Sometimes we wonder if we’ve done the right thing in life. Sometimes we get lucky and know we did, even though we were just trying to get by. Sometimes that story co-incidentally defines another, which is what building community is all about.
This is the story of how a chronically ill dog saved another dog 10 years later. Nobody saw it coming until it was over. It still makes me smile.
In 2010 I published a small gift book, with essays and comic stories about new ways of thinking about the human-animal bond. Bridging Species: Thoughts and Tales About Our Lives with Dogs, chronicled my journey of buying a dog as a pet, and how I ended up creating a multi-species family with two Cavalier King Charles Spaniels, Murphy and Alki, and Grace the Cat.
My publishing goal? To get people together to talk about what it means to see our animals as not just pets but family members, and how that can help us create community, one family at a time.
I was thrilled when East West Bookshop in Seattle created a book signing event for me. I had three choices for a date, and instantly chose July 16. It just felt right, and I quickly realized why: it would be Murphy’s 12th birthday.
Murphy’s birthday was a stunner all by itself. She’d come to live with me when she was 11 weeks old. We had lots of fun and too many problems: Murphy was chronically ill almost from the first, and at 2-1/2 years the anxiety and vet bills and just plain mystery and misery of her health woes were near to breaking both of us.
People told me to get rid of her and get a new dog.
People do that. The very idea shocked me, and even today is part of the reason why I work so hard to help define and live the idea of a multi-species family. Murphy’s problems were at times debilitating and often expensive, small things that added up and puzzled us, but never things that seemed worth killing her over. That just didn’t seem right.
By December 2000 Murphy had been suffering from a long-term infection no one could pinpoint. For some months she also had eye problems. We finally found Dr. Joyce Murphy, a holistic veterinary ophthalmologist who lived in Port Hadlock, a 5-1/2 hour round trip by car and ferry from our Seattle home.
The whole story is too long to recount here, but the gist of it is that Dr. Murphy took one look at her, exclaimed that she had the “medical record of a 13-year-old dog,” and promptly identified the problem. She operated the next day, essentially giving Murphy tear ducts and a tear gland she didn’t have, and the infection was finally resolved.
We’ve been going to see Dr. Murphy ever since. And when Murphy’s Cavalier brother, Alki, came along, he went there, too. And still does.
Dr. Murphy saved Murphy’s life, and, as I think about it, Alki’s, too.
She’s also been there for us through multiple traumas and illnesses, by phone or by appointment. Murphy, in particular, holds a special place in her heart.
Over the years I discovered that Dr. Murphy did a lot of volunteer work at the Jefferson County Animal Shelter. She and her partner and their staff have helped an awful lot of animals. Many happy multi-species families have benefited from her warm, generous heart and skilled veterinary services, families created through the shelter.
When I published my book I decided to give something back, to honor in my small way the work that Dr. Murphy did with my own—my writing. I gave her 5 copies and said to sell them and put the money into her shelter work.
Some time later the dogs and I were in Port Hadlock, getting a checkup with Dr. Murphy. She very seriously thanked me for donating the books to her practice, said that they had sold and the buyers thought my book was “excellent.”
She then told me what she did with the money. An older dog had come to the shelter, he needed “this and that,” medicine and surgery and general fixing up, but he’d recovered nicely, and was now in a happy home, as delighted with his new family as they were with him.
She said he lived because I donated book sales to the shelter.
In my usual blunt and occasionally tactless way I said, “I don’t think my books paid for all that.”
She didn’t miss a beat. She, too, is into creating community.
She said that her work as a vet and my work writing my book produced the sales that made the money that went to the shelter that saved the dog and created a new family.
“It’s all about community,” she said.
And she was right.
I felt pretty warm and fuzzy. My book got compliments and, bonus! somehow figured in saving an old dog’s life.
My old dog started it! It was her problems and our solutions that made me start thinking about looking at the human-animal relationship as something more than just a human and a pet. Dr. Murphy is the reason my Murphy lived, she’s how Murphy and I got the time to create a family that I could write about.
But the story doesn’t end there.
Clearly, Dr. Murphy is popular with dog people in these parts. One of her clients is a well-known, respected Cavalier breeder who had moved to the area from several states away. I didn’t even know that she was here or one of Dr. Murphy’s clients until she bought one of the books I donated to the shelter at Dr. Murphy’s office. And praised it so highly that Dr. Murphy passed on the compliment.
It was some of that Cavalier breeder’s money that bought the book that saved that old dog’s life at the animal shelter. And, 12 years earlier, that Cavalier breeder was also the owner of the stud dog who became my Murphy’s dad.
This was the story I shared at East West Bookshop at our book signing on July 16, 2010. On the very day that the little dog people kept telling me to give up on celebrated her 12th birthday: happy, healthy, energetic, a bit arthritic, and, practically unheard for a Cavalier at that age: heart clear.
Co-incidence? Let’s have more of them.
On July 16 people paid a small amount to come to my book signing. The money went to the Jefferson County Animal Shelter, in care of Dr. Murphy, to honor all of our work, together. We gave her $90, not a lot, but something.
And what she did with that money is another story, for another time.
For now, this is what I know: this story will never stop making me smile, just like the little dog who started it all.
(c) 2011 Robyn M Fritz