Thank God for Barking Dogs

I’ve mentioned our geriatric dog Lager to all of you. He’s a very sweet, very gentle, very grumpy old dog. Actually, he’s not grumpy as much as he is spoiled. He wants to be inside the house at all times, whether we are home or not. If we’re going to be gone all day, and he has to stay outside, he gets downright cranky. If he goes outside for any reason while we are home …. a drink of water, nature call, anything at all, he is at the back door, barking to be let back in, within seconds. And he will bark --- Until. You. Let. Him. In. Period. He doesn’t stop barking --- ever --- until you let him back in.

Most of the time we resign ourselves to standing at the back door while he does his business, or gets his drink, because if you let him out, then try to sit down, by the time your bum hits the sofa cushion, he’s already at the door barking. It’s just easier to wait on him, and let him in, and avoid the barking. (No, I have no idea why he’s spoiled, do you?) Because again, in case I haven’t made it clear --- The. Barking. Will. Not. Stop. He might be sixteen years old, deaf and arthritic, but he’s got the lung power of an young Iditarod champion.

The only time it really bugs me is when I’m trying to sleep, as the master bedroom is in the rear of the house, so his barking wakes me up. Which annoys me. Greatly.

{abrupt subject change}

Last year, when the kids accidentally broke our ancient video camera, we got a new one. But, without the old camera, we had no way to play the old 8mm tapes. So, I bought a DVD burner and made copies of all our old home movies. We have close to one hundred hours of DVD tapes, starting with shortly before Brayden was born in 1997 and going until the present. They’ve provided us with great many hours of entertainment, and there are still many tapes we haven’t watched yet. Each one is like opening a gift, since we’re never sure exactly what is on each DVD. (Are anyone else’s kids as narcissistic as mine? They could watch themselves all day, I swear!)

Yesterday, I heard the kids talking and laughing while they watched home movies. I heard one of them say, “Look! A birthday party!” and I stuck my head in the room to see which tape they were on. It was a tape of Kendrie’s 4th birthday party. We had it at a local pizza and games place called DJ’s, and the kids were running and jumping and having a ball. They were laughing on the tape, and laughing in the room, watching themselves on the tape, and I was smiling at all of it. Then, suddenly, the birthday party was over. The next image on the tape popped up and it was like somebody had punched me in the stomach.

Kendrie, in a hospital bed, recently diagnosed with leukemia.

We were in Atlanta, and it was Blaine taking the video of me and Kendrie. My mom had flown in to stay with Brayden and Kellen so it was just the three of us at Children’s Hospital. In the video, Kendrie was laying in bed, talking quietly, and looked so very small. I was taking photographs of her, and kept encouraging her to smile. I distinctly remember taking those photos. I hadn’t yet been told the statistics about childhood leukemia --- that the chance for a successful treatment and cure is actually fairly decent. (Not great, since we all know anything less than 100 percent isn’t good enough, but still decent.) But I didn’t know that yet. I remember taking those snapshots of her in the hospital bed, and thinking they would be the last pictures I ever got of her, and feeling like I could vomit at any minute.

Yesterday, watching that tape, it all came racing back at me, and I felt just as nauseous. Like someone was squeezing my heart through my chest.

The next scene was the three of us at the koi pond at the hospital. Blaine picked Kendrie up from the wagon, and tried to get her to throw a coin in the fountain. Her arm had IV’s coming out of it, and she was hooked up to the IV machine we were dragging along behind us, so she couldn’t get the penny in the water. On the tape, Blaine says, “Here, I’ll throw the next one, but you get to make the wish.” I remember thinking at the time, “Let me have the wish -- me! I wish for this all to be a mistake -- I wish for my daughter back, healthy, the way things were a few weeks ago!”

The tape played on, and the images were all disturbing to me. I sat there,watching it, feeling sick and nauseous ... yet those tapes cracked all three of the kids up. “Look, Kendrie, how chubby you were!” said Kellen, while Kendrie, sitting beside me on the floor, held her cheeks and was laughing so hard she was falling over. “Why were my cheeks so fat???” she asked, giggling the entire time.

A few scenes later, she walked across the screen -- totally bloated from the steroids, her hair nothing more than the wispy strands that screamed “CANCER PATIENT”, wearing a princess outfit whose neckline showed the scar from her port, complete with beaded necklace and high heels. “AAAAAAAaaaaaaaaaaggggggggghhhhhhhhhhhh!!!” she shrieked hysterically when she saw herself on tape dressed like that, “WHY WAS I WEARING THAT??? IT’S A GIRLS OUTFIT!!!” while all three kids pretty much wet their pants, laughing so hard.

She wasn’t bothered by the bald head, or the puffy face … she thought those tapes were funny. She was able to look back on that and laugh, and I’m so very, very grateful. I know she remembers parts of her treatment because she’ll bring it up from time to time. But she has the ability to look at it with a sense of humor. We’re lucky that her treatment went well, and we have the luxury of looking at those things as funny. Not every family gets that lucky.

As for me, I watched myself on the screen, and saw the dark circles under my eyes, and the pinched, worried look on my face. I remember, viscerally, how those first few weeks in the hospital felt. Yesterday, the memory of that despair and terror was just under the surface, and it surprised me. I felt just as sick, remembering, as I did at the time. Although I never forget how blessed we are, and certainly don’t want to push the entire cancer journey under the rug, I must admit, I don’t think I want to watch those videos again anytime soon. With Kendrie’s treatment lasting twenty-six months, we obviously have a lot of tapes where she is bald and on treatment. But that first tape, the tape of her at the hospital, diagnosed, going from laughing, happy child to frightened, withdrawn, cancer patient …. That hurt. I don’t ever want to be that terrified again, and it's my most fervent prayer that she never faces that again.

{another abrupt subject change}

I dreamed last night. In my dream, me and Brayden and Kendrie were walking along a path when we came to a railroad crossing. The girls were both much younger, about the ages they were in that video. As we stood there, the bells started ringing and the guard rails started coming down, to signal that a train was coming. Suddenly in my dream, I was on one side of the tracks and Kendrie and Brayden were on the other side. They were both crying that they wanted me, and trying to cross over the tracks to get to me. My legs wouldn’t work (do your legs EVER work in dreams like this?) and I was screaming at them to stay on their side of their track, and to let the train pass by. Brayden listened to me and took several steps back, but Kendrie stepped up on the track, arms outstretched to me. I would scream at her to step back, and she would for a step or two, but then she would cry that she was scared, and needed me, and she’d step back on the track towards me, with the train getting closer and closer, second by second.

I was hysterical-panicked in my dream, because I couldn’t reach her, and couldn’t protect her, and couldn’t get her to listen to me. The train was bearing down and she wouldn’t step back away from the tracks, no matter how much I screamed. She just kept crying that she was frightened, and stepping up on the tracks with her arms reaching towards me.

It was one of the worst freaking dreams I’ve ever had.

It certainly doesn’t take a Harvard-trained dream analyst to figure out where it came from. The train was cancer (or I suppose menace in any form) and I was powerless to stop it. I could see that she was in danger, and I couldn’t help her or protect her. It was the most awful feeling in the world.

At that exact moment, my dog started barking, and woke me.

I was never so happy to hear that dog bark in my entire life. As far as I'm concerned, he never has to go outside again.