This Mortal Life
We’re all very mortal just now. I know a handful of people who have had the virus, and some aren’t recovering well. I know others who have had deaths in their circle of friends or family during lockdown, not necessarily virus related, but they can’t travel for funerals. After toilet paper and pasta people started buying freezers for the long term, making bread for the day and becoming aware that they hadn’t made wills for the future.
For me, the daily life with an elderly dog hadn’t changed much except that my vet died last year and we’ve only had temporary vets at the practice. Now, all the practices are closed apart from the emergency vets. For some time Hazel had been suggesting I contact her friend Jeh who treats street dogs in Brighton because he has an orthopaedic speciality and Pops is seizing up with arthritis. Last year an orthopaedic vet at a different practice told me it’d be a question of making a judgement call one day, and Hazel thinks it’d be better if it was someone ‘in the family’ who took care of her. Finally I started an email introducing myself and the dog and saying the day had not come but it was inevitable and would he do the honours. As I typed Poppet turned over onto her backs, her lips flopped away from her teeth and I saw something new. There are always lumps in older dogs, so far the’d been benign, but this was a very rotten tooth. I googled and found that it would either be ‘just a tooth’ or it could be a sign of necrosis of the jaw bone.
The next morning after breakfast I managed to ambush her and get a photograph. The dog has never loved me handling her to look at things - I think she believes I’m an amateur. She loves a vet, and will let vets do anything to her, but she is suspicious of me looking, so getting a photo wasn’t easy. I sent it in an email to Jeh, WhatsApped it to Raj, the dentist who has been walking her, and managed to get the emergency vet on the phone and sent it to them as well. It was bizarrely luxurious to have access to so much professional opinion from my bed. The consensus was that for now it didn’t look like an emergency. The gum around it was healthy. Last evening Raj came to take Poppet a cheeky extra walk and she joyfully concurred. While they were out I tuned in to De Nieuwe Yogaschool and did my yoga practice and cried throughout.
