The Dog With the Remarkable Bottom

GoogleTHE DOG WITH THE REMARKABLE BOTTOM by Carole Forhan

Barkley is no perfect, prize-winning Jack Russell. He is overweight and shaped square, like a brick. When an acquaintance met him once, she remarked that they'd never seen a "square" dog before. Thinking about him, I suppose that's what he looks like.. He has thick ears which both stand upright when he is happy, and one flops down when he is relaxed. They go back and against his head when he is thinking. He smiles a lot and wags his little stump of a tail when he meets anyone. He is a wonderful boy, overeats unfortunately, but is well over-loved. Barkley is a very special dog.

He was supposed to be a Mother’s Day present, l996, but instead my husband Barry and I got him a few days earlier because the farm where he came from, could no longer keep him in the manger where he was born. His being born in a manger should have been a tip-off, of what a good boy we were getting. One afternoon about a week earlier than planned, this little squirming Jack Russell pudding pup was given to us by our children.

He never, ever gave us a day of concern. He only had one accident in the house as a pup, never chewed on anything that wasn't allowed, was easily trained to come and stay by my side, and generally lived to please us.

Over the course of the next year, we adopted a sister for him and called her Rosie. After a tragic day of fitting in (Barkley bit Rosie on the ear), they became each other's half and there wasn't a day that he didn't adore her or she him. They ran, walked, ate and slept together. Rosie was a little bossy at times, and Barkley allowed her to think that, but Barkley was always really the Boss Man. The only problems we had were when Rosie would get into trouble trying to boss strange dogs, and Barkley would have to go in and defend her honour, despite her always being in the wrong. But that was Barkley, being a dog, he never judged anyone or anything.

Rosie was a very special dog, but in a different way to Barkley. Rosie was Parson Russell pup and she came with papers. She was beautiful, slim and taller than Barkley. She was the love of his life. She was also my little white ghost. She followed me incessantly, wherever I was, Rosie was always there behind me. She looked up to me and thought I was very smart, in fact, she had never met anyone as wonderful as I was. It can be quite distracting at times to be adored so unequivocally and so utterly.

One Christmas, Barry had been having terrible heart burn and I forced him to go to the doctor and ask for some medication to help him. The heart burn turned out to be more than we both expected, and he was immediately hospitalized for heart problems. A couple of days later he was transferred to Calgary's Foothill's for an angiogram. He almost didn't survive this procedure and went into congestive heart failure. Immediate quadruple bypass saved his life, but took a lot out of him, he was very ill for several months and was eventually forced to retire from his work at Bowden Prison as Warden of Administration. Barkley never left Barry's side from then on. It became Barkley's job to lick Barry all over. Every single night since then, before he goes to sleep, Barkley has given Barry his "wash". He actually nursed Barry through his illness. He licked his wounds when they had healed, and the scars up the length of his legs from the transplant, and the terrible scar on his chest.. There's hardly a trace of any scars from that dramatic surgery. We decided that if Barkley was human he would have been a doctor. He always tries to "fix" people if they have cuts or bruises. Most, including myself, don't particularly like to be licked and licked by a dog with the intensity that he puts into it. Barry loves it, so Barkley does have at least one patient, patient!

We had years of joy, walking miles across town on the trails to the river, "birthday parties" when I would dress them both up and give them presents, usually fifty-cent stuffed animals from the Sally Ann. Rosie would gut them within hours, I often used to wonder what kind of a mother she would have been if we hadn't had her spayed. Would she have eaten her young with the same ferocity that she would tear into a teddy bear? Barkley was more of a "ball" man and loved a game of chasing a ball around a field.

Michael comes in about once a month and we'd go walking on the trails or the fields, and Michael would always be following with his wonderful camera snapping away at the antics of Rosie and Barkley. As a result of these photographic walks, we have thousands of photos of our happy days running with our two little jacks.

Then one day early Spring of 2010, Rosie stopped running. She came down with something that took all the life out of her. The vet never found out what it was, it was never diagnosed. After several hospital stays, x-rays, tests, and medications,

she faded despite all our efforts. One Saturday night, she couldn't even lift her head and I fed her water from an eye-dropper. We decided this was enough, we picked up her basket with her in it, and drove to the Emergency Animal Clinic in Red Deer and held her in our arms while they gave her a needle and she just drifted off to sleep, peacefully.

Barkley was distressed for weeks after. He would stand on the bed and look at the place where she used to sleep. Eventually, her memory faded from his mind, but other things started to happen. For years, Barkley had had a fat bottom. In fact, my sister, laughingly pointed out that she'd never met a dog with such a remarkable bottom. She said, laughlingly, "he has bum cheeks" . That large bottom turned out to be an enormous tumor, hard and heavy and growing, pushing into his body and pushing against his back leg, pushing into his lungs, causing him to have trouble breathing. We are nursing Barkley and keeping him sedated as much as possible. He still insists on giving Barry his nightly bath, even though it's more like a cat's lick now. Once again, there is nothing that the vet can do for him. We've had x-rays and tests and he's on several types of medications, but nothing is slowing this relentless growth. For a while he had difficulty getting up stairs, then it became impossible, so we'd have to carry him up. Now he cannot go down the stairs, and we have to carry him down. We watch and we wait. We'll know when the time is right. When he stops wagging his stump every time he sees one of us and when he stops wanting his dinner. We'll know when the time is right.