Lily

Lily should be "Lily the Wonder Dog", or something that shows her indomitable spirit.  Lily is my best friend's dog.  (And that's a whole other blog, defining "best friend" in middle age".)  Just like Zuza goes to work with me, Lily goes to work with her Mom, with whom I share the office.  Lily has a job there, she is the doorbell, the official greeter, the keep clients happy in the waiting room person.  She absolutely, fluffy head over heels, there is no one as wonderful as you, loves her Mom. She's bouncy and egalitarian and came to her mom  at about age 6, as a previously loved little dog.  She's 10 now, looks--I don't know--young, the picture of health.

I started writing this at two months ago.  It is, unabashedly, a happy ending.  First, Lily was a a rescue dog.  She was a dog that belonged first to a woman who suffered, and then died, from cancer.  The husband was not so happy with a this left-over dog from his wife, and found someone who could take over--first a concerned citizen, and then, a dog person who needed a new dog.

So there she was, Lily, an incredibly happy dog who became the love-at-first-sight dog of a woman--and family--who needed a dog to take the place of a couple of other dogs who died from different cancers a few years earlier.   She looks like a Bichon Frise.  She isn't; she's an unlikely mix of a Schnauzer, a Cocker and a Llasa Apso.  And she's happy...especially all the time that Beth is near, but also when she can be at her job, greeting everyone at work.

Then she had a weird growth on her elbow that turned out to be malignant.  Agony for the humans who love her and an itchy annoyance to her. That resulted in an amputation of her right foreleg, including her shoulder blade.  It was hard to watch her go through it all.  We took her home with us the night after her surgery.  She was so miserable without Beth  and so vocal about it.  However, she made a lasting friend in Lukas who was terribly concerned about her.  He stayed by the side of her crate, poking his nose in through the bars to kiss her face, or wash her ears or otherwise comfort her.  When he was eating his dinner and she began whimpering again, he left it half-finished to sit by her, and we had to move a bed next to her crate so that he could stay there to nurse her. (Zuza and the cats finished off his food when we weren't watching.) 

During the night we got up to give her medication and take her out, and then in the morning, after another trip outside--yes, she was walking 3-legged--we took turns lying on the floor with her while the other one of us could shower and get ready for work.  I was stretched out next to her with my arm around her when Luke came running up, trying lick all of the places that were shaved.  When I convinced him that licking the pain patch was a bad idea, he snuggled down between us, pressed up against her side.  I'm not even sure she noticed, but I certainly felt comforted.

She went home that night, running eagerly to Beth at the hospital, and did have some rough moments in the following week.  But she wanted to run up and down the stairs in the house, and she wanted to be with her beloved friends.  One funny thing that happened as a result of all of this is that she isn't nearly so anxious when she comes to Briar Patch.  You'd think waking up without a leg would make you feel kinda iffy about a place, but it seems that she focuses on the bright side.  Hmmmm.  Life lesson alert.

We had one more scare about a month after her surgery when Beth discovered a suspicious lump at her incision site.  They aspirated it, and after looking at in-house Carolyn was pretty sure that it was just a lymph node that had sort of migrated.  We sent it to an outside lab, and the good news is that she was right. Lily got a clean bill of health.

So, things are unabashedly gleeful.  Lily has returned to her incredibly happy self.  She's even managed to hop up on people's laps again when they are in the waiting room at the office.  She thinks about it a little more than before, but she does it.

And this time, I have visual aids!  Go to YouTube and search for Lilly.dv.  Beth's son Rowan made a wonderful video about her.  (One of my clients said, "Hey, isn't he too young to know that music?"  You'll see what I mean.  Apparently he is a master of the classics, as well as a youthful videographer.)

Rock on, Lily!