animal Welfare. I passed by that cage several times and noted that her brown eyes followed me, but she never moved. She remained on her side until I stopped and sat down, then her head lifted a little. I poked two fingers through the metal cage and said, “Here, girl.” She slowly rolled on to her tummy, cocked her head at my wiggling fingers and scrambled up and over to lick. And that was that.

We paid Animal Welfare the requisite $75 to hand her over, complete with spay operation, shots, and a goodie bag containing food samples and coupons. For two days, we reveled in our good fortune to have adopted a full-bred black lab puppy with a good disposition and enough intelligence to do most of her business outside. She didn’t fuss when we put her in the crate, slept through the night, and allowed us to carry her around when we felt like it. What we didn’t know was that her intestines were harboring hookworm and she was incubating a deadly illness.

After four days in the oxygen tank at the Emergency Animal Clinic, we took her back to our vet, where she spent another night under observation. When we told our friends the sad story of Grace and her illness, most of them looked at us with a mixture of confusion and astonishment. It was clear that they weren’t sure whether to console us for the puppy’s illness or our climbing credit card bill.

“You’ve only had the puppy for a week?” One friend asked. “You must be some kind of soft-hearted dog lover.” Which pretty much describes four out of five people in our family. And the most soft-hearted dog lover of us all just might be the nine year old. Grace is her puppy, and has been from the beginning. When I sat down in front of her cage that day at Animal Welfare, I was scouting out dogs for Alison.

“That’s the one,” Alison said with finality after we took her out of the cage to get a closer look. I’ve tried to envision at what point we would have told our daughter that we had spent quite enough money to save her puppy. Would she have understood if we returned the dog to Animal Welfare, explaining that we could no longer afford to turn over our credit card to the doctors at Veterinary Associates? We chose Grace, and signed a piece of paper promising to take responsibility for the welfare of this puppy that had been residing in Cage #141. It didn’t seem possible that we could tell Alison that the puppy wasn’t what we had bargained for. In the scheme of things, it seemed more important for our daughter to know that from the moment we carried her out of the cage, Grace was ours.

When she ambled into the kitchen tonight, my dad, who was visiting, looked down at her with a grin and said, “Well look here, it’s the survivor.” Yes, that describes our Grace. And maybe, it describes us also.