a few weeks ago, I took my newly-adopted sweet Ellie to the vet for her first check up, and learned that she has Juvenile Gingivitis, a serious gum disease that causes painful sores and irritation in her mouth that can lead to more extreme complications years down the line. i feel like a world-class villain when my brain instantly jumps to the realm of cost, as her vet tells me this news over the phone. I am parked in the shade of a random residential street in outer southeast Portland—it is unusually warm for March, and I have the windows rolled down in my beat-up Ford Fusion, but the air still feels thick and stale as I try to breathe in, slow and deep.
Ellie’s vet is very kind as she tells me how clean her ears are, how shiny her coat is, how her eyes are beautiful & her muscles and bones are healthy—that it’s just her mouth that doesn’t match the rest of her. she lets me know that while there’s no cure for this disease (wherein an overactive immune system produces a sort of allergic reaction to one’s own teeth) Ellie will need dental cleanings every 3-4 months for the next several years, and annually after that to keep it from progressing. these cleanings will ring in at around $900 each, which i suppose is relatively cheap when you compare it to the cost of human surgeries, but which is actually Very Expensive compared to the cost of say, no surgeries. if the knot forming beneath my rib cage could speak, it would say “I told you so.”
I try not to feel angry—angry at the shelter employee I adopted her from, who mentioned nothing of this as I filled out Ellie’s adoption papers in a stuffy back cubicle; angry at myself for being selfish enough to bring a whole other innocent being into the mess of my current life; angry at God or the Universe or whatever entity is out there, All-Knowing and shit, supposedly looking out for us all. I think recently I am learning I’ve been trying not to feel angry almost my whole life.
the next morning, Ellie is running a fever, likely a reaction to the vaccines she got the day before. she sits on my chest like a hot stone as I type these sentences into my notes app one-handed, folding herself into a smaller and smaller ball, as though the ache making its way through her 6-pound-body might just give up and go away if she could make herself small enough. I recognize this sick survival mechanism. I recognize it because it lives in me too.
on many bad pain days, my cripdom is only survivable because I allow myself to disappear within it—to become hot river stone, to detach from word, from desire, from meaning. as in: this can all be happening, as long as it’s not happening to me. and when, after days or weeks or sometimes months, the pain flare cycles its way through me, when my symptoms begin to fade from roar to hum, i am allowed to be me again. only then do I allow myself to re-emerge.
this news with Ellie changes things. it puts into motion a new season of life wherein I am responsible for the survival of not one but two sick creatures. wherein I must bear witness to another beloved’s bodily ache, fear, exhaustion, and grief in close-up, while simultaneously having to contend with my own. wherein I must consider the possibility that I may not be the human who can give her all the care she is deserving of, or even scarier, the possibility that this might be exactly human I am, even if it takes all the money I have in savings to do it.
it is two weeks later as I circle back to these words from bed again, and we are officially on the other side of one surgery. I am too broke and too scared to say that I am certain I will be the one seeing her through all the rest that are to come. I look at Ellie in all her perfectness now, batting a mangled hair tie across my bedroom floor, and I feel myself putting all my cripped human stories onto her. prophesizing that her illness will be as heavy a weight on her identity as it has been on mine. fearing for her, the inescapable grief that emerges when you live in a body that requires additional care, in a society where the cost of that care is too high, or too terrifying to ask for. I don’t know if I am her forever human, but I know that I am here now. and she is here with me.
until we talk next, and in solidarity from my vessel to yours,
- Sage
❤️🩹
4ever grateful to both witness & be a part of your world, & the words that preside within it ❤️🩹