It was around the same time as my formerly slow-growing cancer transformed into its aggressive cousin, with new tumors sprouting up in alarming succession, that our 14-year-old Maltese [dog], Monty, developed a tumor of his own. Not lymphoma impacting the kidneys like me, but a large tumor on his liver.
He began losing weight, his spine stuck out, more reptilian than mammalian in appearance, and he couldn’t stop peeing. We tried to increase his walk schedule from three times a day to every two hours, but with my own mobility compromised, my wife, Jody, lined up a rotation of neighborhood teenagers to pick up the slack.
A lock box with a combination was installed on the wall outside our front door to allow easier access for our intrepid dog angels, but when even their visits proved not to be frequent enough, we opted to put Monty in doggy diapers so he could wander around indoors without ruining our rugs.
The parallels with my own situation proved to be unnerving.
Like Monty, I had already lost weight, and my spine had become more prominent, too. With my main tumor bearing down on my bladder, one night I woke up having wet the bed, incontinence being the latest indignity.Before you know it, dreadfully embarrassed, I was wearing diapers of my own.
“The difference between the two of you,” Jody explained, “is that Monty can’t tell us how he’s feeling, but we can put him down when it gets to be too much. You, on the other hand, can describe exactly what’s going on in painstaking detail, but we’re not considering euthanizing you!”
Cancer's sinister countdown had started
For both of us, though, a sinister countdown had started. Monty’s outcome was mostly foretold: Our vet gave him three months without medication; double that if we plied him with steroids, painkillers, and liver aids. We saw no reason to prolong the end for a dog whose age in approximate “human years” was fast approaching 98 and who was clearly suffering.
Still, as I grappled with my own agony, waiting for the sci-fi CAR-T treatment that could potentially cure me, a black humor overtook any residual optimism.
While I wasn’t anticipating an imminent demise for myself, for Monty it was a real question: When would his quality of life become so compromised that it was no longer worth trudging on?
Most of the day, when he wasn’t searching for a place to pee, he just lay around, already looking half a corpse. But then we would come home from the hospital or an afternoon playing with the grandkids, and he would squiggle and wiggle and look at us longingly with those big black eyes (the ones from which he couldn’t see particularly well, given his deep cataracts).
Ethically, though, making the call at this point still didn’t feel right.
The first serious writing on the wall came when Monty began having neurological events. One day, he returned from his walk unable to use his front right leg. It then shifted, and he couldn’t use his back left leg. He started walking sideways. He fell over. Climbing our home’s internal staircases became an ordeal, like heading up Mount Everest without a Sherpa in sight.
Ironically, we got Monty when he was three months old, just after we returned from a trip to Nepal, where we celebrated my 50th birthday and the bar mitzvah of our youngest son, Aviv. After 11 days hiking in the Himalayas, we figured we had exhausted our bucket list of big family trips and could now consider a furry addition to the Blum household. (We were wrong about the trips – that one turned out to be just the beginning.)
Monty was pure Maltese, bred by a family in Jerusalem which, remarkably, didn’t ask for any payment.We debated names for a couple of weeks. We considered “Malty the Maltese,” but that seemed too on the nose. “Monty” was close enough, plus it was a congenial reminder of my 50-year Monty Python obsession.
Jody gave it a more Jewish spin, insisting it was short for “Montefiore.”
Monty quickly became our constant companion – and occasional nemesis (I still miss the slippers he chewed up in his first days at home). He accompanied us on long hikes, cuddled in bed, and barked frenetically at doorbells and other dogs.
Prolonging the inevitable
Now, as the vet’s three-month “deadline” loomed, Monty’s behavior was running more and more ragged. He wiggled less when we offered him a walk, he regarded us with disdain when we deigned to affix his diaper, and his days of sprightly ascending stairs, let alone mountains, were all but over.
When it was clear that all we were doing was prolonging the inevitable, we tried to schedule a date. But my own hospitalization was getting in the way. I wanted to be there to hold him as the vet administered the sedative that would put him to sleep before a second shot of phenobarbital stopped his heart.
As “luck” would have it, I was released from Hadassah for a weekend “Shabbat hofesh” (vacation). My room would be reserved and, if anything untoward happened over the weekend, I could come right back “home” rather than the ER.
The vet opened up a special time slot for us on Sunday morning at 8:15 a.m. The whole process took 10 minutes. I waited for Monty to close his eyes, not realizing that he was already gone and his breathing had ceased.
It was tremendously sad, and when I return home, his absence will be felt in so many large and small ways. His legacy will live on in our hearts and in the hundreds of pictures and videos we’d taken during his well-loved life.
As for me, I’m still wearing that damned diaper, hoping the treatment will work and I’ll reach the equivalent of Monty’s 98 “human years.”
The writer’s book Totaled: The Billion-Dollar Crash of the Startup that Took on Big Auto, Big Oil and the World has been published as an audiobook. Available on Amazon and other online booksellers. brianblum.com