Chris & Joy’s Critterweb

This story is in memory of Lilly, who passed away at the ripe old age of 15 a few years back. We still think of her whenever we see rubber rat Halloween toys…

Sometimes even bad situations have their amusing side. A good example of this would be the time our house was broken into and ransacked when we were living in Tucson, AZ.

A bit of back-story is necessary for this one, mainly involving our dog Lilly and a game that we had gotten for Christmas a few months before the break-in. Lilly, for those who never got to meet her, was a forty-five pound white and brindle Pit Bull who had two gears: sloth mode, which is how she spent 98% of her time, and ‘berserk’. Berserk mode was generally triggered by squeaky toys or rubber Halloween decorations and involved bloodcurdling wails and the attempted annihilation of the offending object. This probably sounds more menacing than it actually was; Lilly was good-natured with people, dogs, and cats, and her kamikaze attacks upon items such as two-foot rubber rats were actually a great source of amusement, for the most part. The fact that she also was bent on ridding the planet of lizards, toads, and other small wildlife was not so much fun… but that’s another story altogether.

OK, so it was perhaps immature on our part, but we’d often bring one of her squeaky-toy mortal enemies out of it’s hiding spot, show it to her and then make it disappear again, just to see her come hurtling across the room with an enraged shriek, and then we’d giggle as she’d stomp all over the house with her brow crinkled up, snorting like a bull. She’d be on full alert for a good ten minutes before returning to her previous sun-drunk stupor, and hey — it was a more entertaining way to ascertain if she was actually still breathing than, say, holding a mirror under her nostrils. (actually the loud snoring usually gave away the fact that she was sleeping rather than dead).

Enter the Rotten Egg. This was a game we got from our friends Chris and Paul as a Christmas gift. If I recall correctly, once the batteries were inserted, you passed the egg around the room, recorded your names into it, then had to quickly toss it back and forth to whichever person whose name it played back. Of course, the real use for the Rotten Egg quickly became evident (ok, let’s be totally honest, it was bought with Lilly in mind) the first time we tried to play with it around Lilly. Let’s see, large rubber object with glaring goggly eyes that four humans are excitedly tossing back and forth, that has the nerve to actually be making noise… it was quickly determined by our resident monster-slayer that the Rotten Egg Must Die.

And so after we’d gotten as much mileage as we could out of tormenting Lilly with the egg (yes, the fun of having a good sized dog try to run up the side of your body shrieking like a banshee does lose it’s amusement value after a few moments)  the Rotten Egg had to be permanently banished to the back of the top shelf of the coat closet by the front door, lest it be reduced to bite-sized colorful shreds. Every now and then, we’d show it to her briefly and then quickly shut the closet door; after a few times all we had to do was rattle the doorknob to bring her running at full speed. And then eventually, we mostly forgot about it.

Back in the spring of 2000, we were living in a rental house in east Tucson in what was maybe not the greatest neighborhood. I was working at an animal clinic, and worked half days on Saturdays. I arrived home around one o’clock in the afternoon and noticed as soon as I came home that I could hear Lilly barking her head off. Joy was working at a different vet clinic and had taken Lindsy to work with her to give her a bath, so it was just Lilly, the Chihuahuas (who were crated in the kitchen during the day) and the cats in the house at the time.

The house was shaped rather odd, with two of the three entrances on the front — one being a door into the utility room of the kitchen, where we usually entered, and the other a few feet beside that being the front door, which had a screen door that I was currently hearing Lilly barking through. I thought to myself, “Joy must have left the front door open when she left,” (we often did this when we were home, so that the cats could look out the screen door) but was puzzled as to why Lilly was barking — that was unusual for her. I entered through the kitchen door as usual, still wondering about this.

As I came into the kitchen the first thing I saw was sugar cane disks (which we kept as a treat for Merlin, our pet rat at that time) scattered all over the kitchen floor. The sugar cane had been in the refrigerator, and I was confused as to how it got all over the floor. Next, I realized that Mouse and Igor, the Chihuahuas, were being unusually quiet in their crates, and when I looked over to that area I saw that the large picture window beside them had been smashed! My first thought, of the many I could have had when faced with the evidence at hand, was “holy crap, Lilly has finally gone completely nuts and tried to jump through a window.” This brought my focus back to the still-barking dog in the living room…

Exhibit # 3 was spotted on the way into the living room: one glass jar that formerly held about two pounds of dog cookies, now empty on it’s side. I revised the scenario I had been building in my head, which involved Lilly both opening the fridge door and smashing a window, to include her getting the jar off the counter and eating all the cookies (the fact that this would have required opposable thumbs and a stepstool didn’t ever cross my mind) and I went to see what other destruction had been carried out…

Lilly was standing in the front hallway looking wild-eyed, though she had stopped barking when she saw me walk into the living room. She was surrounded by a pile of coats and jackets that had been hanging on the coat tree, and the coat tree itself was now laying on it’s side blocking the hallway. What the hell had gone on here!? I was still in a sort of confused daze, trying to piece together the bizarre scene I had walked into, as I walked down the hall to locate all of the feline household members and make sure everyone was OK, since in addition to the other chaos and calamity all of the cats were noticeably absent.

First stop was the master bedroom… every dresser drawer was open, clothes were strewn about, the closet door was open, and on the bed was an open — and empty — gun case. It took about two seconds for the puzzle pieces to all fit together, finally: WE HAD BEEN ROBBED!!! And on the heels of that thought came ‘they could still be in the house, and they have the gun!’ I quietly backed out of the room, grabbed Lilly by the collar and the cordless phone from the end table as I went back through the living room, and hurried back to my car. I locked Lilly and myself in the car, called 911, and waited anxiously for the police to arrive; I knew it was not safe to go in the house before they got there but I was frantically worried about the rest of the animals.

It seemed like an hour before the police arrived, but in reality it was pretty quick. After they had deemed that the perpetrator(s?) were no longer on the scene, I was allowed back inside, and determined that all four cats were present and unharmed, as were the Chihuahuas, (there was glass all over their crates but thankfully they didn’t get cut), the snakes, and the rat.

There were a few funny points in this, like finding the little wooden ‘treasure chest’ where Joy kept her collection of coins and paper money from around the world, overturned on a bed but nothing missing — someone must have briefly thought they’d hit the mother lode before realizing it wasn’t anything they could spend. Another amusing moment was when the officer opened the door to the room we were using as an office, saw the Gateway computer I’d been working on trying to fix sitting in the middle of the room with it’s motherboard, hard drive, and other inner workings spread out around it, and said “oh, sorry it looks like they vandalized your computer!” and I had to respond, “uh, no… actually I did that.”

Someone had carefully jimmied open the tiny window of the enclosed back porch and crawled through it, then smashed the picture window between that room and the kitchen to get in. And nothing, other than the aforementioned handgun, was missing. Apparently they’d had time to go through the entire house at their leisure (while Lilly ate two pounds of dog biscuits) but then appeared to have left out the front door in a hurry without taking anything else. The police said that it was probably kids, and they dusted for fingerprints but didn’t anticipate anything would come of that.

I was very shook up over the whole thing; it’s hard to describe the violated feeling of having someone invade your house like that, but mostly I was very, very relieved that things hadn’t gone much worse. I could have surprised the burglar or burglars while they were still here, and made myself into the latest advertisement for why having a gun in the house is dangerous by getting shot with my own handgun (which had been given to me years ago as a gift, for ’self protection’). Lilly could have been shot, or the screen door, which had a broken spring closure and a sticky latch, could have been left wide open and Lilly or the cats could have gotten out and been killed on the busy road. Having the house broken into was horrible, but it could have been much worse.

Of course, the irony  was that, on the other hand, if Lindsy had not been with Joy they probably never would have gotten in to begin with. Lilly was not what you’d call an alert watchdog, and probably was asleep on the couch when they broke in, whereas Lindsy would have been on the spot barking right when they first started fiddling with that window, and my guess is that they would have decided to back off and try an easier house rather than face a seventy pound snarling dog.

After they left and we were cleaning up (Joy had come home as soon as I called and arrived shortly after the police did) we tried to puzzle out how things had happened. The cats must have taken off and hid when the window was smashed, and the Chis probably barked (though they’d clearly been scared silly and were unusually quiet when I first arrived) but really couldn’t do much from inside their crates. Lilly was most likely asleep on the couch when they smashed the window, and then wandered into the kitchen to see what the noise was. We figure they must have been trying to feed her things from the refrigerator to pacify her (hence the sugar cane and cookie jar) while they cased the house. Judging from the empty cookie jar and the bloated, farting dog, this strategy had been at least somewhat successful, but Lilly was definitely agitated when I arrived, and when I checked her over I found dirty shoe-prints on her ribcage. Apparently there had been some sort of scuffle with her and we figured that they had thrown coats at her and used the coat tree to keep her at bay while they took off out the front door.

As I stood the coat tree back up and started hanging the coats back on it, I realized that we’d had way too many coats on it, and I might as well take the time move a few to the hall closet while I was at it. Then I noticed the hall closet was slightly ajar… and the stuff we’d had on the shelf in front of the Rotten Egg had been moved, exposing the toy. Hmmmm…

We began to see a scenario unfold as to how things might have gone: one or more kids break into the house, confronted by a wary — but not particularly aggressive — dog. She probably wasn’t happy to see them, but had no problem chowing down on the cookies they fed her while they wandered about the house opening drawers and closets deciding what to take. Everything probably went pretty well until they got to that hall closet…

I only wish I could have been a fly on the wall when the complacently cookie-crunching pooch suddenly turned into a screaming, raving monster bent on what they had to have assumed was their imminent slaughter.  The coat tree was probably used as a shield until they managed to unlock the front door, open it, and throw themselves out the screen door, closing it securely to keep the maniac hell-hound trapped on the other side! Again, we’ll always be thankful that they didn’t use the gun on her, but I suspect that her sudden Jekyll and Hyde impersonation probably caught them so off guard they just took off in a panic.

Of course this is just a theory, but the white head that popped up, scowling and bug-eyed, over the arm of the love seat when I fiddled with the closet door (between the bellyache from the cookie overdose, and the sore ribs, she didn’t actually get off the couch but she was on alert the minute she heard that door) seemed to support the scenario we came up with.

I guess the moral of this story, if there is one, is that as far as home security measures go, I’d definitely rate a Rotten Egg higher than a handgun.

After we posted that farewell to Lilly — which was all we could bring ourselves to say at the time — a few people asked what had happened, thinking we’d had some sudden tragedy… Actually, we’d been struggling for some time with the decision of when it was “time” for Lilly. She was 15 years old, ancient for a dog her size and breed, and had never adjusted to losing her sight, refused to slow down and take it easy on her feeble frame. She would march off the back porch and ‘estimate’ where the steps were — not always correctly. She climbed up onto the sofa and loveseat and didn’t always make it. She ran into things, fell and hurt herself at times… got lost in a far corner of the yard on more than one occasion.

We kept telling ourselves that she didn’t seem to be in any acute pain, and still had a healthy appetite, but in the past few months she started losing an alarming amount of weight, in spite of eating four times as much food as Lindsy. She was confused, frail and covered in little growths that kept infecting and bleeding, mostly deaf and blind… Truthfully we’d hoped she would just pass quietly in her sleep someday, but it finally reached the point where we felt her failing body and mind were just a prison for her spirit and it was time to set her free.

Somehow we found the courage to make the appointment, and Lilly passed away peacefully May 9, with Joy cradling her head and me petting her as she drifted off. We hadn’t thought we would be able to stay, not again, not so soon after going through this with Mojo (and Nipsy before that) but I felt I owed it to her and I am glad we managed to do that one last thing for her. We got some tranquillizers from the vet — Joy’s idea — to ease Lilly’s nervousness, and gave them an hour before. She had a huge breakfast, her various favorite forbidden snacks throughout the day, and for once the temperamental Texas weather, which had been overcast for most of the day, obliged us by clearing long enough for Lilly to have one last sunbeam to snooze in. The drugs hit her while she was there in the sun, and she was pretty zonked by the time we left. I rode in the back seat with her and she put her head in my lap.

At the vet’s, we carried her in and she lay peacefully on her side on the table, with Joy holding her head, and we both petted her and talked to her quietly and spent about 20 minutes saying our goodbyes while waiting for the vet. She was totally relaxed for the first time in a very long time, which I think meant she really had been in some sort of pain that she was bearing stoically, and the medication took that away. She never even felt the needle go in, slipped away quietly… and we held back our grief until she was gone. We are still sort of numb and sad now, we can’t really believe she is gone… But she went the ‘right’ way, and her suffering is over. Maybe we will meet her again someday.

The view from the window about 4:10 PM today…

And the view below the window - Simon and Lilly conserving heat.

I snapped this picture of Lilly and Simon sharing a sunbeam in the living room this morning.

I am not sure in her current state how aware Lilly is of Simon — at least she managed not to lay right on him — but Simon seemed happy to have the company and gave her ear a few licks.

I’ve been spending most of my time with my nose buried in Microsoft textbooks for my upcoming MCSE exams, so I haven’t had much time to blog anything… and then I always feel compelled to write a marathon post when I do, recapping everything that happened since my last one, and it’s so much to catch up that I procrastinate and don’t post at all… Instead, this time, I will just give the condensed version.

We discovered Mojo turns into Cujo every time we give him his heartworm meds, so we’re trying a different drug next time for that. He’s now on Phenobarbital in addition to his other medications, and is fairly stable right now. Lilly had some sort of sudden episode where she completely lost her sense of balance, and was better before we could get her to the emergency clinic, she’s been fairly OK since then. You know, other than being older than dirt, half blind, half deaf, and mostly crazy. The rest of the animals are doing OK. The one food in the entire world we found that Olive could eat without getting hives changed its formula so we may have a problem there, we just started the new food and so far, so good.

Joy has a new job! She starts on the 31st and will be lead adoption counselor at one of the local shelters. It’ll be better pay, more consistent hours, and one weekend day off so it should be a lot better. Of course, she’s really nervous about starting a new job again…

That about covers things from here, other than the fact that it is super hot and muggy right now. Blech - looking forward to fall.

I’ve been feeling a little overwhelmed lately and I suppose the lack of posts lately has reflected this. Continuing from June 11th’s post, here’s the latest:

Wednesday is feeling fine now, the vet thought maybe the intense vomiting was brought on by stress but with all the surgeries and boarding she’s undergone because of her bladder issues, never having an episode like this before, we’re a bit skeptical. My paranoid, suspicious side wonders if in the heat of a busy day at the clinic, a vaccine (she has a history of vaccine reactions with symptoms like what she showed) or other medication was inadvertently given to Wednesday. I suppose we will never know, we’re just relieved she is OK. Joy’s big fear that night was that that her bladder had burst along the scar of one of the previous incision sites when they were trying to express it. She’s even better than I am at conjuring up worst-case scenarios.

On to Mojo, who was becoming uncoordinated, stumbling, and collapsing in the midst of vomiting up bile. Several members on the Bull Terrier Neurological Disorders group suggested syncope, or fainting, and one person said that her dog had suffered the same symptoms and the vet diagnosed something called ‘vasovagal syncope’. When I took Mojo to the vet, that is what he diagnosed in Mojo’s case, too. Basically (and I am sure I will garble this explanation terribly) the pressure from the hard abdominal press when he was vomiting stimulated the vagal nerve, causing a sudden drop in blood pressure and brief loss of consciousness. I am guessing because he stopped heaving as he fell each time, this remedied the situation and that is why he didn’t go ‘out’ completely.

Apparently it’s a pretty well-documented quirk, and based on what we’ve seen, the vet did not feel there was any underlying heart condition causing this, he said we should just document it and see if anything else happens. If he started having spells at other times we would want to do an echo cardiogram, even have Mojo wear a monitoring device for 24 hours, but based on just what had happened he didn’t think there was anything to worry about. He did a thorough exam including listening to his heart for a good long time, and everything checked out OK. We will make sure that he gets some sort of midday snack from now on so he doesn’t have an empty tummy for so long. I worry that his medication is a contributing factor to both the syncope and the vomiting, but an attempt this week to try and lower the dosage slightly had very negative results so right now I guess it is just a risk we have to take.

The other furkids are holding up. Lilly is still plugging along same as always, the bloody stool has resolved so it was most likely the different food we had been giving her, setting off her irritable bowel. Olive’s allergies aren’t too bad right now, but Simon has a weird lesion on his nose. Joy has been doing some research and it looks like his nose and eye issues may be due to feline herpes. Lindsy had some sort of spell for a few days where she was really grouchy but she’s feeling better now.