When the dream turns to nightmare...

If you've read my earlier posts this year, you'll know that a very long-held dream came true and I was able to get a border collie puppy. Little Maiki has been an absolute joy and I've so enjoyed having a dog again.

So it was a real concern over the past week when Maiki woke up lame on Saturday morning, hobbling along on three legs. There was no explanation for it; she had been perfectly fine the previous day. After three days of limping, we went to the vet, where the x-rays looked fine and so they prescribed anti-inflammatories and "rest" for a possible strained or sprained muscle.

Rest? It's extremely hard to stop an active and energetic border collie puppy from trying to run and play. The poor pup's frustration level rose throughout the week from lack of exercise, but there didn't seem to be a lot of improvement in the limping. On Friday morning I phoned the vet to ask what I could allow the puppy to do and what I needed to prevent her from doing, for her own recovery. 

And that's when my happy little world came tumbling down. The vet said that if she was still limping after a whole week, we needed to consider that it could be a cruciate ligament tear - a serious knee injury that usually only recovers with surgery and can sometimes leave dogs with early onset arthritis.  More medication over the weekend, and then I had to take Maiki in yesterday for further examination.

Well, our vet's appointment yesterday confirmed the bad news: Maiki has a cruciate ligament tear - a fairly serious knee injury. I'd been feeling hopeful because over the weekend she had stopped walking on three legs and was putting weight on four feet again. But the minute the vet saw her, she said, "Oh, she's really lame, isn't she?" (I guess I didn't know what to look for.)

It's sad news for this little border collie puppy. It could mean that I need to wave goodbye to any dreams I may have held of having an amazing agility dog or frisbee dog in the future (typical border collie sports.) What I can hold onto is that perhaps there is just a tiny chance that we can come through this without needing to put her through invasive and expensive surgery.

The next few days will tell. There's to be no jumping, no playing with other puppies, definitely no turning of any sort (which could damage the knee permanently) - so no playing fetch or any other activity which would involve going in one direction and then turning around to go in the other direction.

On Friday we have another vet's appointment to evaluate whether she has continued to improve or whether surgery is the only way of saving her from a painful and arthritic future.

So, in the meanwhile, I keep praying and hoping for some glimmer of improvement that might mean surgery isn't necessary. This isn't what I would have hoped for when getting my dream puppy, but she's my responsibility now and I need to do the best I can for her.

Some people might feel a little shocked that I would dare to pray for a miracle for an animal. Does God really care what happens with our pets? Doesn't He have better things to do than spend a miracle on healing an animal?

Read on below for why I'm at least going to pray and see what happens.

Does God care about our animals?

This week has been kind of hard emotionally as I've juggled the challenges of caring for a dying cat (Tobi) and a mysteriously but seriously injured puppy (Maiki.) Not particularly "spiritual" challenges, you might think; not about winning the lost or making a big impact for the Kingdom of God. So does God even care about our animals? Are there not much more important things in the world vying for His attention?

Whenever that question arises,  I am reminded very clearly of something that happened back in the beginning of 2006, when I still lived in Cape Town. I received an email from a man I hadn’t yet met at the time (the husband of a friend) saying that he had received money for Christmas and, when he prayed, he felt that God told him to send the money for my dog. Well, this was rather mysterious, as there seemed to be no obvious reason why either of our two dogs would need such a large sum of money.

Just over a week later, we were out of town for a few days and a young friend was looking after our house and dogs. When we got home again, we discovered that one of the dogs had had an accident and that part of her beautiful collie tail had been broken off. She needed to have the infected part of the tail amputated so that the skin could be stitched over it again. And yes, you’ve guessed it: the cost of Zola’s operation was exactly the amount of money that my Scottish friend had sent “for my dog.” 

Later that day, I was reading my Bible and I had to smile when I came across Psalm 36 vs 6: “You take care of both people and animals, oh Lord.” This rather unusual incident spoke to me very clearly that I have a heavenly Father who is interested in every single detail of my life - and even in providing enough money for me to take care of my animals. 

Provision is one way that God shows His care for us and our pets (or our children, for that matter.) Another way He sometimes intervenes is by doing an unexpected miracle of healing. Back in 2016, a full decade after the Zola experience in Cape Town, my cat here in Spain, Teddi, was diagnosed with a thyroid condition, which meant that he probably had less than a year left to live.  

I was going to Africa for two months of ministry that summer, and a variety of house-sitters were holidaying in Spain and looking after my two cats. I think no one wanted to be the person on duty when the big cat died, so various house sitters told me they were laying hands on him and praying for his health and healing.

When I came home from Africa, I found a very poorly cat. He had eaten little while I was gone and had lost a lot of weight.  (Whole story here: http://backineurope.blogspot.com/2016/09/medical-misadventures-medical-mystery.html) Yet, when the vet did a blood test to see if thyroid deterioration was behind his rapid decline, the test showed that his thyroid was completely normal. Follow up tests six months later showed that it was still normal. 

Five years later, Teddi is still with me, as large as life. When doing a recent health check on Tobi (his sister) we did the thyroid test on both of them and both came back normal. The vet is completely baffled about Teddi's recovery. She keeps saying that hyperthyroidism isn't a disease you can recover from, and that Teddi's amazing healing is "like a miracle."

So now, it's Tobi's turn to be ill. Her thyroid may be normal, but she's going into kidney failure and she has a tumour in her liver and pancreas. She probably doesn't have long left to live; maybe only a few weeks. I'm not expecting or even praying for a miracle for Tobi. She's twelve years old, she's had a good life, and animals don't live forever. It's obvious that it's her time and at some point soon it will be kinder to let her go, if she doesn't just die on her own. For now, she's not in pain and she's not suffering in any way.

But for my little Maiki, just turned five months old, it seems unthinkable that a mystery injury could rob her of her puppyhood and of possible future mobility and musculoskeletal health. And so I'm praying. I'm praying for an outcome that would be good for her and good for me.

I don't have a specific word from God. I don't know if He would want to do a miracle of healing (with no surgery needed) or a miracle of provision (if surgery is the only way to give this little pup a long and healthy life.) But I know that God cares about me and therefore about every aspect of my life.... and so I'm going to pray anyway and see what happens. The Zola miracle and the Teddi miracle were unexpected. Perhaps God will do something unexpected this time too.

I could do a PhD with this...

I'm a linguist and a language teacher, so I've always been fascinated by language acquisition - especially the dynamics involved when children grow up multi-lingual or when someone is learning a foreign language.

When Kenai was with me for two months before Christmas, I joked that my foster puppy was bilingual, because he was learning some words in Swedish and others in Spanish. I've done the same thing with Maiki: she knows Spanish words for some things and English words for others. The dogs are not really "bilingual." It's just that the one language they do know is made up of a mixture of words from different languages.

But this week, as Maiki turns 4½ months, we're beginning to notice evidence that she's becoming genuinely bilingual. Not with verbs or commands, which need to be super clear, but with her vocabulary and the names of things. You can ask her to find her hueso or find her bone, and she knows exactly what you mean. You can ask her if she wants water or if she wants agua, and she walks directly to the water bowl. If my neighbour says to her, "¿Te doy cariñitos?" she puts on the same soppy behaviour as when I say, "Come and give me cuddles." 

It's quite fascinating. I've intentionally observed it for years in children and adults, but this is the first time I've been able to see it happening with an animal.  Maybe I could write a PhD on language acquisition and bilingualism in dogs and cats!