A Haircut for Betty

A Haircut for Betty

Betty, Betty, Betty. You’ve been with us for five months now and I think it’s fair to say that your recuperation is complete. Your teeth are fixed. Your eyes are fixed. Your diabetes is more or less fixed. You still cringe when someone tries to pet you or, worse yet, pick you up. If that doesn’t happen in the right way, you get kinda nervous and maybe pee just a squirt in your anxiety. We suspect it is the shadow of some form of old but not forgotten abuse. We hope it will fade and that you will start to gain the confidence that you are here to stay and that nothing will change that.

In the morning at about 6:45am I can start to hear Betty walking around and thumping her tail against the bed or the ottoman. She is wide awake and raring to go. She, like me, seems to be a being of the morning. Her mood is nothing short of ebullient. I try to get her up on the bed, but her cringe dysfunction precludes it. She moves quickly from a cringe and crouch to a roll over and whine program. She wants to get up on the bed to visit with her mom, but that’s harder than it seems, so I go sit on the ottoman. Getting up onto the ottoman is less daunting to Betty and that works fine. Once on the ottoman its relatively easy to get Betty to make the leap up to bed.

Once on the bed, Betty has an entire fawning program. She practically wags herself up onto the bed to wake Kim up and is the sweetest thing. Betty has a thing about an itchy snout. She will go all around the furniture in the living room or bedroom rubbing her nose on both sides along the furniture. She likes nothing more than having her face rubbed and rubbed and rubbed. Mix it up with a general head and ear scratch and she is in heaven and will sit there enjoying the scratch forever. In the morning (and sometimes at any other time in the day), Betty will roll around hiding her head in her paws and in the covers alternately doing almost everything a little white dog can think of to express her pleasure with the world. It warms our hearts every day to see the change in her over these last five months and to see the joy she has just greeting the day. It reminds us as we are getting up that the world is a wonderful place and we have to appreciate everything about life.

Betty’s day begins in the same way every day. After a roll in bed and a nice face scratch its time to go get breakfast. Kim kicks into action about an hour or two earlier than she wishes, but she does it. She carries Betty into the kitchen, sets her down and goes about the breakfast routine. Coffee has to wait until Betty is taken care of. Breakfast consists of two courses; a bowl of canned science diet food for diabetic dogs with a chaser of dry kibble. Her years of eating kibble means that she doesn’t feel finished unless she has her kibble. In the rush of her first mouthfuls, Kim gives her the first of her two injections of insulin (7 units) by pitching her neck skin and quickly injecting her. Betty barely realizes she is getting a shot. Such is her excitement about eating.

As soon as Betty finishes her breakfast, she immediately goes on the prowl to mooch more food from me or Kim. The years of food deprivation are hardwired into her psyche. I fear she would eat herself to death if given the opportunity. She remains a slender little white dog (about 17 pounds) with the start of a little pink belly from the new good life she is enjoying. The way we can really tell that she is doing better (besides the fact that she can now see and she doesn’t bump into things every ten seconds) is that her coat has thickened and she no longer looks like an old wispy-haired lady. Her hair is thick and shiny the way it is on any healthy dog.

Kim usually gives Betty a bath once or twice a week. She does that by just taking Betty into the shower with her and Betty seems fine with it. A home shower is never really the same as a professional grooming, but its fine. But this week Kim booked the dog groomer-mobile to come and give Betty the royal treatment. Kim had to spend the hour with Betty in the truck to keep her calm. She has not led the life a dog that gets groomed, so its a new experience for her. She got a nice short cut and actually seemed to prance around the house a bit afterwards, proud of her new look. And in addition to the nice fresh do, Betty gets a fresh new pink kerchief around her neck to make her feel extra feminine and special.

I like rubbing Betty’s back with her new buzz cut just like I like rubbing my hand on the back of my neck after I’ve buzzed myself with my clippers, just like I did when I was a kid home from the barber. Her face and her tail are still a bit shaggy, so she still looks like Betty. When Cecil got buzzed he looked like a completely different dog because he was so otherwise poofy, but Betty still looks like Betty. The cut also doesn’t seem to make her snout any less itchy and she still wants her face rubbed any time you are willing.

Kim has noted that Betty and I seem to have a better rapport than Cecil and I did. I attribute that less to the dogs than to myself. When we got Cecil, I was decidedly not a pet person. Living with Cecil for a decade make me soften my view and warm my heart to the value of pets in my life. I’m sure it had a lot to do with my general stage of life, having more time on my hands and generally having less stress to bother me, but I think its more. I think pets are just a vehicle for our expression of love. Kim has taught me that. They bring the love out of us to the surface and the free flow of love tends to prime the pump and cause the release of even more love I suspect. Even if its just a nice theory, that’s enough to make me feel that its worthwhile having a dog despite the costs and the hassles. There is simply too little time in life not to want to get as much love out of our system as possible. It does no good holding it inside and that is especially true if working the pump makes it bring forth more and more love to share with the world.

When we meet someone new and Betty is with us, which is almost always the case, I like to say to people that she is a twelve year old rescue that had diabetes and was blind and that now she is the happiest dog in the world. The reaction is always the same. People stop and simply say, bless you. It feels so genuine and feels so good to hear. It feels like we are helping expel feel good about the world more so than feeling good about us in particular. People like happy endings and nothing can be happier than the wagging tail of a little white dog that wants you to rub her face.