Chapter 25

About two weeks after returning from Asia everything changed. Friday night, November 21st, 2014 I got a call from my friend Jon Bratcher in the middle of the night, telling me one of my best friends had been killed by a drunk driver.

Jeremy Pryor was somebody I had known for 17 years. We had been in several bands together the first decade of our friendship. After the last one dissolved in 2007, we decided that for the sake of our friendship maybe we shouldn’t play music together anymore as we had drastically different ideas on what good music is and should be. We remained close friends and spoke often about one day, when we were older, setting our differing opinions aside to play music together again. We never got the chance. I’d be lying if I said we hadn’t drifted apart somewhat by the time he died, but we always loved each other as brothers and his death was devastating to me. I had butted heads with him more than anyone I’ve ever known, but it changed nothing about how we felt about each other. There were countless unresolved regrets that I had to face living with for the rest of my life.

The Red Hot Chili Peppers have a song called “Transcending” that has a line “a part of me left that only you knew will never be understood.” That’s how I felt when I tried to come to terms with the fact my friend Jeremy was never coming back. It was the start of a downward spiral for me that took years to recover from. I leaned on the Hogs more than ever to help cope.

Two months after Jeremy died we took E-Style and Chewie in together for their annual vet appointments. E had lost a couple of pounds for the second year in a row and as a small aging dog it was cause for concern. I admit she was a little overweight when she was at her heaviest, but she had been taking more walks the last 16 months since we all moved into the house together. The vet ran some bloodwork on her and the results came back--she was in the early stages of kidney failure.

If anyone out there has ever been through something like that then you know how brutal it is. You fight a battle every single day that you know you’re ultimately going to lose. There’s only so much that can be done to comfortably prolong an animal’s life. At a certain point you have to accept what’s happening and make peace with it. Still, in the midst of the depression from the loss of Jeremy, I emotionally wilted even further with E’s diagnosis. Knowing I would only have all three of them for a limited amount of time made the weight of everything I was going through even heavier. The feeling of exuberance I felt toward life after coming home from Asia just two months earlier was gone. The first year in that house that I had dubbed “my favorite year of my life” was over.

For the first little bit nothing changed. E-Style was the same happy old girl she had always been. A couple of months later, we changed her diet permanently to food for renal failure dogs, but she wasn’t a fan of it. One thing I can say about my three Hogs is they are the pickiest eaters on Earth. It was hard to get her to eat sometimes, but Sphyncus and Chewie were infatuated with the renal food. It was new and they weren’t supposed to have it, therefore they obsessed over it. Sphyncus didn’t want her tasty normal food that was undoubtedly loaded with salt and other flavorful things, but she fiended for that bland renal food. Like all things Sphyncus, there just wasn’t logic to be found in her behavior.

Not long after that, I visited Smitty up in northern Virginia and he took me to a float tank. He had been frequenting one and was pleased with the results so he thought it might help me work through the dark place I was in. Floating in the water in the pitch black, drifting further and further into my mind, I searched for peace and something to grasp onto in order to start climbing out of the funk I was mired in.

Jeremy was gone and there was nothing I could do. I had to let him go and take solace in the friendship we had for almost two decades. E-Style hadn’t even started to show symptoms of kidney failure, but I was already mourning her. I had to stop and appreciate what we still had left in front of us. I vowed to make every day count from then on. Leaving the float tank that day, I didn’t feel the effects immediately, but I had taken a step forward on the right path.

That May marked five years from when I had first traveled to Egypt. On the actual anniversary date, I wrote a Throwback Thursday post on Facebook about Sphyncus, essentially a very condensed version of the first half of this book. It was only a few pages and very basic. I ended it at the part where I walked away from her to go back into the hotel in Cairo without any resolution other than saying I needed to get off the computer and go walk the dog. I don’t really know why I did it. I guess because it was five years and as humans we gravitate toward landmark anniversaries. Part of me just needed something positive to reflect on amidst all the negativity I had been feeling for almost 6 months, to feel like I had done something good. I shared the story to the ESMA Facebook page as well as Mona’s, then shut the computer down to take Sphyncus for a walk.

Like all dog walkers, I’ll reluctantly admit that I can often be found walking with a leash in one hand and my phone in the other. Notification after notification started blowing up my phone. My little random afternoon musings of Sphyncus’s origin story took off and people wanted to know what happened next. Friend requests were coming in from all over the world followed by messages and demands that I finish the story. Previously, I had a decent number of Egyptian connections online through adopting Sphyncus and the random updates I would provide ESMA, but that day I couldn’t keep up with everyone reaching out to me. It somehow went global among animal rescue groups in the span of a few hours.

It took me three weeks, but I did eventually finish the story. Like the first part, it was very condensed and simplified. A few pages and nothing more. It was good enough to placate the masses of fans we had suddenly garnered and I made a lot of new friends in the process. I concluded that the only logical next step would be to make good on my idea from a year earlier and return to Cairo to visit ESMA. I just didn’t know when I was going to be able to do it.

A few months before this Smitty had adopted a dog, Tala, and he came to Bowling Green that June to visit. Tala was only about 6 months old but was already the same size as Sphyncus. Given Sphyncus’ unpredictability with other animals, we were all worried about how it would go. After about a day of uneasiness, Sphyncus really took a liking to Tala. She was the first dog I’d ever seen her play with in five years and they played nonstop the rest of the time Smitty was in town. They played so much it almost got annoying. It was like having two horses running around the house for a week growling and running into everything. Circling the kitchen counter, leaping off couches, barreling down the stairs, it just never stopped. Sphyncus had her first real dog friend.

As the summer rolled by, I held on tight to every passing day because I didn’t know what the future held for E-Style. It was a good summer with lots of sunbathing and having fun with my power trio. Lots of hanging out in the backyard and going on little excursions when the heat wasn’t so bad. E’s health stayed steady until sometime around October when she started to slow down a little bit and was getting harder to feed.

The two things you monitor closely with kidney failure are creatinine and BUN levels. Without getting into specifics, they indicate how well the kidney is functioning and how much toxicity is building up. By this time E’s were elevating little by little and the effects were becoming more noticeable.

That Halloween I decided it was now or never on an idea that had been lingering around and growing since about 2009. I dressed up as Luke Skywalker from the Empire Strikes Back when he was on Dagobah and E-Style was dressed as Yoda riding around in my backpack. Chewie was an Ewok and Sphyncus was an X-Wing pilot. We entered a Halloween contest held on the downtown square and, much to my surprise, the three amigos kept their cool around all the other animals. I was so proud that day. We didn’t even place in the contest, but I still felt great about it. Our costumes were hilarious and totally original. It was a small dream I talked about for years and I finally saw it through. Whatever happened after that, the memory would be there, and I wouldn’t have any regrets about it.

We had a couple of rough snows that winter. As much as Kentucky usually gets snow every year, we had one in particular that was exceptional. I took Sphyncus into the garage and put a hoodie on her with another coat layered over top of it then hooked up her leash. The garage door raised and she stood frozen in her tracks staring at the foot of snow that was waiting for her on the other side. It was by far the deepest snow in Bowling Green of my lifetime. Sphyncus just stood there like she had no idea what to do. The snow wolf from years past was nowhere to be seen. In that moment, she was a true Egyptian baladi wondering what in the hell kind of place she was living. I picked her up to set her down in it and she sank all the way to her stomach. Like a frightened cat she sprang straight up in the air with her legs flailing around, shaking snow everywhere before sinking back down again. It was enough to overcome her fears of it, so we attempted a short walk.

There’s a field roughly the distance of a block away that we had made it to when Sphyncus started struggling to move. She had been hopping through the snow like a deer in a meadow up until then but stopped rather suddenly. After a couple of tugs on her leash were met with total resistance I picked her up to see what was the matter. Her toenails were completely encased in little individual pieces of ice. I’d never seen anything like it.

“Come on, girl. I’m gonna carry you home,” I told her. Typically, being held is met with kicking and thrashing around but that day was different. Mr. Freeze had shot her little toes with his ice gun so she was all too happy to let Batman carry her to safety.

“Good god, Finky, how much do you weigh? You’ve turned into a big fatty. Fat little Finky eating that American food and getting fat. Fat Finky McFinkerson.”

Truth be told, after about 20 yards I was having a hard time. She was around 40 pounds, almost double what she weighed when we first got her. A quick pick up here and there was no big deal, but we had some serious ground to cover to get back home trudging through a foot of snow.

As spring came on, E-Style’s health continued to steadily decline. She had been going through mitral valve disease (heart failure) since 2012. Because of that, the vets hadn’t approved of administering the subcutaneous fluids normally associated with kidney failure. Since it was the only form of treatment we weren’t using, I told them I was going to stop bringing her in for bloodwork every month because it only stressed me out watching it get worse and if we couldn’t eventually do the fluids then it was pointless. No need to keep spending the money and putting E through it all if there wasn’t a magic number we were watching for that would change things. Shortly after that, I got a call back saying that we would begin the fluids at a dosage of 100 ml every other day to see how she responded. I was elated and for the first time in a long time, E-Style actually improved a little bit.

It took a bit of adapting on our end to stick a needle in her back and hold it there for ten minutes. It felt like we were running a clinic out of the house with the bags and tubes hanging up alongside pouches of needles. Whatever it took, we were willing to do it. Of course with a disease like kidney failure, the improvement was only temporary and it wouldn’t be long before we had our first scare that we were going to lose her.

On a Sunday afternoon, Randi and I took the Hogs to a nature trail to run around and noticed that E was standing around looking lethargic and confused most of the time. I ended up carrying her most of the way and when we came home she looked even worse. She didn’t eat anything all day, so we started to get concerned she had taken the inevitable “turn.” The next day everything was the same, no energy, no interest in food. It’s like she was giving up. We talked to the vet and he said if it continued for another day or two we’d have to bring her in and talk about things. I bawled like a baby at the thought of it. I wasn’t ready for that. None of us were. The diagnosis came down about 16 months ago at that point, but everything seemed to suddenly happen so fast.

My sister, Stephanie, is a photographer and she called me asking if I wanted to do a photo shoot with E-Style the next day, just in case. About a month after I got E in 2001 there was a photo taken of me in the front yard wearing a ZZ Top baseball style shirt holding her up by my chest. Our hair was blowing in the wind and we looked so innocent. Our father/daughter relationship was just beginning. Seven years later, when my mom and stepdad divorced, I took another picture wearing the same shirt holding her up again in the yard before the house sold. 5 years later in 2013, I did it again in a different yard. Same shirt, same pose. It became an annual tradition on her birthday after that. When my sister called to set up a session with E-Style there was only one logical thing I could wear.

Steph had several locations in mind, so she drove while I sat in the passenger seat with E and mom rode along in the back. I had the window down and the little Bean kept trying to put her head out like she so loved to do. I was reminded of pictures I’d seen online titled “Old Dog’s Last Ride” as they were on their way to the vet to have the dog put down because some incurable illness had taken hold.

We went back to the house I grew up in and since nobody was home we posed for pictures in the front yard again like we had first done over 14 years earlier. It was tough to keep my composure. A little while later at a different spot I was laying on the ground with E stretched out across my chest. She laid her head down on my shoulder and I lost it. Almost 15 years of those moments rushed through my mind and I knew I only had so many left. Stephanie later told me it was one of her most difficult moments as a photographer to watch her older brother laying on the ground crying while clutching his dying dog.

When we got back home my cousin, Garrett, came over to say what could possibly be his final goodbye to E. Having lost one of his own dogs suddenly to cancer a couple of years before, he knew what we were going through and gave me some of the best advice I’ve ever received.

“Every day, tell her everything you want to tell her. Don’t leave anything behind in case you don’t get another chance. You don’t want any regrets with this. Tell her everything you want her to hear.”

After he left I called the vet to ask them if they had any ideas at all on anything I could try to get E to eat. It was nearing the end of day 3 and I knew day 4 would mean trouble. He advised we begin giving her the fluids every day from that point on as the kidney was in more trouble than the heart and we should try temporarily giving her things like sandwich meat to entice her to eat.

Miraculously it worked. That night E-Style ate several pieces of sliced turkey. We felt optimistic for the first time in days. Before going to bed I heeded Garrett’s advice and had a short conversation with her. I finished with what I would end up saying to her every night after that.

“Horse, I love you forever. I’ll see you in the morning. And if I don’t then that’s okay, I’ll see you again. I promise.” Followed by a kiss on the head.

The next afternoon she ate some more and by Thursday she was almost back to normal. After three days of thinking she had given up on life, E battled back. She ended up taking a short walk with us and my mind was blown. None of it made any sense. A few people warned us that it could be the infamous “last hurrah” some animals do right before cashing in, but I didn’t want to believe it. Seeing her trotting around again like that after days of being at death’s door I couldn’t accept that it was going to crash down again.

I did some detective work and discovered that Saturday evening, the night before it all started, mom had made some type of beef stew that had an onion broth in it that was fed to the Hogs. Onions are highly toxic to dogs, especially one who’s kidneys were struggling to process things. Sphyncus, being the hardened street mongrel that she is, was unaffected by it but Chewie had a little diarrhea those few days E was so down. We had initially chalked it up to him sensing what was going on with E and getting sick over it because he’s always been a nervous dog with an easily upset stomach.

Mom felt horrible and I was shocked she could casually make that mistake but rather than make a scene about it I wanted everyone to learn from it and be more cautious in the future. E-Style survived it, that’s what mattered most.

Throughout May and early June, E held on without a lot of changes. She was eating mostly baby food by then, but she was at least eating every day. When it started to get hotter around the beginning of July we noticed her beginning to do a little twitching motion when exposed to the heat for extended lengths of time. It was a real bummer because of how much she loved to sunbathe. After a few minutes her little body would spasm and she’d have to go back in. It broke my heart knowing it was her last summer and she couldn’t fully enjoy it.

In addition to her kidneys getting worse, E’s dry eye problem had come back to haunt her one last time. She took drops for it every day that kept it at bay for years but suddenly it was an issue again. Little by little her body and immune system were breaking down on her.

Randi and I spent August making the most of the Hogs as a power trio. We took them out a lot even though E had to be carried most of the time. We made sure somebody was home with them at all times. Everyone in the house made sacrifices to be there more than normal.

I kept waiting for signs of end stage kidney failure but I never saw them. There was occasional diarrhea but nothing consistent. No vomiting. Her legs got wobbly as she lost weight, but she never lost use of them. She continued to eat baby food although it did get harder and harder to feed her and she progressively ate less as the days went by.

About a week into September E started doing an odd breathing thing that had me worried. She wasn’t gasping for air like when her heart acted up, it was more like snoring but while she was wide awake. There wasn’t a struggle, it was just really noisy as if she was incredibly congested. I took her to the vet and all they said was the kidneys were getting worse and to just keep doing what we were doing. There was nothing to be done about it. I wanted answers and that was not satisfactory. We’d come so far, I wasn’t going to accept that it was just going to remain that way until she died.

A week later I took E-Style to a different vet for a second opinion. It was the first time bloodwork had been run in almost 6 months, since we started the fluids. Her BUN and creatinine were high but not through the roof. The vet sat me down and just kept apologizing over and over.

“So what does this mean? There’s nothing we can do?” I asked. “What’s causing this?”

“I’m sorry, sir. The kidneys are just getting worse and worse. That’s the cause of the breathing like that. Toxins building up, her body shutting down.”

“I don’t understand. How can her kidneys be causing her to breathe like this?” Nothing made sense to me.

“I’m sorry. These things happen in the final stage.”

“I’m not seeing diarrhea or vomiting or anything. She’s still eating and standing on her own. Shouldn’t that all be different?” E hadn’t given up on me, so I wasn’t about to give up on her.

“It’s not the same in every case. I’m sorry.”

“So, I know you aren’t supposed to answer questions like this, but how long do you think she has left?”

The woman’s face scrunched up and she opened her mouth to speak but didn’t.

I asked again. “It’s okay, I can take it. She’s had this over a year and a half now. I know what we’re dealing with. I just want to know what to expect from here on out.”

“I’m sorry, sir. I’d say she has a month.”

“A month? That’s it?” Tears were welling up in my eyes.

“Maybe two?” She said, raising her voice as if asking me. “Maybe two. It’s impossible to say. I’m so sorry, sir.” She knew I was about to cry and looked at me helpless. Vets must deal with that situation every single day, but she wasn’t numb to it.

I clutched E to my body and paid the bill. It took a while to get my head on straight in the parking lot before I could drive. I’m an ugly crier, I do it easily, and I’m not ashamed of it. One of the costs of having a big heart is wearing it on your sleeve. Countless times in my life I wished I could be somebody else. Somebody stronger and harder. A manly man that chokes it back when times get tough. It would save me a lot of pain. We finally drove home, and I delivered the news to mom and Randi.

Fifteen days later E-Style was gone. She went in her sleep, laying next to mom and Chewie, sometime between midnight and 2 a.m. on September 25th, 2016. We had feared having to make any type of decision, but E-Style gave us one last gift and spared us.

She had her dignity all the way to the end. She never lost control of her bodily functions and she still stood on her own 4 feet. She ate a mixture of sweet potatoes and beets just a few hours before she died.

Her last day on Earth E-Style spent the afternoon with mom while Randi and I went with our friend Chris to get pumpkins to carve. Once we got home mom went out with her boyfriend, so we stayed in for the night watching movies. Randi held E curled up in a blanket throughout the evening. After she went to bed I stayed up with the Hogs until mom got home. I laid on the couch with E, her body pressed up against mine as I played with her hair and feet until we fell asleep. Mom got home around 11 so I scooped E-Style up and carried her to mom’s bed while she was in the bathroom. I sat her down, put a blanket over her, and kissed her head.

“Horse, I love you forever. I’ll see you in the morning. And if I don’t then that’s okay, I’ll see you again. I promise.”

Next Chapter: Chapter 28