When Nothing Here Makes Sense But You
Barley, a dog, sleeps exhausted on a blanket in an unfamiliar place.
The roughest patch Barley has been through in my time with her began when I returned to my apartment after spending six weeks with my parents. This was during the darkest depths of COVID, and Barley, normally a social butterfly, had only the three of us with whom to bond. Returning home, it was just me and her. And my apartment. Which had flooded in my absence.
(Pet medical issues discussed below the fold)
The flooding was, in the grand scheme of things, very mild. I’m shocked to this day how few of my possessions were water damaged (the lesson in this: Clean up your apartment before a long trip and get everything up off the floor; it’s nice to come home to a clean apartment, it’s very nice to lose almost nothing to a flood). Still, the carpets had to be completely redone and the drywall had to be sanitized and fully dried out, which meant all of my stuff needed to be packed into a storage container. My apartment complex stuck me in one of their “model units,” used in simpler times to give prospective tenants guided tours; in the Lockdown Era, it had instead laid dormant and unused. From Barley’s point of view, we returned not to a familiar apartment, but to a weird new space full of very uncomfortable furniture, bereft of any contact with the two other humans she had become used to seeing all day every day.
Barley’s stress was transparent: She really disliked the model unit, slinking from room to room with her tail between her legs and maintaining physical contact with me whenever possible. My own apparent stress can’t have helped matters, tuned in as she is to those around her. After a couple days, her appetite began to wane, a very unusual change. Over time, her stress compounded into a life-threatening case of hemorrhagic gastroenteritis so severe that she needed to be hospitalized in a 24h emergency clinic, hooked up to an IV to stem the fluid loss. Her bloodwork ultimately came back negative for any pathogens or parasites, but showed off-the-charts level of cortisol.
The story ultimately has a happy ending. Barley pulled through and gradually got used to the model unit (where we ended up having to stay for a full month). Having pet insurance helped me feel justified in taking her to the vet the moment her symptoms started to manifest, rather than “waiting for things to clear up.” After she got her strength back, putting in the time to take much longer walks seemed to help a lot. I’ve never lost sight of the fact that the years of time we’ve spent together since that crisis were never guaranteed, and each additional day is no gift, but rather time I need to put in the work to secure.