“…and flights of Angels sing thee to thy rest.”

TJ, who is registered with the AKC as “Cheryl’s Tee Jammer”, strolled into my life and my heart on Valentine’s Day of 1983.  He was a tiny ball of fur, with the colors and markings of a classic tan Lhasa Apso.  I brought him home and zealously attempted to separate the cute little puppy from the smell of the puppy farm.  Thus began TJ’s lifelong distrust and fear of water in general and baths in particular.  After I baptized him in the bathtub and towel dried his hair, I sent him into the living room while I straightened the bathroom.  I brought my blow dryer to the living room to dry his hair, but TJ was nowhere in sight.  I frantically searched my apartment for him, and I finally found him shivering and hiding behind the floor-length drapes at the sliding glass door.  That was the first guilt trip he sent me on, but it would certainly not be the last.  He was afraid of the blow dryer, so I abandoned that idea and instead wrapped him in a towel and held him close as he got warm and dry and drifted off to sleep.  I thought that he was the most precious and innocent being that I had ever seen.  I have not changed my mind about that. 

The first veterinarian that I took him to said that TJ was a weak specimen of the breed and would probably not be very healthy or live very long.  He said that I should not breed TJ, because he would pass on genetic weaknesses, which would be detrimental to the breed.

I was 25 years old, and I thought I knew a lot more than I really did.  I bought a book from the pet store about Lhasa Apso’s, and I thought it would teach me everything I needed to know.  I did not, as the book recommended, buy a kennel. The first night TJ and I spent together, I put him and his bed in the kitchen and strategically positioned a cardboard box in the doorway to block his path.  He cried for about 15 minutes, and it took all of my determination not to bring him to bed with me.  I heard him scratching at the box; and within seconds he was beside my bed, where he went to sleep lying on my bathrobe.   He slept beside my bed every night of his life after that.  Since it was immediately obvious that TJ did not like the idea of being confined, I did not buy a kennel.  Therefore, at six months old, he was still not housebroken.  I would take him outside for walks, and we would walk for 30 minutes or more.  He would sometimes wet the grass a little, but he would rarely do more than that.  I would finally give up and carry him upstairs to my apartment.  As soon as he got out of my sight, he would go into the guest bedroom and do his business.  I got so frustrated I hardly knew what to do.  One day, I went shopping and left him at home alone.   A loud and serious thunderstorm blew through while I was away.  When I came home, I noticed that TJ was acting strangely.  As the day wore on, I noticed that he was afraid to go into that guest bedroom.  If he followed me down the hall, he cowered down close to the floor on the opposite wall and ran as fast as he could past that room.  From that day on, he was housebroken.  I think that he must have been in the act of relieving himself in that room when a thunderbolt or lightening clap scared him witless.  I thanked God and Mother Nature for doing what I had been unable to accomplish.

I bought a pair of Van Eli red pumps with a stiletto heel, for which I paid $125.  I had never paid that much money for a pair of shoes, and I felt rather guilty for doing so.  One day, I came home from work and TJ had gotten into my closet and chewed the heels off of both of those red shoes.  I always thought it was his way of telling me it was silly to spend that much money for shoes.

He was so tiny as a puppy, and he ate so little.  He might eat only two or three pieces of dog food in as many days.  Against the advice of his veterinarian, I gave him table food.  He really loved roast beef, but his favorite was spaghetti with meat sauce.  I would feed him spaghetti and then carry him straight to the bathtub.  His hair was long in the classic Lhasa Apso style then, and he got spaghetti sauce from the tip of his nose to the tip of his tail.   All of this gastronomical pampering transformed the tiny puppy into a 34 pound canine with an insatiable appetite.   From the time he was three years old, we were in constant battle with his weight problem.  He was once on a diet that required me to cook ground beef for him every day and mix it with cottage cheese, canned carrots and canned green beans.  He did not lose any weight, but he was happy that I cooked real food for him.  When I moved to Watergrove Apartments, I started taking TJ to see Dr. Barden Greenfield, who performs miracles and loves animals.  He put TJ on a diet that really worked, and for the last twelve years of TJ’s life, he weighed about seventeen pounds.  The weight loss no doubt extended his life and held his arthritis at bay for as long as possible. 

One day, I was holding TJ and petting him, and I found a lump on his chest.  Dr. Greenfield operated and found that the tumor was malignant, but he was fortunately able to remove the entire growth.  In the course of the next few months, Dr. Greenfield removed three more malignant tumors and in every case was able to get all of the malignancy without requiring further treatment.

I came in from shopping one afternoon and found that TJ’s jaw was swollen so much that he looked like a squirrel with a huge stash of nuts.  Dr. Greenfield found an abscess on a canine tooth, and he successfully performed a root canal and saved the tooth.  TJ went to his grave as the only dog I ever met with a root canal.

In the spring of 1995, TJ became very ill, and his red blood count plummeted to eleven, instead of the normal forty.    Dr. Greenfield initially thought that he had leukemia, and he gave TJ steroids and then chemotherapy.  We took him to the office every day for blood tests, and when his blood count became too low, he was given a blood transfusion.  After three blood transfusions, he was still getting weaker.  One Monday morning, Jim and I took him to Dr. Greenfield’s office, and his red count was nine.  Dr. Greenfield had told us that if it ever dropped to ten, it would be fatal.   As only a true professional and compassionate doctor would do, he told us that he no longer knew what to do; he arranged for us to take TJ immediately to the Park Avenue Animal Hospital, where the veterinarians specialize in oncology.  We left him there that day in an intensive care unit, where he was being given an IV, a blood transfusion and oxygen.  We brought him home the next day, and he was better for only a few hours.  By the next morning, he was unable to walk or stand.  We took him back to the clinic, and left him again.  One of the two doctors there, Carolyn McCutcheon, realized that with as many blood transfusions as TJ had been given, his iron count should be high, but it was low.  This fact made her realize that TJ was losing blood internally.  She called me and told me that TJ was so weak that he might not survive exploratory surgery, but that if she did not do something he was surely going to die.  I gave her permission to operate.  Within twenty minutes, she called back and told me that she had found a bleeding tumor in TJ’s abdomen, had removed it, and that he should be fine in a few hours.  It was a miracle.  We brought him home that evening, and he recovered beautifully.  We later learned that even though TJ had been fasting for twelve hours in anticipation of the surgery, Dr. McCutcheon found food in his stomach when she operated.  They realized that TJ had used the few minutes of freedom of motion between his being let out of the kennel and his being anesthetized to eat some unguarded cat food.  I told everyone that TJ was not going to take a chance on going to Heaven without any dinner; he had no way of knowing what the feeding schedule was up there.   I took him to Dr. Greenfield a few days later, and his red blood cell count was forty.  That was when Dr. Greenfield started calling him the “bionic dog”. 

One night a few months ago, I was at work and Jim and TJ were at home. Jim was eating hot chicken wings out of the takeout box, which was sitting on the coffee table upstairs in front of the television.  When Jim walked across the room to answer the phone, TJ overturned the box of wings.  As Jim ran toward him to keep him from getting one of the wings, TJ started down the stairs.  He ran down the first few and then fell to the bottom.  Jim then realized that TJ had a chicken wing in his mouth and that during the fall it had gotten lodged in his throat.  TJ was lying on his side, choking and gasping for air.  Jim got to him and after a long and difficult struggle was able to remove the wing.  I walked in the door at the end of struggle as they both lay supine on the kitchen floor, exhausted.  Jim was still holding the culprit wing, and it was obvious by the look on Jim’s face that he had been terrified that TJ was going to choke to death.  TJ recovered so quickly from the trauma that when I walked in the door, he was trying to get the wing out of Jim’s hand.  How that dog loved people food. 

During the last few months, it became painfully obvious that TJ was not feeling well.  He would no longer even attempt to climb the stairs.  When Jim and I were both going to be upstairs for awhile, one of us carried him so that he could be with us.  He had increasing difficulty climbing over the threshold to come into the house.  He stopped eating dog food completely; he even lost his taste for the beer that Jim introduced him to, and which he would wrestle our guests for.  He still enjoyed his pieces of hot dog and cheese, and he tried hard not to notice that they were covert bearers of medicine.   He suffered pain in lying down and getting up, and he began to whine when he did either.  

About three weeks ago, Jim and I found four lumps on his body that we presumed to be tumors.  We decided that unless Barden felt differently that TJ would not be able to survive more surgery and cancer treatment.  When we took him in to see Barden the next day, he agreed with us.  We all decided at that moment that we would do whatever we could to make TJ comfortable and happy for as much time as he had left.  We cooked hamburger for him, gave him lots of treats every day, brought him doggie bags from our restaurant dinners, and generally let him have whatever he wanted.  Within a few days, we found another tumor, more menacing than the other tumors because of its location inside his abdominal cavity.  We were amazed and dismayed because of the rapid growth of that tumor and because of its obvious detrimental impact on TJ’s health.   He began panting almost constantly, as if he could not comfortably get a deep breath.   He suffered more difficulty in getting up and lying down.  We carried him over the threshold when he went outside or came back inside, because he would no longer try it on his own.  I knew that he would not be with us for very much longer but having never been through this kind of thing before, I did not know if we were talking about a matter of days, weeks or months.  I had no idea how fast the deterioration would progress.   I talked to Jeri Ledbetter, a dear friend who raises Airdales and who had several older dogs she had to put down in the past several years, about it, and I kept asking her how I would know when the time had come to take TJ’s life.  I agonized about the fact that I did not want to “play God” and make the decision that his life should end.  I prayed that God and the Angels would take him peacefully in his sleep and spare me that awful decision.  Jeri told me that I would know that it was time when it felt like I was giving TJ a gift.  I could not imagine what she was talking about, but she repeated it until those words rang in my ears.  I had no idea at that time what pearls of wisdom she had given me.

Saturday night was the first night that TJ was unable to sleep.  He lay on his bed and cried, and I got up and lay down beside him trying to comfort him.  We were up together for about two hours.  The next night, we were up for three hours.  The next day, Barden said that TJ’s time was drawing near, and he prescribed liquid codeine to help him sleep.  It worked only for a little while, and then only sporadically.  On Thursday morning, I was preparing to take a shower to go to work when I noticed that TJ was lying on the floor beside our bed, and he was crying.  I decided to give him some codeine, and I hoped that it would help him sleep while we were away at work that evening.  I lay down on the floor beside him, and I held him close to me and kissed the top of his head as I told him how very much I loved him and how grateful I was that he had been my little love for so long.  I told him that I knew that he was in pain and that if he wanted to go on to Heaven, Jim and I would be all right.  I asked him to forgive me for all of the times that I was impatient with him and for all of the times that I should have spent more time just being with him.   As I left the house, I gave TJ some of his dog treats.  He took them, but he cried even as he ate.  I left for work feeling wretched that I was leaving him alone.  Jim and I came home during our shift to check on him.  He acted better than he had earlier that day; he did not cry at all while we were at home.  I gave him more codeine, hoping to calm him down and help him to rest.  Jim got home from work that night an hour before I did, and he told me over the phone that TJ was not doing well.  Jim said that TJ had not even eaten his hot dog and had refused to eat a treat.  I cried all of the way home, praying that he would still be with us for a few more days but fearing that the end was nearer than I wanted to believe.

 We had tentatively planned to spend the weekend pampering TJ by cooking him a steak, spending time just being quiet with him and preparing him and ourselves for the end.  We thought that we could delay the final moment until Monday.   When I got home, I realized that TJ was in agony.  His back legs were virtually useless and intermittently paralyzed.  He refused food and experienced difficulty drinking water.  Jim and I administered codeine twice before midnight in hopes of helping him calm down and rest, but the medication had no effect.  Jim called Barden and told him that we needed for him to come to the house on Friday morning to administer the lethal injection to relieve TJ from misery.  By 10:30 that night, TJ struggled and cried with every breath.  The effort that he had to exert for every breath caused him such stress that he was breathing extremely rapidly, which increased the pain.  I administered codeine four more times during the night, and it had absolutely no impact.  Only once during the night was he calm enough to lie down beside me on the floor and let me hold him for one last time.  Several times, he stopped his pacing to look up at me as if to say, “I know you love me, but isn’t there something you can do to help me?”  As I followed TJ around the house that night and watched his suffering, I saw glimpses of light and movement, and I know that Angels were gathering to take TJ to Heaven with them.  

Jim called Barden at 8:30am on Friday and told him that we needed for him to come as soon as possible.  By that time, TJ was still struggling and crying, and he could not stand up for more than a few seconds at a time, and those few seconds required all of the strength that he could muster.  Barden said that he and his assistant would come soon.  About thirty minutes after that phone call, TJ lay down beside me on the floor, and for the first time in over 24 hours he calmed down and went to sleep.  We later realized that Barden and Beth were leaving the animal clinic at about that same minute.  TJ sensed that relief was on the way, and he could finally breathe easier.  When Barden and Beth came, TJ was perfectly calm.  I carefully picked him up and hugged and kissed him and I gently laid him on his bed.  I told him that I would miss him every day for the rest of my life.  I told him that he had been the best friend anyone could ever have.   Jeri’s words kept coming back to me while Barden, Beth, Jim and I held that precious little body as he breathed his final breath.  As the four of us cried tears of sadness for the friend that we bade farewell, I heard those flights of Angels singing as they came to take my angel to his rest.  I knew without any doubt that we had indeed given TJ a gift, the gift of blessed relief from pain.