On Cancer

In a slightly less humorous turn of events, Izzy was diagnosed with presumptive cancer at her last annual visit back in September. I brought her to the vet with two concerns: alarming halitosis, and a strange growth on her right hind paw. I left the vet with two additional concerns: a chipped canine tooth (thanks to last spring’s thunderstorm fiasco) and a rather significant amount of weight loss. Her vet and I discussed the pros and cons of getting a 12-year-old dog's teeth cleaned, and we decided to run a “full senior screening” blood panel first and wait for the results before worrying about her teeth.

A week later the blood results were in which showed a small elevation in calcium. Her vet emphasized that the elevation was very minimal, but she asked me to bring Izzy back in for a recheck and a brief follow-up exam. Mary and I brought her back after school the next day, and the two of us sat in the waiting room while the technician brought Izzy back for the exam. 10 minutes later, the same technician asked us to go back to an exam room to talk to the vet in person. I’ve spent enough time in doctor’s offices at this point to know that “the doctor wants to talk to you” is never a harbinger of something good, and I said as much to Mary as we followed the technician to the exam room. After another brief wait, Izzy’s vet came into the room and closed the door. She explained that she had rechecked her blood and that the original results were accurate, her calcium was elevated. And since elevated calcium can indicate one of two types of cancer, she followed up the blood work with a rectal exam and discovered a “firm nodule the size of a pencil eraser in her left anal gland.” She continued to explain that it was not conclusively cancer until it was biopsied, but that in order to biopsy the growth it must first be removed.

Let me be crystal clear right now in case it’s not obvious: my dog is the only constant source of joy in my life. I can think of exactly 3 days out of the last 13 years where I second-guessed my decision to rescue her from the Falls Road SPCA in 2007. Granted those were really bad days when, according to my friend Shelly, Izzy deserved to end up in a freezer (one of those days is detailed in another blog, to read it click here). But other than that, she has been the most consistently loyal, entertaining, and adoring companion I could ever ask for. Which explains why, when her vet mentioned cancer, my face started to burn while the air seemed to disappear around me. I felt like a fish flopping about helplessly on the shore after the tsunami receded. Mary’s eyes bore into me, almost willing me to cry, but then I heard myself speak and I sounded calm and rational and far away: “She is almost 13 years old, do you think surgery is the best option at this point? Her overall quality of life is paramount to me.” She assured me that yes, given Izzy’s otherwise good health, she’d definitely recommend the surgery. She told me to schedule an appointment with the oncologist on my way out and we said goodbye.

Izzy pre-ultrasound waiting for her morning treat
(she needed to fast and did not understand)

I’ve been blessedly lucky that none of my immediate human family members has dealt with cancer at this point, so I can only imagine how exasperating the healthcare timeline must be for humans. From the time I heard the word cancer until Izzy’s actual surgery, we waited a mere 2 ½ months, but it felt like 2 ½ years. During that time period, she had an appointment with her oncologist, an appointment in Syracuse for an ultrasound to check for metastasis, and an appointment with the surgeon.

Mercifully, per ultrasound results, there was no obvious evidence of metastasis in her lymph nodes or other vital organs and her surgery was scheduled for early November. In the meantime, my friends and I had planned a 10-day trip to California, and although I was hesitant to leave my dog for that long, there was no rational reason to cancel our vacation plans. I hoped a vacation would help kill the time, and one of my travel companions for the trip was my favorite compassionate-yet-logical vet friend, Ellen. She not only understood my concerns, but also was leaving behind her own beloved cat with cancer. So I tried to suppress my anxiety and enjoy myself in California. It was a trip I had been planning for over a year and Ellen and I were meeting up with my sister (from another mister), Sonya, and several of my other favorite people in the world on the West Coast. Still, I could not help missing my four-legged sleeping companion with vile breath.

Ellen, Kristen, Matthew, and my sister, Sonya

While in California I was surrounded by so much beauty – both the environmental and human types. And I was simultaneously distracted by so many wheelchair malfunctions (for more details click here) that I was able to keep my mind from obsessively worrying. When we returned from the West Coast, I had less than two weeks left to wait before the surgery. The morning my mom brought her in for the surgery at Colonial Veterinary Hospital, I made sure to let Izzy lick my face extra-vigorously and said about 300 silent prayers on her behalf. The surgery was not until 5 PM, and the surgeon said he would call me afterwards. If everything went according to plan, we could pick her up within 48 hours. In the meantime, I went to school for the afternoon and tried to stay distracted by editing college application essays and helping students identify central themes in the book Things Fall Apart. I prayed that Izzy’s fate would turn out better than Okonkwo’s.

Day 3 in the hospital

My phone did not ring until close to 7 PM, but it was good news: Izzy was alive and recovering, and the surgeon thought he got good margins. Per my request, in addition to removing the tumor, he had also removed the unsightly old lady wart that protruded from Izzy’s left side. He told me to call the clinic in the morning to check on her and he hoped she would be ready to come home by the following day. As it turned out, she was not. Nor was she ready to come home the next day, or the day after that, or the day after that. Post-surgery, Izzy was stricken with the most dreaded of possible side effects: fecal incontinence. Two words that should never be used in the same sentence. I called Colonial twice a day for six days, and twice a day I heard about her lovely disposition and ravenous appetite, before hearing about her uncontrollable diarrhea. Given the fact that Colonial is staffed 24/7, and that technicians were able to bathe her and sterilize her incisions after every “accident,” I did not pressure my mom to go pick her up; sometimes I know my limits. Fecal incontinence does not fit into the schedule at the Hooks’ household, especially with two other dogs and only one able-bodied human.

As the days added up, I was secretly starting to worry that fecal incontinence would continue indefinitely, and I would never get my dog back. When I vocalized my concerns to the surgeon, he seemed genuinely shocked that her recovery was so fraught with difficulty. I thought back to my original conversation with the oncologist in late September about Izzy’s quality of life being paramount, and I started questioning my decision. Then I flashed back to my appointment with the surgeon in October; he did warn of potential fecal incontinence, but said it was extremely rare – especially with such a small mass in such an otherwise healthy dog. As two days turned into three days and three into four, I continued calling Colonial until even the technicians recognized my voice. They graciously invited me to come visit her in the hospital, but it seemed too cruel – she would think I was there to bring her home and then I’d turn around and leave her again. So, I continued to wait, and after six days I finally got some encouraging news during my morning phone call: Izzy still had diarrhea, but she had no accidents overnight. I consulted with my mom, and we agreed that – if Izzy continued with no accidents throughout the day – she could come home that evening.

Thankfully, Shelly – who might be the only person who loves Izzy almost as much as I do – agreed to accompany my mom and me to pick her up. It was later in the evening when we arrived at Colonial, and the waiting room was empty. The three of us headed back to an exam room to wait for a technician to retrieve Izzy and give us the (extensive) discharge instructions. When the door finally opened, we were presented with a very excited, very skinny Izzy with a cone on her head. The second she saw us she started wiggling and squinting her eyes and wagging her tail, and she left a trail of pudding poop in her wake. The technician did not seem to notice, but I saw my mom’s eyes start to bug out of her head and I had a sinking feeling that we might be bringing Izzy home too soon. But at that point it was too late, the damage was done, Izzy already knew that she was coming home. The discharge instructions began: first there was anti-septic wash for the incision site, which needed to be thoroughly cleaned at least twice a day, and then there were antibiotics, pain meds, anti-diarrheal meds, a probiotic powder and prescription dog food. The instructions continued, and I could see my mom’s stress level elevate with each directive: one medication was administered every six hours as needed, the other was every twelve, the probiotic powder could be split between both meals or put in one, but it could not be given at the same time as the antibiotic, and we needed to make sure that Izzy was always on a leash even if she just went into the back pen to pee, and under no circumstances could she jump on furniture until the sutures were removed.

When the technician finally stopped talking and left the room (to get another medication incidentally), Shelly and I tried to assuage my mom’s concerns. I tried to reassure her that I understood all of the directions and that everything was written down in the discharge instructions. Meanwhile I could not reconcile the Izzy in front of me with the Izzy from seven days ago – she looked like she had lost about 10 pounds, her rear end was pink and inflamed, her tail was shaved so she looked like a rat and she had anxiously nibbled the towels in her crate so aggressively that the area between her lips and her nostrils was red and raw. She reminded me of a kindergartner with Kool-Aid all over her face. Nonetheless, I tried to convince my mom (and myself) that we could figure everything out at home and that Izzy’s sphincter function would soon return to normal. I paid the bill, and the four of us headed home.

Shelly sat in the back of the van and held onto Izzy to keep her from jumping on the seat, and less than five minutes into our ride home she had two accidents. I was relieved that the floor of my van is not carpeted, but that fact did not change what I saw as a bad omen for the rest of the evening. Incidentally, while Izzy had not had an accident in the house or car for over 12 years, she did not seem particularly ashamed of herself. My mom pulled the car into my driveway and opened the garage door, and the second we let Izzy out of the back of my car, she dragged Shelly straight to the shelf that holds the tennis balls and started prancing in place and looking up at the box of balls and looking at us, up at the balls and back at us, back and forth. Something about that moment, even though she had just pooped in my car, reassured me that she was going to be fine. She might be emaciated with fecal incontinence, but she still wanted to play ball in the dark. Once in the house and off the leash, she immediately trotted to the back door and asked to be let out. That was also a good sign, I thought, even though she left a small poop splooch or two along the way. Shelly came to our assistance and followed behind Izzy with the Clorox wipes, and then helped us problem solve the next inevitable obstacle: where should Izzy sleep? Where to put a dog with a leaky sphincter?

A discontent Izzy in my bathroom

Shelly considered lining her crate with trashbags or towels, but quickly abandoned that idea once we realized she could barely fit in the crate while wearing the cone of shame. Ultimately, we decided to cover her bed with towels and put it in the bathroom adjacent to my bedroom. I figured after six nights in a crate next to other hospitalized dogs, the bathroom floor on her plush bed would be luxurious. I figured wrong. After Shelly left and I was settled in bed for the night, and after Izzy had gone out for the last time (and had her incisions thoroughly cleaned by my mom), my mom closed the door to the bathroom and attempted to retire to her own room for the night. Izzy’s noises elevated slowly, starting as occasional pathetic sounding yelps, but ramping up to a full doggy temper tantrum within minutes. I could hear her banging up against the door with the plastic cone as she graduated from pathetic yelps to high-pitched, almost piercing barks. I heard my mom’s footsteps through the house, and she opened the door to the bathroom and moved Izzy to the other side of the house in the laundry room. Once again, it took only a matter of moments for Izzy to successfully articulate her sense of doggy injustice. Panting dramatically, she was eventually returned to my room where she stood at the foot of my bed accompanied by my increasingly displeased mother.

Temper tantrum, please notice the Kool-Aid lips 

“What do you suggest we do with her? It is after midnight, I’m not doing this all night.”

Before she even finished the sentence, Izzy jumped onto my bed. She immediately curled up with her cone on my legs, and sort of looked up at my mom as if to say: “Took you long enough to figure that one out.” Defeated, my mom shoved an old blanket underneath her, turned off the light and left my room in disgust.


The rest of the night, or at least what was left of it, followed suit – Izzy needed to go out once in the middle of the night but mostly made it through the next eight hours without incident. It was a stressful first 48 hours home after an already stressful 2 ½ months, but I am happy to report that over the next two weeks, her sutures remained intact, her diarrhea subsided, her sphincter control returned and my mom expertly followed her extensive medication protocol – including frequent antiseptic cleansing to affected areas. Most importantly, six months post-surgery, her quality of life seems unchanged; she still tramples over my mom’s shih tzus daily while she races to get a morning treat, she still begs to be fed as if she is on the brink of starvation, and she still wants to play ball – every single day, no matter the weather. The older she gets, the less obedient she seems, but the only thing that matters to me is that as of today, she is cancer free, and she remains full of the shenanigans which make her both the best and worst dog of all time. 

"Porch ball" with Shelly

On Traveling with a Dog

This is one of my all-time favorite Izzy stories.

Almost 2 years after leaving Baltimore, I convinced Shelly, another member of my Ithaca caregiving crew, to take me on a mini break down there to visit friends. My friend Peter lived outside of Baltimore and invited us to stay in his accessible mother-in-law suite, and he made the deal even sweeter when he told me I could bring Izzy. Predictably, Shelly, Izzy and I left Ithaca two hours after we intended to, and I quickly realized we were not going to arrive at our intended destination until after 10 o’clock at night. Under normal, even perhaps highly trafficked circumstances, the drive from my house in Ithaca to Baltimore city is 5 – 5 ½ hours max. With Shelly driving, however, the same exact drive (even without traffic) took almost seven. I blame it on her slightly abnormal obsession with McDonald’s unsweetened iced tea which necessitates we stop almost hourly to pee. At 9 o’clock, still north of Baltimore and more than an hour away from Peter’s, Shelly and I aborted the mission and elected to find a hotel room for the night. The only problem was my beast.

Izzy, Shelly, and me on the Inner Harbor

Luckily for us we had her therapy vest in the car, and it would only be for one night. We pulled into a Hampton Inn a mere 15 minutes north of Baltimore city, got an accessible room with a roll in shower and the three of us retired for the night. Izzy was a picture of perfection, she ate her dinner in the room, went out for a nice walk before bed, did not bark or whine when strangers walked by and snuggled up with me in the queen-sized bed all night. The next day we coordinated plans to meet my friend Lena for a trip to Whole Foods and a nostalgic walk along the waterfront in Baltimore. As we walked/wheeled, she convinced us to find a hotel within walking distance of downtown rather than trek to Peter’s house in Silver Spring. Considering everything Shelly and I planned to do was downtown – including our later dinner plans – we were easily convinced. After the previous days’ interminable drive from Ithaca, another 45 minutes seemed daunting. Especially given Shelly’s obsession with iced tea, and the traffic on I-95. I called Peter and told him we’d see him at dinner and used the (presumably now obsolete) Hotels Tonight app to find an inexpensive hotel room in the Inner Harbor. 

We told Lena we’d see her later and headed a few blocks away to the hotel. Izzy, adorned in her therapy vest, got settled into yet another hotel room and Shelly and I did our best to make her feel comfortable before we left. She ate her dinner, we left her water bowl in plain view, and she had access to two queen size beds of her choice. Relatively certain she was tired after our walk anyway, Shelly and I headed out to meet my friends for dinner. Our reservations were at 6 o’clock at a restaurant about 10 blocks away from the hotel. As Shelly and I left the lobby I said to the concierge, “I’ve never left my therapy dog behind in a hotel room, and sometimes she gets anxious without me, so please call my number if there are any problems.”

Shelly and I got into the van and headed to City Café. The traffic was horrendous. 20 minutes after leaving the hotel, we’d barely made it five blocks. And then the inevitable: my phone rang, it was an unknown Baltimore number. Shit. Without functioning hands, I was no help, and Shelly had to reach over and grab my phone in order to answer it while navigating rush-hour traffic. The man on the other end of the phone sounded frazzled: “Ma’am, I’m sorry to tell you but it seems your therapy dog is causing problems on the eighth floor. There have been some complaints about the noise coming from your room. Can you please come back?” Naturally we were on a one-way street going north, so by the time we’d turned around and fought through thick traffic heading back to the hotel, we were already late for our intended dinner reservations. I stayed in the car while Shelly ran in to grab the beast. Moments later she was back in the car with Izzy in tow.

Me: Where is her leash?
Shelly: I didn’t grab it, she was already out of the hotel room when I got to the eighth floor.
Me: What are you talking about?
Shelly: She greeted me as soon as the elevator door opened, so I did not even go to the room. Someone must have gotten her out before I got there.
Me: Shelly, that makes no sense. Why would the hotel staff let a dog out of the room to wander around the hotel without a person?
Shelly: I don’t know, it did not make sense to me either.

Then it dawned on me: the door to the hotel room was a lever. My crazy dog had let herself out of the room. I called Peter with my predicament and explained that we’d be late, and that my dog had broken out of our hotel room and would be joining us at dinner. Shelly and I crawled our way up Charles Street back towards our original destination and eventually arrived a mere 20 minutes late. Unable to find parking, I called Peter again and begged for his assistance. I was anxious to see all of my old teacher friends and felt like a proper asshole for being late. Meanwhile, Shelly’s hair was about to fall out of her head after driving through Baltimore traffic, and trying to parallel park on crowded one-way streets was beyond what either of us could handle. Peter traipsed out of the restaurant as Shelly unloaded me from the van, and I implored – as Shelly passed off the keys – “Can you please put Izzy’s vest on and bring her in after you park? I think it’s still too hot for her to sit in the van.”

Shelly and I went into the restaurant, completely forgetting that Izzy didn't have a leash in the van. Once I introduced Shelly to my favorite friends from Baltimore, all of whom had been sitting at the table for at least 30 minutes, I awkwardly parked my chair under the edge of the long table and turned around just as Peter walked in with Izzy. He had removed his belt and looped it through her collar, and had buckled her therapy dog vest around her midriff rather than around her chest, so as she walked it wiggled down towards her hind end and resembled a diaper. Meanwhile, unaccustomed to being in restaurants or surrounded by so many friendly people, Izzy was ebullient; her eyes squinted as if she were smiling, she tilted her nose in the air to smell all the delicious food and she wiggled with excitement. I could almost hear her say, “See what good things happen when I escape from hotel rooms?”

We ate dinner, shared dessert and made general merriment until the post-meal surprise: tickets to see Peter Bradley Adams at a local venue, one of my favorite singer-songwriters. The concert was scheduled for 8 o’clock, so we needed to head out as quickly as possible. The only problem? Izzy. What was I going to do with my dog during a two-hour concert? Mercifully, one of my friends at dinner was not accompanying us to the concert, and he volunteered to dog sit for the rest of the evening. (Probably something he will never do again.)

The concert was incredible. Shelly describes Peter Bradley Adams as a “closed mouth singer” but his voice resonates with me, and beyond that, I just felt so loved and so grateful to everyone who made the entire evening possible. And despite the fact that my therapy dog escaped from a hotel room, made us late to dinner, and ruined any chance of my friend Matt having a relaxing evening with his wife due to Izzy's irrational anxiety about spending time with strangers, I will always look back on that night as one of my top 10 favorite memories. It certainly would have been more seamless without Izzy, but it would not have been as memorable. For any of us.

On Thunderstorms

When I retired from teaching in 2012, I moved back in with my parents in Ithaca. The only one at that time who was fully enthusiastic about my new life plan was Izzy. With the exception of the summer of 2010 which I spent almost entirely in the hospital, Izzy and I had spent every summer since her adoption in Ithaca. She loved Ithaca. When we’d drive home to visit my parents, as soon as I took the exit for Whitney Point – a full 45 minutes away from Ithaca – Izzy would sit up and start panting and whining in anticipation. My dad used to joke that Izzy was like a “fresh air dog” that came up from the city for the summer to spend two months in the country at the doggy equivalent of summer camp. With access to real grass in the backyard (as opposed to the pee pad we constructed on my balcony out of bricks and pebbles) and almost daily visits to the lake to swim and chase her ball, Ithaca was a proper utopia for a dog that was used to 30 minute walks with a dog walker through downtown Baltimore.

Just because she is happier in Ithaca, did not mean that she left her doggy shenanigans in Baltimore. As she got older, her fear of thunder took on an extra element of intensity. To illustrate, the last time she was crated during a thunderstorm, my mom and I returned to find the bottom of the crate on the other side of the room, blood all over her dog bed and a broken tooth from her apparent efforts to escape. Henceforth she was never again crated during a thunderstorm. I felt so guilty, just imagining her abject terror while attempting to tear the metal crate asunder while I was out to dinner with my family. Fast forward a few months, Mary – one of my dream team Ithaca caregivers – and I were out running errands. Halfway through my shopping spree at EMS, a storm unleashed itself in true Central New York form. There were literal sheets of rain coming out of the sky and intense lightning that seemed to bounce itself through the parking lot in front of us. I purchased a water bottle and Mary and I made a quick break for the van to head home. The rain eased a bit, from torrential to steady, but the thunder and lightning continued throughout the 15-minute drive back to my house. As we turned onto my street, I noticed a man walking his dog in the distance and commented, “what kind of idiot walks a dog during the pouring rain without an umbrella…?” But before I even finished the sentence, I realized that the idiot was not walking just any dog down the street, he was walking my dog down the street. Without a leash. Mary pulled up alongside the stranger and rolled down the window. Before she could explain who we were or ask the man what he was doing with Izzy in the pouring rain, my – at the time 11-year-old dog – jumped through the driver’s side window and clawed her way behind Mary (shredding the back of her neck in the process) to land in my lap. All we heard from the man during the struggle was, “I just found her in my garage.”

When we pulled into the driveway, I was shocked to see my mom’s car was not in the garage. I thought perhaps my mom had let her out to go to the bathroom and Izzy had discovered an unlatched gate in the backyard. Instead, we discovered an empty house (with the exception of two very anxious shih tzus), with the back door ajar letting a steady stream of rain into the living room. Mary walked onto the back deck to see if the gate was open. It was not. Using deductive reasoning we concluded that Izzy had freaked out upon hearing the thunder, depressed the lever door to get out of the house and into the backyard, jumped over a 4 foot fence and wandered down the street until she found someone to rescue her.

Every time I tell this story, I can’t help but imagine all of the ways things could have ended badly. What if Mary and I had not turned onto the street at the same moment the man was walking her past my house? How long would he have walked her in the rain trying to find her owner? He was not my immediate neighbor, he lived several houses away and Izzy’s address was not on her collar. What if in her panic to escape the thunder she had run into traffic and been hit by a car? Living in a town with frequent thunderstorms, my options felt pretty limited: don’t leave the house when it might thunder, put her in the crate and risk her ripping her own teeth out, or trust the weatherman and drug her every time it’s supposed to storm? There was no good answer, but while I waited in trepidation for storms, I realized that there is one perk to my favorite four-legged friend finally getting old: she is starting to go deaf. A few months ago we had our first Ithaca spring thunderstorm, and Izzy – mercifully – did not hear it.

On The Dangers of Owning A Smart Dog

There is a lot of heavy shit on my mind these days, and the actual blog that I’ve been mulling over in my head is honestly something that no one needs to read during a pandemic. So, for right now, in order to give myself a remote sense of productivity, I’m going to write a series of Izzy stories for your reading enjoyment. You are welcome in advance for making the most irresponsible, impulse purchase in the history of such purchases at the Baltimore City SPCA in April 2007: Izzy.

I make reference to a few of her first year’s antics in a blog (click here for the link) I wrote several years ago, but a decade later there have been a few more doozies. I had great aspirations of self-training a reliable, mixed breed therapy dog. 13 years ago, when she was just a tiny one, I tried teaching her how to move things out of my way in my apartment. With much peanut butter and patience she eventually mastered, “move your bone,” or “move your toy," and with ample opportunities for practice, she soon learned that “go get Meg” (my roommate back in Baltimore) meant I needed help out of a pickle. She also walks exceptionally well on a leash – I think running over her paws a few times with my manual wheelchair when she was a puppy sent an enduring message. Along the way she also learned how to open doors – at least the ones with lever handles. She had no problem jumping up, depressing the lever and barging into someone’s room, and she soon figured out how to depress the handle, walk backwards and stick her snout in the doorway in order to pull the door open as well. During her first few years with me, I was still able to walk, albeit with difficulty, and there were occasional nights when I tripped and fell en route to the bathroom and needed Izzy to go “wake up Meg” to help me off the ground. On another morning, I woke up and struggled to get myself out of bed. Unable to break my superhuman extensory tone in the morning, I could not pull myself into a seated position to transfer to my wheelchair. I summoned the beast: “Izzy, come, come up here!” She leapt onto the bed, eager to encroach upon my personal space as always. Once she was standing directly over my face, I grabbed her collar and told her to “back up.” Whether she knew what I was talking about or she just backed away from me in an act of attempted defiance, I will never know – but the result was that she pulled me into a seated position. Once seated, I was able to grab onto my nightstand and reach forward for my wheelchair in order to successfully transfer out of bed. That was the first moment I realized, this beast deserves a therapy dog vest.* Whether or not she would be physically able or well-trained enough to help me out of the myriad predicaments I’d find myself in over the next dozen years remained to be seen, but I knew I needed her by my side.

There have been times however, especially in her younger years, when her extensive therapy dog “training” and her intuition backfired. For example, I never thought about the downside of Izzy learning to open doors inside my apartment. Fast forward a year or two to when my friend Meli flew in from Seattle to visit me for the weekend. Izzy mistakenly believed that anyone entering my apartment was there explicitly for her entertainment, and was thus non-plussed when the two of us departed the apartment to go out for brunch. Two hours later we returned to my apartment to find a pink Post-It note stuck to my door. It read: “FYI, I found your dog in my apartment. I returned her and put her in her crate. – Apartment 509.” I was confused, the deadbolt to my apartment was locked – how did she get out? I shrugged it off thinking perhaps the door had not latched for some reason. But then, just a few weeks later when I was wheeling to the garbage chute in my pajamas, immediately after the door latched behind me I heard clattering – as if the metal handle on my apartment door was being violently jiggled up and down. I thought to myself, maybe this is how she got out? I dumped the garbage and headed back towards my door where I discovered that somehow Izzy had managed to lock the deadbolt during her erratic clawing at the handle. Wearing pajamas on a Saturday night with no cell phone on me, I immediately panicked – how was I going to get back in? None of my friends had an extra key, Meg was in New York for the weekend and how could I contact anyone without my phone? The apartment manager didn’t even have an emergency contact number, and I wasn’t particularly friendly with any of my neighbors. In desperation, I did the only thing I could think of at the time: “Izzy girl, Izzy girl!! Let me in, come on girl, open the door!!” She must have hesitated for a minute or two thinking, why isn’t she just opening the door herself? Yet with repeated urging, I heard the familiar scrambling of her front paws against the door handle and soon enough she depressed the handle and pulled it backwards just enough to let me in. I felt the same sense of pride at that moment as I did when my most academically unmotivated student finally managed to pass a test. I leaned forward and praised her as if she had saved someone from a burning building. Never mind that she was the one who had locked me out to begin with, her brilliance prevented me from spending the night in the hallway of my apartment building.

That was only one of many door-related exploits perpetrated by this dog of mine. On at least two other occasions she managed to escape the apartment while I was in the hospital and at school. I received a phone call late in the afternoon the day before I was scheduled to begin my first chemo infusion. Recognizing the number as my apartment manager's, I answered: “Hey Melody, what’s up?” Sounding flustered she responded, “Are you home? Your dog is in my office.” Confused, I explained, “I’m in the hospital for a couple days, nobody is in my apartment right now. Meg will not be home until after work. How did she get into your office?” That question was never answered (although I wish I could get my hands on the security footage). To be clear, I lived on the fifth floor of a high-rise building. Melody’s office was on the eighth floor. Which meant that Izzy either rode the elevator up three flights or that she somehow got into the stairwell by way of a heavy duty door that she pulled open before walking up three flights of stairs to the eighth floor. Either scenario did not make much sense to me. Who in their right mind would let a dog get into the elevator unaccompanied? Or how did she manage to pull open such a heavy door? On another afternoon, the maintenance guy from my building called me at school to report that Izzy was found on the ground floor of the parking garage. He escorted her back to the apartment, begging the question: what would have happened had he not been in the parking garage when she came out of the elevator door? It was terrifying to consider.

I’m sure you are shaking your head at this point and thinking, why the hell did you not just put that Houdini of a dog inside her crate? Good question. Primarily because when I was the only person in my apartment, I was physically unable to get her into the crate by myself. She’d throw herself on the floor just outside the crate and have a canine equivalent of a toddler’s flop and drop. From the confines of a wheelchair it was pretty much impossible to force her in, and she couldn’t be enticed by a treat when she knew it meant I was leaving her alone in the apartment. The most annoying part of these shenanigans? When there was an able-bodied person in the apartment with me, all I’d have to say was, “in your crate” and she’d walk in obediently. (Clearly not a characteristic of a reliable therapy dog when said therapy dog is able to expertly exploit her owner’s disability.)

I’m going to leave off on that note, and hopefully – as the quarantine continues – I will be motivated to chronicle a few more Izzy adventures before life returns to normal. She is 13 at this point, and already had a cancerous tumor removed. My goal is to get these stories written while I can still look at her sleeping on the floor in front of me, gnawing on her bone, occasionally passing gas, and making me smile.

*Important note, although she does currently have a therapy dog vest, it is just from Amazon. She has accompanied me to a lot of places over the years, but I’d never take advantage of the system and bring her with me on a plane or, Lord forbid, to a grocery store.