Don’t Go Breaking My Heart

Willie’s been “off his feed” the past few days.  I’ve seen this before – a day here or there in which he seems his usual happy and energetic self, yet has no interest in eating.  It’s alarming because it seems so unnatural (A dog that doesn’t want food?), and yet I try to convince myself that, unlike people, animals are self-regulating and eat when they’re hungry.  Still, the questions nag at me each time I walk past the stainless bowl of untouched kibble:  Have I been overfeeding him?  Have the bison meat and brown rice pellets he eats twice a day gone bad?  Stale?  Rancid?  Has he grown tired of the monotony of his diet?  Have I already become a helicopter pet parent?

So Willie skipped dinner last night and was interested in eating only grass this morning; this in turn later caused him to retch (the intended effect, apparently) and caused me even greater alarm.  Just what is going on with him?   “Maybe you should bring him to the vet,” Richard says.

In the exam room at the animal hospital, Doctor Sweeney conducts an exam, probing and palpating my cooperative little eleven-pound dog.  He doesn’t think Willie is underweight and sees no cause for alarm.  We continue chatting as Doc Sweeney sets aside the chart and washes his hands; almost as an afterthought, he says, “And you’ve got him on his monthly heartworm preventive, right?”

I stare at the doctor, frozen, and in that split-second, we both understand that I have not, in fact, been providing this critical medication.  And we also both understand why.  “Well,” the vet says, “shame on me for not making a stronger impression about the importance of heartworm prevention.”  He reaches into a cabinet for a tiny syringe.  “Let’s just draw a little blood and run a test.”

I sit in the waiting room with Willie on my lap, sniffing and nibbling at my knuckles.  The set of Doc Sweeney’s face as he enters the room tells me what he already knows: the test is positive.  Willie has heartworms.

I immediately picture the pickled heart on the shelf of the exam room, the giant heart of a formerly beloved Newfoundland, preserved in a formaldehyde brine and clogged to bursting with angel hair pasta.  Heartworms.

A mix of panic, confusion, and anger courses through me.  Shouldn’t Willie have been tested for heartworm at our first visit in November, just days after he arrived from Louisiana?    Then, because I know virtually nothing about this parasite or the protocols, another sickening thought: Willie might die.