Nutty's Tumour Is Getting Smaller!

I hardly dare think, say or write this, but Boyfriend on a Short Fuse and I have both noticed that Nutty's tumour has shrunk by half.

Am I hallucinating?

But it really is smaller! It isn't bleeding any more and the horrible pus/mucus surrounding it has disappeared. He has a great appetite, eats as much poached chicken as I can feed him and has just polished off some lightly-cooked Alaskan salmon.

I am a great believer in miracles, in `making the impossible possible' (as our latest Buddhist campaign puts it), and now, it seems, I have proof of this.

After all, the word miracle wouldn't exist if humanity hadn't witnessed a few of them.

But I am determined not to get too effusive and Pollyanna-like about it all. As always, I take it day by day.

When Nutty was looking bad last week I was so desperate I prayed to Archangel Ariel (the archangel who heals and protects animals). The next day I noticed an improvement.

So the whole household now has a spring in it's step.

It's been a good day on all fronts. I finished editing an article for the Sunday Telegraph magazine, Stella, which should be out in a few weeks.
Then I bought a perfect dress that I'd been slathering over when it was in a shop window round the corner. Most unusually, I put it on and it fitted like a glove. It is a knee length, mid/navy blue woolen dress with a fitted top and a flared skirt. I am thinking it will be a perfect ensemble for funerals as well as drinks parties (I go to more of the former these days).

A good funeral outfit is so important. As a femme du certain age one can't reveal too much flesh or wear anything too bright or tight. However this dress is tight but because it is in demure navy blue it looks modest without being very modest at all.

I Love My Dog and my Dog Loves Me

I have just fed Nutty his dinner of lightly poached organic chicken (from M and S, I pray it is not halal - fifty percent of lamb is now halal in the UK, so under the cosh of Muslims have we become).

Talking of beastly halal, listen to this. At Christmas I met up with an old flatmate who I hadn't seen for over twenty years and we hit it off straight away, it was just like old times. We were chalet girls together in Crans Montana and had a wonderful time. We were both too lazy to ski and spent all day (after finishing our very cursory domestic duties) in the local patisserie, gorging on cakes and endless creamy cappuchinos. Result was we both staggered back to Blighty having put on a stone and bursting out of our cords. She married an old Etonian Welsh sheepfarmer and disappeared to a place called Mould in North Wales and I never saw her again. Neither of us were great at staying in touch, besides she disapproved of my decidely non-Etonian fiance (a good natured but socially insecure Geordie). But it was lovely, none the less, to reconnect with her and her lovely husband.

Now I have nothing against farming, but when her hitherto lovely husband said with a cold shrill laugh that he sold off his old ewes (knackered presumably after enduring endless births and having their lambs stripped away from them, again and again) to the halal abbatoir "they pay us really well", haw haw, " so why bloody not!" I inwardly shuddered.

My pal had insisted Boyfriend on a Short Fuse and I stay with them on the halal farm in Mould but I knew I never would. I mean, where is his loyalty to his stock? I guess I am very bourgeois, but where is the common decency it it? How desperate can they be for money that they sell these old girls off to some wretched abbatoir where they do not even get stunned before having their throats cut?

Poor old Teflon-dad is completely gutted because he has to close one of his factories in Surrey (which his father opened in the 1930's) because it has been losing two million pounds a year. But he has kept the place open for years, solely out of loyalty to his hard-working workforce who have stuck with him through thick and thin. Many other bosses would, and have, relocated to China or wherever the running costs are cheaper, but he refused to do this.

I am so proud to have him as a father, just imagine having my pal's husband as a rello? Thank God for great mercies, is all I can say.

I prayed to Francis of Assisi and Archangel Ariel, the patron saint of animals last week, and I must report that Nutty has been doing very well ever since. Part of me still holds out for a spectacular remission, or just for his mouth tumour to shrink a bit or not get any bigger. As it is, he is in fine fettle, eating like a trouper, taking his medicines and being his usual loving, sweet-natured, stoic self. We are so lucky to have this extra time with him to spoil him and show him our love.

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Nutty Nearly Dies...

So much has happened in 24 hours...

Nutty had been OK all day but in the evening he lay down and tremors were going through his little body. I didn’t know what was happening and did some Reiki. Boyfriend on a Short Fuse and I got ready for bed and Nutty was still lying on the carpet.

This not unusual, but what was unusual were the tremors and the lack of response from him. I was in my bath reading the papers (oh blessed relief and escape) when Boyfriend on a Short Fuse calls me. Normally his tone is quite shouty but this time it was subdued and anxious.

`Darling! Come down now!’

So I scramble out of my bath, suds and papers all over the floor and dash downstairs. Nutty is lying comatose on the floor shuddering slightly, Boyfriend on a Short Fuse is hovering over him, frantic with worry. For the first time in seven years since we first met, he is crying. He is famously Teflon-coated and I am used to him shouting, but crying, never. My heart shifts in my chest and I can hardly breathe with emotion.

`I think he is dying’, Boyfriend on a Short Fuse whispers as I stroke Nutty's scrawny tawny fur and watch anxiously for the rise and fall in his abdomen. Then Boyfriend on a Short Fuse runs to the kitchen for a bottle of water and spoons teaspoonfuls into Nutty’s mouth. Within minutes Nutty is revived, his eyes open and he moves around. It is like Lazarus rising from the dead! He was dehydrated all this time.

What we didn’t realise is that his mouth tumour, officially known as a squamous cell carcinoma, has impeded his ability to drink. Normally his little tongue laps out constantly into his water bowl, but what we’ve realised is that he is not actually drinking very much at all.

And while only a few hours ago his tongue was trying to lap the water, now his tongue cannot leave his mouth to drink. I don’t know what has happened. So we spoon teaspoonfuls of water into his mouth and carry him upstairs. We get into bed and talk and talk and I cry a bit. Boyfriend on a Short Fuse has re-teflon-coated himself and is dry eyed again. I was very moved by his tears, sometimes I forget he has a heart but I do know he loves Nutty very much. Not as much as me, but he does love him so much.

While Nutty was comatose I prayed to my mother, to St Francis of Assisi, to Archangel Ariel the patron saint of animals, to make him better, to keep him happy and healthy with us for a little longer.

`Please let me be able to take one picture of him in his dog pram’, I begged. He looks so adorable in his pram, people always smile and chat to him as we wheel him past. If you don’t have a picture you can’t share the image with anyone and it would be lost forever.

And they answered my prayer!

Boyfriend on a Short Fuse and I were both absolutely shaken and devastated at this latest brush with death. Nutty has defied death many times, how many shelties live past 15? And yet, and yet… I believed he was immortal, that he would live to be the oldest Sheltie in the world.

I love Nutty more than heaven and earth and he depends on me for sustenance and love. So much is tied up in him, memories of my Mother, grandparents, Longdown where we all grew up (not that I loved Longdown at all as it had many unhappy memories, but still, there is emotion and history there). 

15 years of my life, a huge chunk, encompassing my mad it-girldom period, dizzy dazzling boyfriends, many flats, Nutty always a constant although I did not know him as I know and love him now of course as he was living in Guildford with my mother.

I used to spend the hours googling world’s oldest Shelties, and delighted in a Youtube video of a 20-year-old sheltie wearing a birthday hat and looking bright and healthy. Yes! That could be Nutty! With his organic, home-cooked diet of fresh poached chicken with pureed vegetables and spelt, interspersed with the odd morsel of lightly cooked venison mince I thought he would be indestructible.

And yet, death waits for no man or dog. I can’t hold off the inevitable, however much time or money and love I lavish. Nature will have her way.

Many times I have wished his cancer on myself. Let me have his cruel and gloating tumour sprouting in my own mouth like an evil discoloured cauliflower! All human ingenuity would be exercised in its removal…. But Nutty is just an innocent bystander. I do my best but we caught it too late…. Something I will always regret.

And so, eventually I crawled down into my own bed, reluctantly leaving my baby in BOASF’s room to sleep fitfully downstairs. At 4.30am I woke up and crept upstairs to check he was still breathing. Yes! He was! A miracle. One more day with my love. By now I had woken the Tinies who were jumping up and down (but not Teflon Boyfriend who is indestructibly asleep), they bounced downstairs with me and we all slept together fitfully till 8.30am.

Back upstairs, Beloved still breathing!

I hand fed him some poached chicken, Boyfriend on a Short Fuse and I took them out for a walk then took Nutty down to the Blue Cross. BOASF met a lady in the park who insisted the Blue Cross offered the best vetinary care, `but don’t you need to be on benefits? I asked. Apparently not.

So BOASF whisks Beloved down to Victoria, peaking out of his little pram. I leave later and catch them up. BOASF is inscensed that I have joined them. `IT’S ALL ABOUT YOU ISN’T IT’ he rages in the busy street.

There is no point arguing with him when he is like this. Of course I want to be with my Beloved when he has his consultation but it is not to be. The receptionist insists that BOASF must have some proof of being on a limited income, which he does not have, despite being of limited means.
I drop off my donations (a nice dress and several books) and we go home. BOASF still raging about this and that. The waiting room is choc a bloc, heaving with ailing people and their beleaguered pets, waiting, waiting…. 2 hours apparently. I am relieved we must leave and go home.