Oogy_ The Dog Only a Family Could Love - Larry Levin [46]
“Do you talk to other Dogos?” I once asked him. “Can you somehow communicate telepathically? Is there a psychic Dogo connection because you are all so unique? If so, tell them you’re loved. Tell them that it worked out okay for you. Tell them,” I said, “that we love you like there’s no tomorrow.”
CHAPTER 8
A Special One
it has always been my belief that a pet owner has a special responsibility to do everything that can be done to make the pet’s life as fulfilling and peaceful as possible. That responsibility is yours the moment you make the choice to take an animal into your life. Indeed, just as with children, once the choice to assume responsibility for another life has been made, it can be carried out only one way if it is to have any chance of producing maximum results: all the way. It’s what Diane refers to as “above and beyond.”
Since Oogy was rescued and his face was stitched back together, his life has not been simply a never-ending series of pleasant experiences. He has had four more major operations. None of them, separately or cumulatively, have adversely affected his nature and temperament in the slightest. If anything, with each ordeal his trust in us has increased. He knows that we will alleviate his pain. He knows that we will do the right thing for him. His faith in us calms him and calms us.
The first of the surgeries became necessary as Oogy grew and the scar tissue where his face had been continued to spread. The expansion pulled the left side of his face upward. One result of this was that he could not close his left eye completely when he slept; it wept constantly in an attempt to lubricate itself and regularly issued a green, mucuslike discharge we needed to wipe away. His upper lip was pulled back in a perpetual grimace, a sneer that exposed some of his upper teeth. Because of the distortion caused by the scarring and leathery, reptilian texture of the scar tissue, he looked almost like a T. rex on the left side of his face. We sometimes called him “dinosaur dog.”
Once Oogy had come to live with us, it took no time at all for the scarring to become simply part of who he was; but seeing it through other people’s eyes was unavoidable. Those who caught only a glimpse of Oogy often had a difficult time accepting what their eyes told them they were seeing. One side of Oogy’s profile looked perfectly normal: a sweet, white dog face, a large, black nose, a floppy ear; the other side looked positively grotesque, with a nub of an ear, textured scar tissue instead of white fur, and an exposed upper canine. Often, people could do nothing more than stare at him in astonishment — and sometimes in horror — as we passed quickly away, leaving them to try to assimilate what they had just seen. Sometimes I would see the person who had caught sight of Oogy gesturing wildly to get the attention of others around him or her to have a look at “the creature” while we were still there.
And I would leave them behind, secure in the knowledge of the loveliness beside me.
But in addition to the deformities the scarring had caused, none of which should have presented any substantive health issues, it turned out that the spreading scar tissue had created a very real problem, one that I never would have detected on my own because of Oogy’s ability to tolerate extraordinary levels of pain. When Oogy was about two years old and had stopped growing, during one of his routine checkups Dr. Bianco informed me that Oogy was in chronic pain because the