A Hole in Our House and Hearts

Marta holds Chance at the breeder for the first time.In the spring of 2000, we brought home a fat little chocolate labrador retriever puppy that our daughter Marta christened Chance. She chose that name because he was, according to the breeder, the result of an unplanned union, and we were the lucky beneficiaries.

It's impossible to envision a more gentle, tolerant, laid-back, and quiet dog. By quiet, I mean exactly that—he virtually never barked; at most, it was a deep gutteral "woof" or two, and that was it. He would regally lie in our unfenced front yard and survey the activity in the park across the street and on our sidewalks with nary a comment. Only very rarely would he venture down the grass to greet people, and passing pedestrians routinely expressed amazement that we didn't have an invisible fence. If during our neighborhood walks I'd encounter a friend and end up in conversation, he would never strain and tug against the leash; he'd simply plop down at our feet and patiently wait until the humans stopped blabbering, his expressive eyes evincing an attitude of lugubrious resignation at the delay in his walk.

This doesn't mean that he was asocial; he greeted familiar friends and neighbors in the same way: he'd eagerly lean his 80-lb bulk up against their legs, and then flop onto his back at their feet, hoping for a belly rub. Which he generally got, expressing his pleasure in bear-like grunts. His best canine friend was Cody, a black standard poodle owned by our close nearby friends Christin and Myron. Chance and Cody spent many hours together in various parks, and they would have extended jousting matches, standing on their hind legs and going at each other like prizefighters. When Cody was alive, Chance would cast longing gazes across the park to see if he was approaching, and that didn't stop after Cody passed away a few years ago—Chance still looked for signs of his old friend every day.

Family friend Martha gives Chance what he wants.As much as he enjoyed simply hanging out at home, as befits his breed he was happiest when out in nature, whether trotting through the woods, swimming in a nearby river or pond, or bounding up the slopes of a Colorado mountain. He would suffer in the worst heat and humidity of the summer, but seemed completely impervious to winter cold, and would happily lie in sub-zero snow and ice chewing on sticks while we hopped around trying to keep warm. I never saw him shiver from the cold—shivering was reserved for visits to the vet.

He had his quirks. One of them was that his interest in actually retrieving a thrown object was transitory. He never displayed the slightest interest in chasing Frisbees, and thrown tennis balls were of limited attraction. He did love chasing kicked soccer balls in the park on winter nights, but he didn't retrieve the ball to bring it back to me—I was supposed to chase him to get the ball, and so we would run back and forth across the snow and ice like maniacs at midnight, alternately chasing each other, depending on who had possession of the ball. His only consistent retrieving activity was in getting objects out of the pond at the dog park Linda took him to frequently, but even then he would be easily distracted by the numerous frogs in the shallows, forgetting all about the ball floating nearby.

He never once tried to pull food from the counter or dinner table, but once ate an entire bag of Halloween candy bars—wrappers and all—with disastrous digestive consequences. He loved fresh mushrooms and sweet peppers, and I could rely on him positioning himself at the entrance to our kitchen when he heard the sound of my knife on the cutting board. He had no interest whatsoever in nylon or hard plastic bones, preferring instead the endless supply of large sticks and branches in the park. He would strip the bark from them as though he was stripping the fur and skin from a deer's leg, and then cough up wood chips with amazingly loud and bizarre noises.

To the end of his days, he enthusiastically chased squirrels, on two occasions managing to bowl his prey over upon contact. Fortunately, Linda or I were always present to call him off before he could do anything to the momentarily stunned squirrel. We don't know if he would have actually killed or eaten one, but we never wanted to find out. Oddly, he never displayed any interest in the numerous rabbits around our house.

Neighbor Sayre happily leans on a contented Chance.Regrettably, he never seemed to get the hang of what skunks were, and was bombed on five occasions by the skunks that infest our neighborhood. In each case, it was late at night, necessitating long de-skunking sessions in the bathtub that invariably didn't finish until 2am. Eventually we took to walking him in the middle of the streets at night just to stay clear of the skunks that lurk in the shadows of shrubs and bushes.

Just like people, his last years were increasingly accompanied by a variety of physical ailments, some mostly aggravating and some much more serious in nature. He developed constant digestive "issues" during the warm months, and we took many trips to the vet to try to figure out the cause. Eventually, our vet determined that plant and mold allergies were responsible, and antihistamines brought the problem under control for the most part.

In early 2010, he underwent surgery and radiation treatments for a particularly aggressive form of cancer on his leg. The radiation was administered several times per week for over a month, and at the end of each treatment he was so loopy from the anesthetic that I had to completely upholster the interior of my truck with blankets and quilts to prevent him from hurting himself when he tried to stand up inside. But in spite of the discomfort associated with each visit, he never wigged out in the waiting room or refused to get out of the car when we arrived at the cancer center, instead greeting the clinicians there with his customarily wagging tail.

He came through the treatments in remarkably good shape, and by late spring was showing no noticeable ill effects from either the surgery or the radiation. Then, in August, during one of our weekly jaunts to a wooded area adjacent to UM's North Campus, he blew out the ACL in his left rear knee. This required reconstructive surgery to correct, and he never entirely shed the limp he acquired because of the injury.

Then, shortly before Christmas, he developed an intermittent and strange-sounding cough, and I took him to our local vet to make sure that there wasn't something lodged deep in his esophagus. X-rays didn't reveal any obstruction, but they also revealed something far more serious: a suspicious-looking mass in his lung. A visit in January to the cancer center confirmed our worst fears. Not only was the mass in his lung a tumor, he had also developed a painful lump in his left armpit, which the oncologist determined was likely to be another tumor, and given its location, meant that the cancer was likely already in his lymph system. On top of that, the cancer center vets also concluded that the strange coughing sounds that had prompted the pre-Christmas trip to the vet in the first place were symptomatic of the early stages of Canine Laryngeal Paralysis, which is especially prevalent in Labs.

Given his advanced age, the extent of the cancer, and the low probability for truly eliminating it, we reluctantly and tearfully concluded that subjecting him to the twin assaults of the required chemotherapy and surgery would mean that a good portion of his final weeks and months would be spent shuttling back and forth between home and cancer center, followed by an extended and confining convalescence away from the grass and the trees and yes, the squirrels that sustained him. This seemed to us to be a very poor bargain for him, for so little chance of true success.

During the spring he gradually but visibly became less mobile, eventually finding it a struggle to get over low obstacles and steps that only a short time ago had posed no problem. He had great difficulty in getting down the stairs from our bedroom where he's always slept, and while laying down was restless and distracted, and would issue forth with long, drawn out sighs or groans that we could only imagine as signs of pain and discomfort.

We had many conversations about when the inevitable had to take place. We knew that there were only two things that could happen: either we would feel that we had ended things too soon, with a few "good" days still left on Chance's calendar, or we would conclude that we'd waited too long and by doing so had subjected him to needless suffering. The latter was unacceptable, and in late April we decided we could wait no longer. On April 29, with his entire family around him at home, he departed us quietly and peacefully.

When I think of Chance's soulful eyes looking up at me, hoping for a scratch, Mark Twain comes to mind: "Heaven goes by favor; if it went by merit, you would stay out and your dog would go in."

See Chance's soulful eyes here.



Comments

[Christin Grant]

I miss him. Goodbye Chance, you were a good, good dog.

Don, you left out two things that I tended to tell friends about Chance: 1) I don't think he ever did learn to give an outward sign of any kind that he needed to go out. What he did was sit very still and stare at you fixedly. I am pretty sure he thought humans were pretty dense regarding that form of communication. 2) You spared us a list of the various things that Chance swallowed and threw up. It was a pretty funny list. I saw none of the actual events, but I remember being told about a substantial piece of clothing and also the Chance equivalent of a hairball: a big crazy mass of twigs and godknowswhat that probably had been building up in his stomach for months without bothering him at all.

I'm very glad to hear that you made the early choice instead of the late.