One Little Dachshund Manages to Throw One Big Scare Into a Family

On a recent Saturday night, we got home late from an Angels game. It was the night Dante Bichette unloaded a three-run homer in the 12th inning, and we happily stuck it out to the end. My wife and I were still high when we hit our driveway at midnight and said good night to the friends who had gone with us.

Our customary practice when we get home late at night is to rap on our garage door to tell our miniature dachshund, Coco, who is barking an excited greeting from inside, that it’s us. But on this night there was no greeting. The silence was suddenly oppressive. And ominous.

We went through the house and opened the back door, where she usually comes tearing through and races around the house, forgetting her irritation that we abandoned her in the joy that we’re back. On this night, she wasn’t at the door. Nor did she respond when we called her.

I grabbed a flashlight, and my wife and I went looking; we didn’t talk. There was disturbing evidence in the garage of a very sick dog--but no Coco. As we searched the back yard, we found a darkish pool of blood. We have possums that Coco--perpetually playing out her fantasy of reckless hunter--goes into small places after. I’ve worried that one of them, cornered, would do her in. I flashed on that as we searched the yard.

Then she emerged from the darkest, deepest corner of the yard, dragging her way, looking like warmed-over death. There were no wounds on her, so it was clear the problem was internal.

We called our vet and got a recorded referral number of a pet emergency hospital in Fountain Valley. So we wrapped Coco in towels and entered a world neither of us had ever experienced before: the world of grievously sick and wounded pets--on a weekend, when most veterinary hospitals are closed.

I had experienced this scene in passing with my oldest daughter, who has a retinue of animals in her household. I’ve driven with her to the vets several times on various errands of mercy. But the people in the waiting room never registered on me because I wasn’t involved. It all seemed rather silly--this fawning over pets--and I was always impatient to get away. Besides, it never happened in the middle of the night at an emergency clinic.

It was just like the emergency room at a people hospital. Several pet owners--an older man who had obviously dressed hurriedly and was looking sightlessly at a magazine whose pages he didn’t turn, a young woman who kept taking off her shoes and putting them on, a family of mom, dad and a teen-age son crying together--were hanging out in the waiting room.

While my wife held Coco, I had to fill out multiple forms. I remember one question in particular, because it didn’t give me pause until later. I had to choose between 1) setting a fixed amount beyond what they presumably wouldn’t go on providing care for Coco, or 2) indicate that I wanted them to do whatever was necessary to save her life and restore her--and hang the cost. This is rather like being asked, at a moment of crisis, what a life you love is worth to you--the ultimate gun at the head. The answer, of course, has to be that it is priceless, which doesn’t translate to dollars and cents until the crisis has passed, one way or another.

Anyway, I signed everything they pushed at me, then--with Coco shaking--an attendant ushered us into an examination room. The shaking reminded me graphically of a wonderful wirehair terrier I owned when I was 16. He had been poisoned by a neighbor--we could never prove who did it, but we knew from the autopsy that he was poisoned--and when I found him, he was shaking just as Coco was shaking. The terrier died on the way to the vet, and I thought about that a lot during our drive to Fountain Valley.

In the examination room, Coco shook on my wife’s lap, and I paced as we awaited the doctor. She turned out to be a gentle and remarkably young woman who told us that Coco was very sick but that she couldn’t offer an accurate diagnosis until she took some blood tests. She suggested we go home and said she would call us as soon as she knew.

We did, wrapped in our own thoughts. I slept fitfully, and I don’t think my wife slept at all until the doctor called about 4:30 in the morning. Coco, it turned out, had the lesser of two possible diseases. She had lost a lot of blood and needed to be fed intravenously to rebuild her strength. The prognosis was good, but she needed to be observed and cared for at the hospital for several days, at least.

My stepson had been away for the weekend, and when he returned Sunday and learned about Coco, he cried very hard, just as I had seen the young man in the waiting room crying. Our reassurances didn’t mollify him until he went to visit Coco and got a feeble tail wag as a sign of recognition. Then he was all right; he knew she would be coming home.

Coco stayed at the emergency clinic until Monday, then we transferred her to our own vet, who loves her dearly. She’s home now, beginning to eat normally--which means anything she can get, although we give her nothing but “scientific food”--chase her old enemies, the neighborhood cats, rip through the house sliding on the hardwood floors, and sniff out the possums that hang out in our back yard. We still don’t know what happened; our vet can only surmise that Coco ate something that would probably have been lethal had we not been able to get her immediate care.

The emergency bill was prodigious, but so was the care she received. It was gentle, loving and efficient--and I know that staffing an emergency clinic round-the-clock on weekends is expensive. But I couldn’t help wondering what someone who lacked our resources (we had to pay a sizable amount up front) but loved their pet as much as we would do in such an emergency. Where could they turn?

The other thing I learned--a little grudgingly, perhaps--is how much I care about this tiny wharf rat of a dachshund who has captured our household. Although I know she won’t, I just hope to hell she watches what she eats from now on--and stays out of possum dens. I can’t put in very many more weekends like that one.