The Second Stage of Grief

Now that we've begun the hardest march, the longest mile, my sister (No, the other one) is driving us all crazy. She's the sort of girl who sees a stray dog on the side of the freeway and has to pull over to try and help, after all. But, of all of us, she's probably the least ready to let go. I know I'm having my problems with it but after seeing the dog, after seeing her struggle to walk and see and eat - everything that makes her life worth living - I'm getting there. But my sister is caustic, trying to find some way, some answer, or, failing that, someone to blame. She's frantically running around, questioning, asking, and judging. And she's making my mother frantic, too, because she's the one who has to deal with her. But damned if she wasn't right.

See, when the whole thing started, my sister was dead set against going to the normal vets. The same vet where our cat had died on the table earlier in the year - a massive system crash brought on by stress and dehydration after we'd taken her in for an exam. She didn't trust them. Didn't think they were capable. Didn't see them as caring enough. And she urged my mother to find someplace else, an emergency room, a referral, anything (She expected my mother to be the one making those calls and spending that time finding a new office to go to, of course, but that's a different story. The one about why she's so damned annoying at times.) to avoid having to go back to that place of sadness and apathy. My mother, I, my brother, my other sister, we thought otherwise. That the worst thing we could do was panic, that the doctors at the clinic knew our dog and knew what they were doing, and rather than waste time running around trying to find someone knew it was best to be patient and let them do what they could.

Now, I'm not so sure. Because what's going to kill my dog, now, isn't the arthritis along her back or even the savage inflammation of the same that's keeping her from walking. It's the mass on her liver - described as swiss cheesed throughout her system and possibly a cancer spread to her other organs - that we only found out about thanks to a recent ultrasound. An ultrasound that my mother had to demand, beg for, almost, in order to see if the dog hadn't managed to swallow a plastic bag. That might have been what was causing her to vomit and shit all the time, after all. Because before her back went out the dog had been having stomach problems. Diarrhea, loss of appetite, the whole deal and she was on rather strong medicine to help. We'd gone to the doctors, had all sorts of tests run, blood drawn, stool samples examined, all inconclusive. But in all that time, no one thought to suggest an ultrasound to us. And, now, when it's far, far too late, we find out that there's this growth there that's been growing all this time. Maybe, potentially, if we'd caught it months ago the dog might have been healthy, strong enough to survive surgery. Maybe it wouldn't have seeped through her veins into her kidneys and spleens, organs which have vanished from the display, buried by her enlarged, malignant liver.

And the worst part? My mother asked what kind of problems having a mass in the liver could cause. The answer? Vomiting, diarrhea, loss of appetite. The very same problems she's had since the beginning of the year, if not before. And the vets have been throwing up their hands and failing to find a cause for.