“So Handsome” by Nancy Brinton, Milpitas, CA
Pictured in Photo: A 1 year young Damian
Succumbed to Poorly Differentiated Sarcoma of the Spine at 22 months of age (5-15-98 to 3-20-00)

One Golden Moment
A friend of mine, Nancy Roberts of Logan, UT, is a puppy-raiser for Guide Dogs for the Blind. In April of 1999, she asked me if I was interested in adopting Damian, a Golden Retriever yearling. Damian was her current puppy-in-training and he was being dropped from the Guide Dogs program because of the discovery of juvenile cataracts in both eyes. Nancy explained that as his puppy-raiser she could facilitate the adoption as a “puppy raiser placement”. She explained that Guide Dogs would pay for cataract surgery, if it ever became necessary, and because of this they wanted Damian adopted by a family living in California.

My husband and I do live about an hour from Guide Dogs’ lovely San Rafael campus. We already had 4 Basenjis and my initial response to Nancy was, thanks for thinking of us but, no, we don’t need another dog. Then we began to think about it. I’d enjoyed working with our oldest basenji in AKC obedience. She was now retired and I’d hoped to have the chance to get back into the sport with someone who would enjoy it and not just do it because I wanted them to. My husband was interested in animal assisted therapy visits and Damian would certainly be good at that. We were reassured that the cataracts were small and might never mature at all. If surgery were required, Damie would have a happy and normal life afterward.

We changed our minds and began the process of adopting Damian and filled out all the paperwork. Damian was due to come back to California in the Guide Dogs van on May 18, 2000. To say that the people in Guide Dogs’ puppy-raising department were patient with us is an understatement. Some of the kindest people on earth work at Guide Dogs for the Blind. Finally, on May 20th, 5days after Damian’s first birthday, my husband and I drove to San Rafael to pick our newest family member. We were very excited. We signed the adoption contract and headed out to the intake pens in the kennel area. There he was in the first pen looking a bit confused about why he was there. We cooed and baby-talked to him through the fence and waited, sort of patiently, for a trainer to fetch him for us.

I’ve never had a dog bigger than a Basenji. Having Damian on the other end of the leash was quite different. I had to learn to balance my weight and to anticipate sudden movements. We walked around the campus a bit to let Damie get the feel of his new humans. Damie very willingly got into the crate in our van and we headed to his new home. We stopped along the way to buy some essentials, including a brand-new bed of his very own.

Damian’s introduction to the Basenji Bunch went without a hitch. When we were all finally in the house, Damian spotted the toy basket in the family room. He literally pushed his big, lovely head deep into the basket seeming to breathe in the reality of all these toys. This was his idea of heaven—a basket filled to overflowing with fleece style woobies and other toys. From that day until the time he could no longer move around, Damian emptied the basket every day and re-decorated wherever he thought a touch of fleece would improve the look of things. I never quite taught him to put away his toys.

Life with a Golden Retriever is very different than life with a Basenji. Damian was very interested in interacting with us all the time, whereas the Basenjis are a pretty self-contained, self-absorbed unit. Damie would run up and down the hallway with the fuzzy snake in his mouth enticing us to play. Our 10-year-old male Basenji, Trooper, enjoyed having Damian here and they would play often. Sometimes they just hung out in the yard together doing “guy things” while the girls were curled up on the couch inside. Damian thought both rain and the sprinklers were just fine. Muddy feet were normal and it was up to me to adjust my thinking and find ways to dry him or clean him before he came back inside. The combination of Damian and a tennis ball should be listed in the dictionary to define the word Obsession. Damian was clearly and totally obsessed with tennis balls.

Damian was polite. He would not leap up on the furniture without an invitation – unless that was part of a chase game he and Trooper were playing. He would plop his big bead along the edge of our bed in the mornings…asking to be invited up for a sleep-in snooze on weekends. We were happy to comply and we often enjoyed “family hour” on weekend mornings with all the Basenjis and Damian helping us catch another hour of sleep. His favorite position was on his back with his legs stretched to heaven.

We’d had Damian about 2 weeks when we attended a picnic/trial put on by the Norcal Golden Retriever Club. This event is practice for folks who do AKC hunt tests with their dogs. The beginners get to retrieve bumpers on the ground and in water. Damian had never been swimming. He thought retrieving a bumper on land was pretty much a good game. Retrieving one in the water was a very special experience. My husband held him as they threw the first bumper into the water. Once released, Damie walked into the water and stopped. He tilted his head and I thought I could actually see years of genetic programming kicking in. Damian leaped high out of the water and belly-flopped, smiling and swimming all the way to the bumper. He was so happy! He retrieved each bumper with complete abandon and really did not want the game to end. Retrieving birds, the activity planned for later that day, was a slightly different story. Damian did not want any smelly, dead, frozen bird in his mouth and that’s all there was to it. Hey, nobody’s perfect.

The picnic trial was followed by a summer of great fun. Damian even got to bob for hot dogs at the Golden Fun Day. He didn’t win because his strategy of drinking the water before eating the hot dogs was fairly self-defeating. He had a wonderful time with all those other Goldens. We looked forward to next year.

We like to camp in our travel trailer and there’s a favorite lake we visit. Damian wore a bright yellow life jacket and spent many hours retrieving tennis balls and playing at the water’s edge with his ball while watching the ducks from the corner of his eye. Perhaps planning a strategy to capture one for his very own? Naw, he just wanted to play.

Damian really enjoyed obedience school. He made many friends and looked forward to Tuesday night out with Mom at School. He learned quickly and really enjoyed showing off his new behaviors. I loved having him to train and play with.

In December, we learned that those small cataracts had expanded to a point where Damian had less than 20% vision in each eye. Surgery was scheduled for December 14th. Dr. Cynthia Cook of Veterinary Visions in San Mateo did a really wonderful job. Damian was a model patient. He loved everyone he met at Veterinary Visions and was good about everything. He was completely patient as I put in 8 eye drops every day. He never complained. He did, though, look really, really pathetic in that e-collar. He tolerated it patiently. By the middle of January Dr. Cook pronounced Damian’s vision back at 100% with no reason to do anything but resume our normal lives.

We had a great holiday season with our happy canine family and had resumed training and other post-surgery activities when Damian fell playing catch in the yard. He went up to catch the ball and slipped on the wet grass landing flat on his back. He got right up to resume the game, even though my husband held his own breath thinking that maybe Damie had been hurt. Didn’t appear so. The next day, Sunday, when I headed out to take Damie for our daily walk, he—very uncharacteristically—did not want to walk. We’d go a few feet and he’d stop. Not at all like my “walk Mom’s legs off” Damian. We decided that he must have hurt a knee or something and took him in to see the vet. Her x-rays showed nothing but we all thought there must be something since he was favoring one leg. We went home with Rimadyl and “take it easy” instructions. Damian got progressively worse. We went back for more x-rays. This time she took a full spinal set because Damian had become unable to urinate and seemed weak in the rear. Our vet suggested that we see a spinal specialist for a myelogram because, while her x-rays showed nothing, we all knew something was happening. On Monday, my husband connected with the spine specialist that Guide Dogs uses, Dr. Bob Fuller of Sacramento, CA. Dr. Fuller agreed to see Damian on Tuesday. He explained that if he found anything serious during the myelogram, he would go straight to surgery.

Tuesday came and during the myelogram, Dr. Fuller found a blockage between L4 and L5. He suspected bleeding or a mass. He went right in to surgery. He removed a “mass” and sent it off to pathology. Damian recovered very well from the surgery, walking gingerly that very night and able to urinate on his own. This was March 13th. We got to bring him home on Thursday. We nicknamed him ” Frankendog”. A 20” x 7” section of his beautiful deep red coat was shaved from his back. The incision was 7” long and held together by 20 staples. His spirit, though, was undaunted. He limped around the house and cradled his tennis ball or his red glow-ball between his front paws, gently rolling one back and forth. You could see him waiting to get well enough to play another game of catch. It seemed like it took forever for the pathology reports to come back. Two pathologists disagreed on whether or not the mass was a round cell tumor. While we waited for a third pathologist to render his opinion, we explored treatment methods for this kind of tumor.

Damian, who seemed so good immediately after the surgery, began to decline. He was incontinent and very distressed. If we positioned him just right, we could lift his back legs while he pulled himself up on his front legs. He would totter outside, looking back at my husband hopefully to see if a tennis ball was going to put in the air. The diagnosis of the third pathologist was worse than we imagined—a poorly differentiated sarcoma. Poorly differentiated sarcoma is classed as a primitive cancer that responds to no treatment—not chemo or radiation. We checked and double-checked with vets and oncologists. There was nothing to be done. Damian had begun to whimper when we helped him stand. He was beginning to feel discomfort. We would not and could not sentence this bright spirit to pain and suffering.

On March 20, 2000, my husband bathed and groomed Damian. We sat in the sun on the back patio and fed him his favorite things and rolled the tennis ball to him so he could nudge it with his nose. He breathed the sunny-smelling air and lolled on the warm patio enjoying the sun and the companionship of his Basenji family. Later we drove him to our favorite pizzeria and bought Damian a ¼ pie of his very own. He ate every bite before we went to the vet for the last time. Damian died very peacefully with my husband’s and my arms around him. I kissed his lovely big head and told him how grateful I was to have had him, how much we loved him, and thanked him for being ours. He was 2 months short of his second birthday. We had him 10 months exactly. It seemed like we had him for only one Golden moment.

Postscript: Despite the heartbreak of losing Damian as we did, we soon adopted another career changed dog from Guide Dogs for the Blind. Keystone is a beautiful, now 4 year old, Golden Retriever. He is a sweet, gentle, loving soul who likes every person and dog he meets. If we hadn’t had Damian, we would not have been fortunate enough to get Keystone. Damian’s legacy lives on…

     
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Succumbed to Lymphosarcoma at age three (12-13-96 to 3-9-00)
 

“Overlooking My Kingdom” by Rich Thorpe, Amherstburg, Ontario Canada
Pictured in Photo: A 6 year-7 month young Sunny [Formally—Sunny St. Lawrence]
Succumbed to Lymphosarcoma at age six (11-13-94 to 10-5-01)

“Maxx and Maggie 2” by Nancy Skoviera, Ironwood, MI
Pictured in Photo: A 3 year young Maxx
Succumbed to cancer at age three (2-11-99 to 7-5-02)

“Getting Sub-q Fluids” by Lynda Wolfe, Oak Forest, IL
Pictured in Photo: A 3 year-8 month young Flirt [Malagold Strike A Pose]
Succumbed to Lymphoma at age four (7-7-95 to 4-3-00)

“My Angel Sitting Pretty” by Michelle Feehily, Scituate, MA
Pictured in Photo: A 5 year-10 month young Bailey
Succumbed to Lymphoma at age five (11-30-96 to 10-15-02)

“The Wonderful Thing About Tigger” by Paul Ordway, Mead, WA
Pictured in Photo: A 4 year-6 month young Tigger
Succumbed to a Mast Cell Tumor at age four (4-16-95 to 11-6-99)