Hank knows the sound of his food bin. On Thursday morning he heard it not open, and he sat in the kitchen at 5:45 and stared at it like it owed him money. No breakfast before anesthesia. Caleb and I didn't eat either, partly out of solidarity and mostly because neither of us could.
It was 6 below when we walked him down the back step and up Caleb's ramp into the Outback. Caleb built the ramp Tuesday night in the garage, carpet stapled over plywood so Hank wouldn't have to jump, and tested it with a 40-pound bag of rock salt first. Highway 65 was dark the whole way to Blaine. Hank rode with his head on the console, talking under his breath the way he does when something is taking too long.
Drop-off at 7:30
Admission took about twenty minutes. A tech went over the consent form, confirmed what time he'd last eaten, asked for a phone number that would definitely be answered, and ran the deposit on our card. She asked if we wanted a call when he was out of surgery or only if something came up. I said both, please. She gave me a small, kind smile. I know that smile. I've used it.
Then she took his leash and he walked away from us on three and a half legs, tail waving, without looking back once. That's Hank. He has never believed a door leads anywhere bad.
The waiting room, and the rest of the day
We sat in the lobby for an hour because leaving felt wrong. It's a nice lobby. Big windows, a water bowl by the door, a home renovation show on a TV nobody was watching. A woman across from us held a cat carrier on her lap and talked quietly to whoever was inside the whole time.
At work I'm the one behind the counter. I see people at drop-off and again at pickup, and in between they're a name on the board and a phone number. I knew, in a general way, that the hours in between were hard. I didn't know they were this long. The clock in that lobby moved like it had frozen too.
Around 8:30 Caleb said, reasonably, that we could worry in a booth just as well as in a lobby. We went to a diner nearby and ate eggs we didn't taste, walked laps around a big-box store buying things we needed anyway (lint rollers, paper towels, a bag of wild rice for my grandma's soup), and then drove back to sit in the practice's parking lot with the heat running. I read the same page of a library book about six times.
1:10 p.m.
The phone rang at 1:10. I saw the Blaine number and my whole body went cold, which is silly, because I know the good calls and the bad calls come from the same number.
It was the surgeon herself. Surgery went well. She found what she expected inside the knee and nothing she didn't, the plate was on, and the post-op X-rays looked the way she wanted. He was waking up, warm, and "a little dramatic about it," which I took as an excellent sign. As planned, they'd keep him overnight for pain control, and we could pick him up Friday afternoon.
Caleb, who started out "not really a pet person," had to go stand by the car for a minute after I hung up.
They let us see him for a few minutes around five, in a quiet room off the treatment area. He was lying on a padded mat in a plastic cone, his leg shaved from hip to hock, a bandage on the knee, eyes half open. He thumped his tail twice when he heard Caleb's voice and fell back asleep in the middle of the second thump. The tech said that was about all the excitement they wanted from him. We drove home without him, which felt worse than the drive down.
Friday: home
I'd taken Friday off, and pickup was its own appointment: half an hour of discharge instructions, a printed sheet, a medication schedule, a demonstration of the rear-support sling, and the balance on the card. We bought the sling and a soft cone at checkout. A tech walked him out with the sling under his belly, and he went up Caleb's ramp like he'd been doing it all his life.
He's home now, in the exercise pen we set up next to the gray sofa, groggy and grumbling. I submitted the insurance claim from the couch Friday night, invoice and surgical report attached, before I could talk myself into waiting. I'll share the numbers when they come back.
If your dog has a surgery coming up, ask the surgical team what the day will look like for you as well as for the dog. Ours told us more than I expected, and it helped.
Last night I slept on the sofa again. Around two in the morning he let out a long, full-body sigh, and Mabel came down from the radiator shelf and sat on the arm of the sofa above his pen for a while, just looking. Then she went back up. That was the whole visit.
