The Ballad of Johnny & June—Verse 5
Previously, up-for-adoption bonded pair Johnny Cash and June Carter were given the Zilker Bark treatment, but no one stepped up. At this point, we were a little relieved—we all were bonded with them by this time.
First Across the Rainbow Bridge
The Zilker Bark adventure was our last chance, I think, to find a perfect home for the JCs. We adored them both, so our disappointment was more on their behalf. How dare people not adopt them...! We all settled into our comfortable 4-pup family rhythm.
And so, not long after, when we learned Big JC had bladder cancer, it was more of a shock than it should have been. June Carter had started to launch herself at him, teeth-first, starting a general dog-pack ruckus. In retrospect, we don't know whether she could smell his cancer and that had thrown her off balance. But she seemed to know something was wrong when we had no idea.
Our first sign was noticing that he couldn't pee. He'd try and try but . . . nothing. We took him in for the vet to check in and she identified the cancer pretty quickly. Because of his age, the vet was pessimistic of his survival chances, but she put him on a course of treatment, and we managed to bring him home for the weekend. We loved him as much as we could, despite him being mostly confined to his crate because of his catheter.
The meds she gave us did their job and reduced the swelling in his bladder enough to allow him to pee. This was the first hurdle he had to jump and he did it with apparent ease. Then, after a visit to the doggie oncologist, he was put on chemotherapy pills. As a foster dog, Pug Rescue Austin picked up the bill. I dread to think what it costs to pay for the treatment of a dog with cancer.
We had to wear rubber gloves when we gave him his chemo pill. They’re tiny, the pills; it’s hard to imagine them being so powerful and, apparently, so toxic. His poop needed to be picked up with rubber gloves and we had to wear the gloves when we cleaned up the mess if he accidentally-on-purpose went to the toilet in the house. He was significantly more toxic than pre-chemo Johnny Cash.
I started to say “toxic” a lot more than I used to.
Four days in and it seemed to be going OK. The change in routine was difficult to juggle—he had to pee and poop separately from the other dogs, so that meant getting him out while everyone else stayed in, then keeping him in while everyone else went out. It wasn’t difficult, it just took time, especially with the extra toxicity-related safeguards. And juggling gets tiring after a while, for everyone.
In himself, he seemed full of energy. He ran as much as he ever did. But maybe he looked a little thinner. And there were smudges of blood in his belly band when we took it off at night. He was ill, after all, and it was so easy to forget that. But while we had him, we were determined to do what we could to make him comfortable and make his hours (the ones he didn’t spend sleeping) stimulating and full of love.
But events shift on the tiniest changes, and the next significant tiny change was a small increase in the size of the tumor in his bladder. It was small but large enough to block the path to his urethra. And that’s why, very early on a Monday morning, his straining and panting from the effort of trying to pee raised the biggest red flag that has ever existed in the history of the world.
He tried over by the bushes, against a tree, on the grass. Each time, I’m standing there, 4 AM, the flashlight of my phone aimed at his undercarriage, looking for any sign of flow and hoping no nosey neighbor starts posting about us on nextdoor.com.
But, there was no avoiding the truth: the big guy wasn’t peeing. And the chemo treatment was only beneficial for his quality of life if he could pee by himself. This was a huge, and unexpected, problem. He had, as the cliche goes, been doing so well.
S took him to the vet as soon as it opened. We waited. It was Presidents’ Day so I sat at home, not knowing what to do, waiting. Hoping there would be a solution, another approach the vet had been keeping for the darkest time. When S came home, without him, she didn’t have to say anything; her face told the whole story. He’d ran out of options.
At noon, we drove back to the vet's to see him one last time. We hugged him, told him how much we loved him. And reminded him how he was absolutely not just a good boy but the bestest boy. That’s what he was hearing as we scritched his ears and stroked his side; as the wonderful, empathetic vet gave him the first injection, which calmed him, and the second, which stopped him from suffering.
Early in Big JC's illness, my wife and I had agreed that if Little JC was left alone, then we were not going to let her go to another home. She’d seen too much change, too much loss. We weren’t going to make her adapt any more than she needed to. When we’d said our last goodbyes to Johnny Cash and came back home, the first thing we did was formally apply to adopt June Carter. She was family now and we needed each other.
