Poodle Mistress

Star In the fall of 1981 Red and I were at a party, hovering around a bonfire trying to keep warm. I was standing a few people away from Red when I heard him say, “I’d like to get a motor home.” On the way home I asked, “What’s a motor home?” During the next few months we occasionally checked the classified ads in the paper. The following spring Red found a motor home at a car dealer and we made an appointment to look at it. It had been used for tailgating at football games and hardly showed any wear. The salesman handed me the keys and said, “Let’s go for a ride.” I’d never driven anything this large before. It was a Sprinter model, twenty-seven feet from bumper to bumper. The huge steering wheel was almost horizontal, whereas the steering wheel in a car is closer to vertical. Surprisingly, I felt comfortable driving. On the way home, Red and I talked over our finances. I had a certificate of deposit coming due in a few days and I’d put the airplane up for sale. That was my half if he could match it. We’d had the airplane since 1976. It was nice to say we had one, but we were limited in using it. The weather had to be good, and we had to have ground transportation. That’s where we thought our folding bikes would come in handy. Those twenty-inch wheels just hadn’t cut it. We adults were accustomed to twenty-six-inch wheels. Only a few places dotted our aviation map where we could fly and not need ground transportation. Not many airports had restaurants. A few times we would just fly out somewhere for a meal – to Urbana or New Philadelphia. Or to try to help me learn to land, which I never accomplished. I’d get the plane down close to the ground, but suddenly I’d pull up and Red had to take over and land. The possibilities are greater with a motor home. Drive it. Park it. Live in it. Eat in it. The dogs loved it. Oh, yes, they allowed us in. After all, they had to have someone drive it, park it and feed them. That first summer we crisscrossed Ohio in our motor home, getting accustomed to a new lifestyle. My schedule that summer coincided with Red’s. Jacques was gone by that time and Shane was nine and Zeke was seven. We camped at state parks and sometimes spent a night in a roadside rest area when we couldn’t find a place to camp. We were learning first-hand how popular camping is. In August, Shane developed a respiratory problem. He coughed for a couple of days. I spent a lot of time with him, holding him, massaging his throat. The second day of coughing, I took him to our vet who told me that respiratory problem Shane endured was not unusual in poodles and that it could not be treated. I petted Shane as he lay on the examining table. “I love you,” I said. The vet assured me that that dog knew he was much loved. Then he inserted a needle into Shane’s neck. I thought he was giving him some medication that would help him. The vet explained what he was doing. I wanted him to stop. I wanted Shane in my arms again. It was too late. Shane’s little heart stopped beating, He was gone. I didn’t know what to do. The vet found a towel to wrap around Shane. I had to he in shock as he put my dog’s body in a box and led me out a side door so I wouldn’t have to pass through the waiting room filled with other people and their pets. He helped me put the box in the trunk of the car. I felt awful about leaving Shane alone in the trunk. He didn’t belong there. He belonged in the front seat with me, wrapped around my neck like a white fur collar. He really didn’t know where he was. The last thing he heard (and I hope he understood) was “I love you.” We were still seeing a vet in Marion, about an hour’s drive away. I cried much of the way to Columbus. I stopped at the bank where Red was working. I cried as I told him about Shane’s last minutes – how I petted him and had told him he was loved. My husband put his arms around me and held me tight. “I’m getting you a female dog for your birthday,” he said. A few days later, it dawned on me that getting a female dog was Red’s plan for a long time. He was nearly forty-six when we were married. He said he didn’t want children at such a late stage in his life because he didn’t want to go to their graduation in a wheelchair. He’d often spoke of raising a litter of pups. Instead of two-legged children, we were planning to become parents to more four-legged ones. My birthday was several weeks away. Meanwhile, we were down to one dog, Zeke. Although Zeke seemed to favor my husband, I think he realized I was alone and spent much time with me. I needed that. I think he sensed my loss and wanted to console me. Red and I started talking about the new dog. When he told me he was getting the female, he didn’t even know for sure the mother dog was pregnant. “What if she doesn’t have a female?” he asked one day. “Would you settle for a male?” “Yes,” I said. I was lost without a dog, the first time in nine years I hadn’t had one. Something was missing in my life. I could feel a void, a hole. Early in September, three weeks before my birthday, the pups were born – two females. We wouldn’t be able to get the pup until she was six weeks old. By that time, my life was beginning to fall apart. Shortly after Shane died, I discovered a lump on my pelvis. At first I thought I was having some kind of reaction to Shane’s death, but I still had it checked out. After several doctors’ appointments, I was admitted to the hospital. I had more tests. I was scheduled for surgery two days before we were to pick up the puppy. The surgeon removed a fibroid tumor, biopsied it and discovered it to be malignant. It had metastasized to the ovaries. Both ovaries and the uterus were removed. The diagnosis: ovarian cancer. I was in the hospital, facing chemotherapy treatments. That’s a two-year regimen, the oncologist had told me. A lot of things went through my mind. Why me? Why this? Why now? What’s going to happen to me? I cried. Now I understood why Betty Rollins titled her book on battling breast cancer “First You Cry,” Then my thoughts went to the puppy we were supposed to get that weekend. “If I don’t go get her, the woman will think we don’t want her,” Red said. “Get her and bring her home so I will have her to come home to,” I moaned as I tried to get comfortable in bed. I still had a tube running through my nose into my stomach. I had an incision from my belly button to as far down as possible. A curved piece of something – plastic or plaster of Paris – covered my midsection. I had heard and read that animals can make recovery easier for humans. I needed that dog. I needed to get better. I was only thirty-nine. I was not ready for my life to be over. I still had too many things to accomplish. Red didn’t need this. He’d already lost one wife to a serious disease. A day later than planned, Red went to get the puppy. I had asked for the smaller of the two and had picked out a name – Lady Bell Star. The Bell Star was for the motorcycle helmets we wore for protection and the Lady was the fact I was getting a female. He brought her home and bathed her under the spigot in the bathtub to get rid of the fleas. He took Polaroid pictures of her on Zeke’s little chair and brought the pictures to me in the hospital. I couldn’t wait to get home to her. She took to me immediately. And the feeling was mutual. We got along great. She was definitely my dog, even though she had had about five days with my husband. I needed a dog, especially facing that uphill battle with chemotherapy that would begin in a few days. It was her time to help my healing process. A few days before my second treatment I was scheduled to go to chemo clinic at the hospital. I ran into the woman I shared a room with after my surgery. Her name also was Sandy, and we had the same oncologist. She introduced me to another patient in clinic. “This is the woman I was in the hospital with,” she told her friend. “She was talking one day about her baby and I figured