Happy Bella Day

On August 3, 2000 my then-wife spotted Bella trotting into an intersection.  As the stoplight turned green, signaling the waiting traffic to proceed forward toward the hapless little stray, my ex rushed out into the open space and waved her arms at the cars to urge them to wait.  The stack of cars balked, grudgingly — this being Los Angeles, where even momentary impediments to traffic are greeted with disproportionate ire, and more specifically East L.A., where stray dogs are a dime a dozen.

“C’m'ere, doggie! C’m'ere!” she urged.

The skinny little pup turned and trotted straight toward the invitation, tail wagging. She clearly lacked the skittish trepidation of the average street cur. She reached my ex, who had retreated to the sidewalk and crouched down to receive her. Just as she still does today, the dog we would call Bella took immediate advantage of this access to a human lap and commenced giving dog kisses.

Loaded into the back seat of her rescuer’s ’88 VW Fox, the gray mongrel lay down as though she’d just run a marathon. On the subsequent ride to our vet’s office, she curled up into a ball and periodically issued audible, prolonged grunts, similar to the ones I might produce during a particularly effective back massage.

I met them in the exam room at the animal hospital, where the doggie stood on the stainless steel table looking at me and wagging. The vet gave her brief once-over exam, and Bella licked his bearded face whenever it came within range. He estimated that she was four to six months old. We pressed him for an educated guess of her breed makeup. He offered only the determination that she was “some kind of terrier mix,” which struck me as pretty cagey for a veteran veterinarian (or “vet vet,” if you will).

At home, I put the doggie straight into the bathtub and carried out a remorseless act of aquatic flea genocide. As the little bloodsuckers swirled toward their soap-and-watery grave (I don’t like fleas), the power of dog shampoo revealed that Bella was actually a blonde. It was like one of those Clairol instant hair coloring commercials, except the shiny-haired fashion model not only changed shades but also was cured of a bad case of head lice.

In the nine years since that day Bella has remained as cheerful and affectionate as ever, and proven herself to be tougher than a box of ten-penny nails. A week or two after we’d brought her home she chewed up a bright yellow highlighter pen. It turned out to be a smart move on her part, because the overnight emergency vet detected that although Bella hadn’t poisoned herself, she did have parvo. The virulent contagion had been caught relatively early, and Bella survived it thanks to immediate admission to the isolation unit at the vet. She spent about seven groggy days there, hooked up to an IV. We visited her daily, stomping on a bleach-soaked towel as required to enter and exit the room.

Parvo would almost certainly have killed Bella if she’d remained a stray for only a few weeks longer than she did — but even if it didn’t, and she stayed out of traffic, her congenital heart defect would have got her by age four or so. Soon after her recovery from parvo, we were informed that she had a heart murmur. A cardiac specialist vet diagnosed her condition as pulmonic stenosis and prescribed a beta blocker medication. We initially took a wait-and-see approach, since the severity of the condition can vary.

Bella’s stenosis proved to be pretty severe, and degenerative. Within a few years it became clear that without heart surgery, Bella would not last more than another six months or so. The vet cardiologist recommended taking her to either Dr. Chris Orton of Colorado State University Veterinary Hospital or Dr. Theresa Fossum at Texas A&M, who he said were the only two vets in the U.S. whose practices focused on the kind of surgery Bella needed. CSU was a shorter drive.

In the early morning of August 25, 2004, I took a deep breath as I watched a veterinary assistant lead Bella, her demeanor cheery as ever, through a set of double doors and away to be prepped for surgery. My dog would be undergoing an inflow occlusion, an open-heart bypass procedure in which the patient is briefly put into circulatory arrest in order for the faulty heart valve to be accessed and repaired. If that sounds a little risky, it’s because it is. At least it was in Bella’s case, given that her condition had progressed farther than one would desire for a dog undergoing this operation.  On the other hand, it was reassuring to have in the care of a surgeon who quite literally wrote the book on the procedure. In his co-authored textbook write-up on inflow occlusion, Dr. Orton put it this way:

[Inflow occlusion's] principal advantages are its simplicity and that it does not require specialized equipment… The principal disadvantages of inflow occlusion are the limited time available for cardiac surgery to be performed, the motion of the surgical field, and the unavailability of a fallback or rescue strategy should something happen to delay completion of the surgery.

Fortunately I hadn’t read that before Bella’s operation, because something did indeed happen to delay completion of the surgery.

I’d been told the surgery should be complete by sometime around noon, so I was concerned enough when no one had come out to tell me anything by 1PM. Eventually a vet student from the surgical team emerged and told me that the surgery was still in progress because Bella had experienced “a little bit of extra bleeding” in the part of the procedure leading up to the actual occlusion. It didn’t sound like good news, but the vet student’s manner was casual and unperturbed enough to keep me from freaking out. It wasn’t until sometime after 3:00 that someone emerged to inform me that Bella had come through the surgery and was headed for the recovery unit.

It turned out that the prudent understatement “a little bit of extra bleeding” could be more bluntly described as a massive hemorrhage of the pulmonary artery, through which Bella very nearly bled out and died. She had required transfusion with something like four units of blood… or maybe it was four separate transfusions, I can’t remember — Anyway, a lot of transfusing. That she hadn’t died on the table was testament to the sure-handed skill of Dr. Orton and his team, or so it seemed; I would later get the sense from him that most of all, Bella survived because of her own reservoir of grit.

By Dr. Orton’s estimate, the surgery had been 60-70% successful. Bella had been weakened by the  hemorrhaging ordeal, so the occlusion and valve repair had to be done in a smaller window of time in order to best ensure that her heart would re-start. Furthermore, he reminded me, even under the best of circumstances this surgery was a treatment of her condition rather than a cure.

“I know this is an impossible question,” I prefaced to Dr. Orton, “but if you had to hazard a guess — you know, a ballpark estimate — how much more time do you think this has bought her?”

He thought for a moment, then said, “About a year and a half to two years.”

Good enough, I thought. I’ll take it.

Five years on, Bella seems to have developed a more mature sense of her own limitations. When she was younger her playfulness was irrepressible. She would often exert herself to the point of a syncope episode — a dizzy spell in which her legs become wobbly and she lurches to one side, and in the worst instances loses her footing altogether and sometimes voids her bladder. Nowadays she seems more aware of the need to pace herself, and no longer goes full tilt to keep up with the quickest dogs in the park. She’s likelier to run a short distance with them before tailing off into a trot, then waiting to rejoin them as they circle back to their point of origin.

After her two earlier brushes with death, the few serious health hazards she’s encountered seem relatively minor through the filter of my memory. A few days after Christmas of 2007 while visiting my parents up in the Monterey area, Bella apparently ingested a pill that had eluded my father’s grasp and gone unnoticed by the baseboards. The effect on a 35-pound dog of a tablet intended for a 200-pound stroke and prostate cancer survivor was alarming, as might be expected. I quickly packed up, loaded my dazed dog into my car and headed back to LA and our regular cardiology vet. As it turned out Bella’s stupor had worn off by the time I reached Santa Maria, a little more than halfway to LA. She stood eagerly when I stopped the car and waited for me to attach her leash. I took her outside and she trotted briskly along, sniffing for pee-mail. Back in the car, she wagged hopefully when the drive-thru attendant handed me my In-n-Out Burger.

In early 2009, the vet detected a mammary mass in Bella’s underside. The possibility of breast cancer is as serious for dogs as it is for people, and the usual practice for a dog Bella’s age is to cut first and ask questions later. For Bella, however, a general anesthetic isn’t an option because it places unusual stress on the heart. Her cardiology vet and the surgeon instead devised a scheme to administer anesthesia by slowly pushing it through her IV, giving the surgeon enough time for a quick slash-and-grab (so to speak) of the shallow-lying mass. It went off without incident, and lab results later determined that the mass was non-malignant.

Bella is presently five feet to my right, sprawled across the head of my bed with her back against my pillows and her nose toward the open window. Since I don’t know her exact birthday, I have always considered the day that she found us to be a worthy alternative for celebration. As absolutely no one predicted, my girl is now nine years old. She’s still irresistibly cute, still immediately popular wherever she goes, and still just as ready to climb into your lap and give you kisses as she was the day she came out of that intersection in East LA.

In honor of the best, happiest little blonde of a doggie ever, I wish you all a Happy Bella Day.