The dog is… fine, perhaps…? He’s old, and he’s got old dog things wrong with him, which is how it was more or less explained to me, but anything more serious has thankfully, inexplicably, been avoided despite the blood test that sent alarm bells ringing last week. There was another blood test done to check this, and he had his belly shaved and some radiography done as well just in case. It’s been “looked into,” and he’s… okay…?
I found out via phone call. I’d spent the days before his appointment with an increasing sense of doom and foreboding, as if I knew definitively that this was the beginning of the end (if not the end of the end), and I’d been told that I’d get a call with updates during the appointment when I’d dropped him off that morning. Before it came, I’d look at the phone, accusatorially, daring it to ring and give me the bad news: come on, just do it. Just tell me.
But instead, the call was a surprisingly happy doctor giving me the good news. I remember thinking at the time, she sounds happier and more relieved than I am with some sense of wonderment. I couldn’t tell if I was surprised by the seeming lack of professionalism or touched by how much she cared more; all things considered, it’s a nice thing to have to call a draw in.
Even more surprising was how it felt afterwards: an unexpected sense of anti-climax that all it took was one phone call and everything was done, bar a follow-up appointment. I’d spent days thinking the worst, feeling the worst, and it was suddenly just gone. I was happy, I was relieved, but also, there was this very clear feeling of, Is that it? Am I just supposed to move on now? I try, and instead, I write this to exorcise those feelings and share how it actually feels.