Everyone Needs a Buddy

Dr. Jennifer Fortune shares true stories on her podcast, "Tales from the Dogside," recounting emotional moments from her veterinary practice. She discusses the inevitability of death and how she helps owners and animals through challenging times. One story involves a dog with lymphosarcoma and another about a boy with Down syndrome saying goodbye to his beloved dog. The emotional connection between the boy and the dog, named Buddy, brings comfort and hope in the face of loss. Hello, everybody. This is Dr. Jennifer Fortune, owner of Niceville Animal Clinic in Niceville, Florida. This is another podcast of Tales from the Dogside. Now, these are stories. These are all true. They've happened to me. These are not given on a chronological basis, just as I remember. They're not edited, and they're not written ahead of time. These are in the vein of two storytellers, which is from my memory, so forgive me if there are moments where I hesitate or have to think about something, but I hope you enjoy these. Feel free to let me know. The one today is called Everyone Needs a Buddy. There's two stories, but they're of the same theme, and they will probably make you shed a tear or two. They did me, and even when I think of these and just the people involved, they have happy moments and sad moments, which is really what veterinary medicine is about. Now, in my practice, I have 66,000 patients, and in any day, it's always somebody's time to go over the rainbow bridge, as we say in veterinary medicine. I do a lot of talking about death because it's part and parcel of my practice. These animals don't live as long as we do. People love them as their children, and they have to say goodbye frequently. I do my best to make that moment in time as easy on the animal as I can, as sympathetic to the owner as I can, but it's hard. It plays a lot of drama, a lot of sorrow, and there's funny times, too. A lot of times, I'll talk to people in a way that you ordinarily wouldn't because it's so much a part of what I do. Very interestingly enough, just a week ago, I had four elderly gentlemen come into the practice with their animals. These men did not know each other. They were not related, didn't know anything about each other. Their animals were not really sick, a nail trim, ear flush, allergies, but each one of these gentlemen were terminally ill, not their pets, but they themselves. I've learned that if somebody wants to talk, I take the time to stop and listen because a lot of times, their families, when they know they're getting ready to die, the families don't want to talk about it. It seems kind of macabre, but people that are approaching death themselves very often want to talk to somebody that's not in the family just to talk, so I kind of lay my pen down and I listen. I always use humor a bit to lighten things because there's truth in almost everything and humor makes it a little easier. These men, each one of them, I kind of said the exact same thing because I speak the truth and in a way, I try and make it funny. I said, when they told me that each had the first one, I only have six weeks to live. I said, well, you know, we all have an expiration date, your SOL if you're a fruit fly, and that always makes people laugh, but it's true. A poor little fruit fly, he's born, has to find a mate, make babies, and die all within a 24-hour period of time, and you can have the choice that you want longevity, a Greenland shark, 800 years, they can live, but it's a mile or two down, darkness, very cold water, don't bump into anybody else too often, that doesn't really sound like too much fun, and eternal life, you could be a sponge or a jellyfish, immortal, well, that's not too interesting either. So each and every one of us on this planet has a time when our life here ends, and nobody escapes, not a single person, we all think it's not going to happen to us, but when we're facing it, you know, there's a different level of anxiety. So we talked about it, and I told them my views on the inevitability of your time on Earth, it can be short, it can be long, but eventually, it's always going to end, and I did tell them, there's been a lot of research lately about magic mushrooms, with your approaching death, they have a guide, and they can give these people, you know, through a medical facility, and it seems to have quite some anxiety-resolving impact, now, I said, I'm just going to lay that information out for you, you have to do your own research, but if you're feeling anxious about it, that might help you, so here I'm sending these 80-year-old gentlemen out, thinking about magic mushrooms, having never partaken myself, I can't say too much about it, but I have read a lot about them, and they do seem, the more recent studies do seem to help people, as they're approaching death, to kind of ease and lift that veil a little bit, so you can maybe see what's on the other side, but it was kind of unusual to have four people on the same day come in, want to talk about this, and it made me start thinking about what these two tales are going to be, which is kind of about death, now, the first one involves a dog that had lymphosarcoma, now, lymphosarcoma is a very terrible disease, my own grandfather died at 28 years of age from Hodgkin's lymphoma, they didn't have much treatment for it back then, I didn't know him, of course, and he died when my mother was 10, she ended up in an institutional orphanage, so it's just faintly more that he had died from a very serious cancer, and they have better treatments now, but even today, if your dog gets lymphosarcoma, they do have chemotherapy, but it's still a very serious disease, and most of the animals, the owners don't want to go for the huge expense of chemotherapy, but these people did, because their dog was elderly, but she also was the beloved pet of their son, who had Down syndrome, so even though she was elderly, we ordered the medication, and unfortunately, some of these dogs, the disease goes so quick that they can't make it through, so we started her on the treatment, and she got the first dose. Now, at the same time, we had a little dog in the clinic, because I try and place these dogs sometimes that come in, found on the road, nobody knows they belong to, or puppies that people can't take care of them, I can't do too many, because it overwhelms the practice of medicine, but if I can help them, I will do my best, so this little puppy came in, he was kind of a teenage puppy, not a tiny puppy, and his name was Buddy, and he just would not eat, he just refused to eat, now this guy, we've done blood work on him, we ran a fecal, we didn't have parasites, there was absolutely no reason for this little guy to not want to eat, but he just wouldn't, and we tried different foods, and I have never had a patient, before or since, that kind of fit in this category, a young, healthy dog, that just, not going to eat, not today, and so we spent two weeks trying to have this little guy, he's going to eat something, I thought, well, maybe there's some, you know, it's not a twist, he's not vomiting, he's not parasites, there, you know, just no reason at all that he wouldn't eat, but he was just wasting away, and we kind of made the decision that if I couldn't get him to eat today, that we were going to put him to sleep, because I had exhausted all of my options for this little guy, and figured he must have a genetic problem that I just couldn't get a handle on, and that morning, the little boy was down syndrome, his dog was halfway through the treatments, and she died. Now, the mom said, listen, my son's so attached to this dog, could we bring him in, so he can say goodbye, and I said, sure, you know, people will actually sometimes bring in the other pets to see a dog that has died, because there's an attachment there, I will say, though, it depends on who died, the king of the slaves, there's usually one or the other, the slave's pretty happy if the king dies, but the king is a sad creature, indeed, if he loses a slave, so dogs can be a little funny about the loss of a companion, but they do feel it, so I said, sure, you know, if your son needs to say goodbye to her, you know, we'll just do everything we can to ease this moment for him. He was maybe eight, I think, somewhere in that vicinity, so we laid out a blanket, we put his dog on it, and she had died, so she was not with us anymore, and the mom brought her son in. Now, I don't have any mentally challenged or down syndrome children in my family, so I didn't have a lot of experience with their reactions, but I do know that they are very sweet, you know, down syndrome children tend to stay childlike and just so, so sweet, so an old boy came in and saw his dog and just collapsed in a way I've never seen before or since. He wailed from the bottom of his feet all the way through his ears, it seemed like. There was no social governor on him that this wasn't socially appropriate. He grieved as purely and completely and truly as any person I've ever seen, and we sat down on the floor with him, you know, I put the dog down there with him, and he, this was just inconsolable, and mom came and sat with him, and she goes, it's okay, it's just who he is. Well, we all kind of walked out of the room with the tears in our eyes, because it was very, very heart-rending to see somebody suffer so much with grief. So, we were putting on to other patients while they said their goodbyes, and we were bringing the little dog Buddy past the room, the room had an open door, and the little boy was sitting on the floor crying and weeping, and Buddy stopped, looked in the room, and pulled on the leash to go in. Now, you know, I wasn't really sure if this was appropriate, but I thought that, you know, maybe another little person in there, a little dog, could ease the moment. So, Buddy walked in, sat on the little boy's lap, and started licking his tears. I think we all cried very hard that day, and the little boy just hugged Buddy, and we went and got a plate of food, and Buddy just gobbled it up. So, mom looked at him, and she called her husband, and she said, honey, listen, I know we've had orders we're leaving for, I don't remember where, Guam, probably, and we'd agreed not to get another and we'd agreed not to get another dog, however, it's too late, we have one. And so, somehow, that whole moment, I feel, was engineered, not by any of us, but by higher powers that know more what they're doing. Now, the second story is, let me gather myself for a second. The second story was, this gentleman came in, and he was obviously very, very intelligent, well-read, but, you know, kept looking, living in his car. He was very clear with me. He said, my dog is very sick, I don't know what's wrong with him, I live in my car, I've bent down, and I'm a physicist. We live in an area where there's a lot of military, and probably a lot of PTSD, and, you know, I have a lot of, actually, clients that are paranoid schizophrenics, and I'm pretty good with them. I, you know, whatever's going on in your head, I don't care, as long as you're there with your animal, I can get through to you long enough to help out both of you. Over the years, I've had quite a number of mentally challenged people that, I just take them who they are, maybe they are true in seeing what I can't see. I mean, this one lady with an ax out there trying to cut down one of my 30-foot trees, and my staff was all in a tither, and they said, she's got an ax in there, she's trying to cut down a tree, so I just, I looked at her, she was older than me, I said, I could take her down, and I said, what's up, and she said, I love this tree so much, I want to take part of it home. I said, well, how about you give me that ax, and we will walk around and pull up some baby trees from the seeds that have fallen from the tree, and that's what we did. She handed me her ax, we walked around, I pulled up about 10 trees from my loquat seeds that had fallen, wrapped them up for her, sent her on her way to see what I could expect, so I just work within their reality as best I can, and I've never had anything that's been really dangerous, in my opinion. So, this gentleman obviously had some severe problems, very intelligent, I took him to be probably an alcoholic, maybe paranoid schizophrenic, estranged from his family, I mean, they tell me their life stories sometimes, and he was a physicist, and he had this dog, Blue Jack. Now, Blue Jack was a pit bull, you know, blue pit, super friendly, people, most pits are actually the friendliest dogs ever, they have a bad rep, because if they are inclined to bite you, they're the breed most likely to kill you, because they don't give up, but as a general rule of thumb, German Shepherds are much more dangerous to veterinarians than pits. So, Blue Jack, you know, beautiful blue pit, and the owner said, listen, Blue Jack's my bud, we live in my car, everything I have is in that car, and I share everything with him, he's my companion, he said, but he's not, he's really sick right now, and I go, well, give me some background, and he said, well, I go to, I'm a migrant farmer, really, I mean, a worker, I pick oranges down South Florida, and I was down in an orange grove, and he got into some poison that they put out for the cats, and I guess the cats were problematic in this orange grove, and so they wouldn't tell me what it was. Now, this is back in the 70s, and paraquat was a poison that they were spraying on marijuana down in South America to kill marijuana, it was back in the, they thought they could control it that way, it ended up killing, or destroying the lungs of a lot of young people, they had to have heart and lung transplant, so they always died, it was a terrible thing that they did, to spray this paraquat on the marijuana, the kids would get it anyway, and there were a lot of deaths associated with it, and so I looked at Blue Jack, and I looked him over, and he was starting to actually turn blue, his gums, he was having trouble breathing, and I said, you know, I think this is paraquat, because that's the hallmark of paraquat, is it starts to interfere, oxygen free radicals, as far as I recall, and you just cannot perfuse oxygen, and if you actually give them oxygen, it makes it much worse, so the grove wouldn't tell the guy what he gave, so I made the presumption, that's probably what we were dealing with, and I left a note on the dog's cage, to the vet I worked for, he was an older guy, very smart, but you know, I was newly out of school, and you know, how that goes, I was female, nobody really seemed to be female, so I said, I had a note on the door, I said, don't give him oxygen, even though it looks like he needs it, it will hasten his demise, well, the older vet, it did it anyway, and so I came in when my time didn't stay, and the dog was much, much worse, and just struggling to breathe, and so the owner came in, and I, now it's very sure of what the diagnosis was, and I said, listen, Blue Jack's going to die, there's nothing we can do, this has been tried with people for the last five or ten years, they've outlawed this, that's why they don't want to tell you, that's what they were using, but it's 100% fatal, there is no treatment for it, he is going to die a horrible, horrible death, struggling to breathe, as he already is, and you need to let him go. Well, this one's this man's only companion, his only creature that he spent time with, and he said, he's all I've got, I said, I know, but my loyalty and my words have to tell you what's wrong with him, and what the best thing for him is not to let him suffocate to death, because that's what's going on, and he said, you know, I have a, when I get a can of beans, I share, he gets half, I get half, if I have hot dogs, I get two, and he gets two, he said, we share everything, he said, can I come back in an hour, I said, sure, sure, so he walked out with Blue Jack, and they said, he's back within the hour, so an hour later, here comes the owner, here comes Blue Jack, they are both skunk drunk, as you can imagine, and the owner said, Doc, I got my last penny, and I went and bought a bottle of Jack Daniels, and I got half, and Blue Jack got the other half, and I know I'm drunk, and he is too, but we're going to go out and stop, now, there is humor in that, and acceptance, and just a remarkable story, and they were both leaning sideways, stumbling in, and I laughed, he laughed, we went to a private area, and we put Blue Jack to sleep, and the owner cried, and we helped him through that moment in the best way we could. Everybody has a different way of leading this life sometimes, sometimes we have power over it, and sometimes we don't, but it's an inescapable part of the existence that we have here in this universe, and as a veterinarian, we deal with it a lot, and I would encourage you, if someone you know starts to talk to you about their impending death, they want to talk about it, they really want somebody to listen to their concerns, and it's really, that is the most helpful thing you can do for someone that's facing this, is to be a good listener, no advice, unless they ask it, but just taking the time to pass somebody's hand, hug them a little bit, and just take the time to listen. It's one of the most wonderful things there is about people, and it's a gift to both of you, if you are in that situation, don't be scared, just don't be scared. Anyway, that's the end of this two stories about death, and life, and joy, and sadness, and I hope this has been a good podcast, and just like everything else, there's always drama, and always humor, and everything that happens at my final time.