Thank You, Dr. Gregg (the full version)
Many thanks to The Chapel Hill News for running a shorter version of this essay. BG
It’s taken six months for me to be able to write this. But now that gratitude can speak louder than grief, I want to publicly thank the veterinarian who gave our dog, Tofu, nearly 5 years that she almost certainly would not have had otherwise. Naturally, there is a story…
I’ll begin at the end, the night after Christmas 2007 when Tofu and I made our last trip to the vet together. For all the planning that my wife Barbara and I had done, for all our good intentions, for all our conviction that Tofu should be able to die at home, I’d postponed the inevitable one too many times and suddenly the pain was just too great for the painkillers and it had gotten too late to call any other vet, so the waiting room of the all-night emergency clinic on Route 15-501 was where I sat while Tofu was given her final examination.
As I waited for what I knew was the inevitable prognosis, I couldn’t help but think back almost five years, to the day an 11-year old Tofu had been diagnosed with a painful and crippling genetically caused spinal condition, and I was told that she might have, at most, 6 months before the pain would be too great to block, and too much to justify keeping her alive. Two of her litter-mates (we heard from the breeder) already were limping badly, and Tofu was no longer able to make it up the stairs on her own. Pain-killers were prescribed. Sympathy was expressed. I began rehearsing the way I would break the news to Barbara. And I cringed at the thought that this happy dog, this yellow Lab who used to run and soar off the dock on Blackwood Mountain’s pond, over and over, flying unbelievable distances through the air, now unable to climb the stairs to our bedroom, would soon not be able to walk at all. Incontinent and in pain and unhappy.
“There is one thing you might want to try,” said the kindly young vet who had examined Tofu and read her x-rays. “There’s a veterinarian who does acupuncture on dogs and even on horses, Dr. Elaine Gregg. She calls her practice ‘Horsefeathers.’ She’s gotten some pretty good results, I hear.”
I called as soon as I got home. Got an answering machine. Liked her voice. Got a call back that evening. And told her the truth: I didn’t have much faith in acupuncture. It seemed like a lot of hoodoo to me. The people I knew who got acupuncture and said it helped were just suggestible, I thought.
Dr. Gregg was unperturbed. “It’s up to you,” she said, “but the pain-killer you’re planning on giving Tofu has been shown to cause some pretty nasty gastrointestinal effects. You’ve got a choice between hoodoo and bleeding ulcers. And if the hoodoo doesn’t work, there’s still the painkillers. Oh, and don’t forget that, in dogs, there’s no such thing as a placebo effect.”
There was something about that that I really liked.
“Where’s your office?” I asked. “Oh, no,” she said. “I come to you. Where’s your house?”
Within days, Dr. Gregg had given Tofu her first treatment. Watching bunches of needles being stuck into your dog is not easy. Holding your dog while it’s being done is harder still. But watching your dog doze off, and hearing her snore with all those needles in her… that makes it all worthwhile.
At the end of that first session, Dr. Gregg and I stood up, as we were to do so many times over the years to come, and watched Tofu get up and go to the door to be let out. Seems there’s something about acupuncture that makes Nature call pretty loudly. I watched her closely. Was she moving a little more easily? Surely that was the placebo effect, but acting on me, not on my dog. And yet it did seem she was a tad more spry already. I let Tofu back in, gave Dr. Gregg her check, and went upstairs to Barbara’s office to tell her how it had gone.
“I don’t know if it’s going to do any good,” I told Barbara, “but I know Tofu seemed to like it. She fell asleep.” Barbara wasn’t looking at me. She was looking at the floor. “Did you carry Tofu upstairs?” she asked. “No,” I started to say, and I realized I could feel Tofu lying on my foot. For the first time in months, she had come upstairs with me on her own.
And she would do so for almost 3 years. And for another year after that, when I did have to help her up the long flight of stairs, she would play happily with Tyler and Faulkner, our other two Labs. Yes, there were rare times when I felt I just had to give her a pain-killer. But seeing how she ran up to Elaine Gregg and lay down for her acupuncture, and watching her play when she was supposed have been long dead, each day of those years felt like a small miracle. Every month for the first 3 years and twice a month after that, Elaine (we were on a first-name basis by now) would drive up in her huge modified pickup truck with a mobile clinic, refrigerator and all, mounted in the truck bed. (Today it’s a Subaru Forester.) She’d jump out, always in scrubs, about 5 feet tall and about 100 pounds, and all professional. She exuded the kind of comfort, compassion and confidence that you pray a professional will bring to the care of someone you love. Within minutes we’d be on the floor with Tofu, the needles inserted, tiny electrodes attached for electrostimulation, and we’d talk in a whisper while Tofu dozed through her procedure.
We’d talk about vet school, and acupuncture training, and the difficulty of getting the best supplies here in the US, and what the rising cost of gas is doing to mobile vets. Once or twice Elaine told me about having been thrown across a stable by a horse in such pain that it could no longer be its usual docile self, and she’d show me bruises to prove it. And she’d show me the enormous acupuncture needles that eventually calmed the pain and the horse.
During one session, maybe 3 years into the treatment, Elaine looked up at me and said, “You understand that this is a road with no turns. We are doing everything we can to keep the pain away. But here is the objective. We want Tofu to stay at an even level for as long as possible, not have a slow, miserable decline. But what that means is that when it does happen, it will happen fast. When Tofu’s systems finally start to go, they’ll go all at once. But at least you’ll know it’s the end. Are you prepared for that?”
I said I was prepared, and I guess I was. But after a grace period of more than four years, I suppose I had gotten just a bit cocky. I may have forgotten what it means when all systems collapse at once. But that’s just what happened. It wasn’t pleasant. How could it have been? Christmas was coming and I got the timing wrong for seeing Tofu off, but when the time unequivocally came to say goodbye, that night after Christmas, Tofu and Barbara and I knew there could be no further treatments, no denial, no delay. Yet I can say in retrospect we would not have had it any other way and I’m pretty sure Tofu would agree.
As I walked out into the night, alone, from that last visit to the emergency vet, I realized that Tofu had lived through 16 Christmases with our family. Her life had been extended almost half again by a loving vet who practiced a healing discipline in which I had once not even believed. Our time with Tofu, as precious as it was uncertain, was genuinely blessed. And though I felt it then, I can say it now. Here is a public “Thank you, Elaine.” You gave Tofu and her family almost 5 more happy years. What more could we have asked?
Find Elaine Gregg’s wonderful web site at http://horsefeathersvet.googlepages.com .
