buh

Hi. It’s been a while. For once, though, I’ve got a really good reason.

Longtime readers my remember my former dog, Buddy, who went off to live with an ex when pack-dom started to be an issue for him. He’s now an old man, and had a spinal disease a couple of years ago that’s left him with degenerative nerve damage. The nerve damage made his back end increasingly unsteady over time, though for a very long time he coped just fine.

A while back I got word from his handler that he wasn’t eating, and I showed up to a skin-and-bones dog who needed…something. I took him to the vet, not really planning for him to leave, but I had some last-ditch ideas to try, so I left him with his handler to try to solve the problems.

I’m trying not to fault the handler too much, because he’s got his own problems, but he didn’t prove to have very good problem-solving skills and by the time he got a hold of me, weeks later, because he needed to go out of town, the dog had basically been starving to death for weeks.

So now I have had the dog for 10 days, and I kind of think that his handler isn’t even going to bother getting a hold of me when - or if - he gets back into town.

The dog can’t get up on his own, nor can he walk very far once he’s up before he falls. When I got him 10 days ago, he had a couple of bald patches that I suspect were injuries from falling and/or pressure sores from being a canine skeleton who can’t easily shift positions when laying down. He had a huge pressure sore on his ass that I particularly thought might be the end-game.

So for the past 10 days, we have fed the dog. Literally, spooning up canned food from a bowl for him as he lays down or propped up on a pillow. He can’t stand still because he’s too unsteady, and he can’t bend down to a bowl (I suspect this is the cause of all the trouble in the first place). We also hold the water bowl for him. He can’t eat a lot at once (a half can for a very hungry session), and needs to drink regularly. We can’t be here all the time, so his drinking sessions often last minutes. He’s lost all his muscle mass and needs to rebuild it as he gains weight, plus we can’t let him stiffen up or get pneumonia, so we get him up to walk (with his back end held in a sling made from a long towel) regularly. Walking also tires him out, and sometimes he sleeps through the night. But sometimes he doesn’t, so on those nights I get up 2, 4, 6 times to feed, water, walk, reposition, and/or change out wet bedding.

He’s incontinent, too, because he can’t get up and because the nerve damage has left only vague sensation.

I know, I know. Dog needs to be put down. I say it every time I find myself awake at 4am spooning what looks and smells like cheap Chunky Beef Stew into a ravenous piss-wet monster.

And then I clean him up and get him some dry pads, and make him comfortable and pet his fuzzy head and sometimes he snuggles or makes his happy hum. Most days, his walking gets a little better. He’s sitting up on his own, making attempts to clean himself. That one huge sore is just a scab now. He’s gaining weight. He’s alert, and that’s what stops me. If he was still lethargic, or in any kind of pain, or still turning down food - or if any of that comes back - we’re done. But while he’s alert and simply incapacitated, I can’t bring myself to do it.

Or at least I tell myself I can’t until I can talk to his handler, who for all his mistakes deserves to say goodbye, and I can wait a little longer as long as Buddy keeps getting a little better all the time.

Dork is taking all this pretty well. He’s been quieter at night, and grudgingly accepting that almost every free moment I have is devoted to Buddy. He really wants that Chunky Beef Stew, though.

In the middle of all this, I changed jobs. I haven’t been at the new job long enough to know what it’s really like, but I’ll have a wider scope of responsibility and get to do cool things like go to Asia every now and then. I’ve only been shadowing my boss so far, and I’m at that point of full-brain-capacity that, combined with the interrupted sleep, has made me hollow-eyed and zombie-ish.

It’s all been very startling; I bombed part of the interview and had written the job off when the offer came in, and I had to give my notice the next day. This new job didn’t exactly happen because they were intent on hiring someone; I just happened to have a few of the skills they would have liked to have if they did hire someone, which they didn’t have to do. Except for those few bare skills, I’m in over my head. In a good way, as I can see the surface just above me and will likely learn to swim very quickly, but I’m essentially learning a new language on the fly.

It’s also a little scary because, for benefits reasons, I’ve kind of hitched myself up for at least a 4 year run there. Not that I couldn’t leave, but I’d kind of be shooting myself in the financial foot if I did. Except that benefit is a total crapshoot, so I could hang in and have bupkis in the end.

I remind myself that I don’t have to start every job with quitting in sight already; I did that before because I was in a bad situation, but that doesn’t apply the same way now. There’s plenty for me to learn in 4 or more years, and I could very well score several patents in that time if I work hard, which is the kind of programming goal I haven’t even heard of since the height of the boom. (It’s the kind of industry jabber you hear about the big boys at Apple, IBM, Motorola, Xerox, and not only could I score some software patents, but I’m just as welcome as anyone else at the company to design products, the stuff we actually make (which isn’t software; I just help make the software that makes the company run), should an idea strike me.)

It’s my first grown-up job since the bust, and I’m not even sure my boom-job was grown-up, so maybe it’s my first real grown-up job. I don’t feel like a grown-up, yet.

So it’s a little daunting to be back firmly on the career track, and to make this kind of commitment to a company in the same year that I made a big personal commitment, but maybe that’s all just things coming together.

The whole marriage thing is pretty cool, too. With so many changes going on at once, we’re still trying to find our feet, but we’re doing pretty good considering. It seems like literally every day brings something new we hadn’t anticipated (we totally didn’t expect B to get a permanent job within 6 weeks of me getting a new and very challenging job, for sure), but we’re doing a pretty good job of being a team.