Oogy_ The Dog Only a Family Could Love - Larry Levin [54]
“He’s got a slow tearing of the ACL going on,” the doctor said with complete assurance.
“You can tell that just from looking at him?” I asked somewhat incredulously.
“I can tell that,” the doctor said. I appreciated his confidence because it underscored his expertise. And then he added, “I’m terribly sorry this happened. But now there won’t be any more.”
He was trying to make me feel better instead of treating me impersonally, as though this were an unemotional business transaction. For the first time, he had expressed some sympathy and had made an effort to connect. I felt better about him as a result.
Oogy had his second ACL surgically repaired — and again, he developed a postoperative infection that took him back to the hospital for several days of treatment to knock down the fever and treat the infection. The second surgery, however, was most memorable not for the procedure, but for a conversation I had with a technician there.
When the tech who was bringing Oogy out so I could take him home entered the waiting room, I got down on the floor to say hello to my dog. The tech said to me, “This is a great dog. A great dog. He’s loving, he’s gentle, and he’s really, really smart.”
While Oogy licked me repeatedly as if he were saying “Hello” and “Thank you for being here” and “I can’t wait to get home,” I said in an offhand fashion, “Isn’t that kind of a contradiction when it comes to dogs?”
The tech’s eyes narrowed. “Listen,” he said to me. There was a real sternness in his tone of voice. “You don’t understand. I see hundreds of dogs each month, and every once in a while there’s one of them that’s really special. And you’ve got him.”
When I took Oogy to Ardmore to have his stitches removed, I related this conversation to Dr. Bianco. Initially, I thought he might not have heard me. His attention remained on the task he was performing.
Then, without looking up from his ministrations, he said, “But we already knew that.”
CHAPTER 9
Signs
it sometimes feels like destiny that we were at the hospital that Saturday morning because of Buzzy’s illness, but Diane revealed to me years later that as soon as she was certain that Oogy would survive, once she had completed fostering him and knew he was adoptable, she had decided to call me to ask if I would take in this pup they had saved who had only one ear. So at some point, our phone would have rung and Oogy would have been waiting at the other end, not unlike how Noah and Dan had been waiting for us years before. The inescapable conclusion is that Oogy was meant to be here.
There are other things that make me feel that Oogy’s involvement in our lives was preordained. Several likenesses of Oogy existed in our house for years before we actually met him. Long before the boys were born, when Jennifer and I actually had some disposable income as well as free time to travel, we happened upon an art gallery in Vancouver that specialized in Inuit art. Over three separate visits there in the next five years, we collected a number of Inuit prints for the house. One of them, which has been in our first-floor hallway for the past fifteen years, and had been in our old house for five years before that, is called My Dog Protecting Me. It shows two small white dogs in the foreground, each of which has the arm of an Inuit man in its jaw. In the background, two larger versions of the dogs in the foreground are standing on hind legs with their