The weaves are really hard for Bo now and it was amazing that he got through dozens of them all weekend without any faults. Even did 24 weaves during his NAC run. Photos by Keith Highley, KH Photography, Salt Lake City, UT
Jackson, Bo and I came home a little over a week ago from our trip to the DOCNA Nationals in
Golden. Jackson has qualified for the Nationals in both of the years that we
have been going to agility trials but it was Bo’s first time to qualify, at the
age of 11. We had a wonderful time during our four days there, as we always do
at the DOCNA meets we’ve been to – time to visit with the agility friends we’ve
made, learning by watching the really good handlers and dogs, cheering on our
friends that are more at our level as they get better and better with every
meet, and making a bunch of new acquaintances from the Denver area this time.
The efforts that Jim, Laurie, Christa, and all the folks from the host club put
forth to stage such a complicated event and deal with the surprises that popped
up never ceased to amaze me and, as always at the relatively few DOCNA meets in
which we’ve participated, I am always, always impressed by everyone’s support
for all the other competitors and everyone’s willingness to pitch in at every
turn so that the meet can run as smoothly as possible. Thank you, everyone, we
had a great time.
I thought that Jackson and Bo did really well considering our level of experience; they had
good finishes in their events, got some ribbons, and by and large I was able to avoid messing up
their runs and causing them to fault. But whether they did well or not was not really what this
particular trip to the Nationals was about for me. Although I was pretty sure
that Jackson could qualify again this year, I did not think that I would be
bringing both dogs to the meet, let alone that both would be competing…
Bo and I never really planned to participate in agility competitions, although we have taken
classes off and on for a number of years and enjoyed doing it together. I only started doing agility
with Bo when he was about 2 years old because I had unintentionally ended up with this
young, very strong, and pretty large dog that I desperately needed to exercise
to an insane degree and who really needed, well, a job. Bo and his brother were
the last of a litter that was abandoned at about six weeks when the family took
the mother dog and just moved away; the puppies were left on the farm to fend
for themselves and a couple of months later, the last two were rescued by the
Roice Hurst shelter in Grand Junction. After surviving on their own for months
they were completely un-socialized and pretty much feral, and Roice Hurst
regarded Bo as an unadoptable dog who would just safely spend his years at their
no-kill shelter. I happened to visit that shelter in November 2001 and Bo was
the first dog that I saw there. He was scary and pretty crazy looking, jumping
to the top of the chain link enclosure, barking his head off, and snarling /
aggressive to anyone who dared walk by, especially children. You couldn’t walk
him, because he would tear loose and run back to the building. Just a lovely
dog….
But he looked like no other dog I’d ever seen, and he had this look in his eyes. He never took his
eyes off of me that day, even when dinner was served and every other dog was face down in their bowls –
he just sat there in his cage, staring me down, his eyes always following me. I
left that day, but I woke up in the middle of the night thinking of him and,
irrationally and without thinking it through at all, at 6 AM the next morning I
was making the two hour drive back to Grand Junction to get this dog.
I have had 11 wonderful years with Bo, but they were not without their challenges early on.
He wouldn’t get in a car and had a great fear of any enclosed space, he wouldn’t go into my house
when we got there, he was totally without a clue as to what the purpose of housebreaking
was, and – remarkably for a strong, athletic dog – he had absolutely no physical
coordination because he had never really learned to do anything. He was
about 6 months old and in the process of growing from the Border Collie size dog
that I wanted and thought I had adopted, to the wolf size dog that he became.
He could be sitting on the floor and do a sitting jump up onto a kitchen counter
if he saw something he wanted, but he couldn’t catch a tennis ball without it
bouncing off his head and when he tried to chase a Frisbee he ran into trees or
posts. He kept losing his balance and falling on his chin when we tried to hike
through a boulder field. The next summer I found a woman who offered agility
classes and we signed up, and I started hiking with him at least once a
week.
Shortly after I got Bo, a new challenge appeared. It turned out that he had been born with an
eye condition called viral keratitis, a herpes-like virus that has no cure and that usually causes
blindness within a year or two. The ophthalmologist suggested that I move to
sea level as the virus is triggered by high levels of UV, but instead we started
on a program of eye meds and wearing Doggles and managing his exposure to UV,
and I resigned myself to having a dog that would someday be unable to see. But
it was too late to change my mind, he was my dog now and I loved him. We have
been very fortunate - 10 years later and the early damage has been reversed, to
the point where his eyes have been perfectly clear and functional for a long,
long time. And he’s got the coolest collection of Doggles…
It took about three years and constant de-sensitizing efforts to make him feel pretty comfortable
around most people, but I now had an incredible athlete of a dog. He could hike all day, race me
down the mountain through powder while I skied and yet always knew where I was
going to turn and where he needed to be, accompany me on mountain bike trips of
practically any length, and became an absolutely wonderful and skilled fishing
companion. Bo used to love to race along side of me when on bike rides - one
time on the mountain above Snowmass, I was going downhill at 30 MPH by the
speedometer, Bo was running alongside in a beautiful full gallop, and he looked
over at me as if to say “bring it on”, and then just put it into overdrive and
dusted me. I have no idea how fast he was capable of running, but it was faster
than I could ride a bike. For many years, we did everything together, as there
was little he could not do and he had terrible separation anxiety.
When I got Jackson 4 years ago this month, we resumed agility classes the following summer as
I thought I now had a full-fledged agility dog on my hands. But one that that was at that point a
crazy, 220 volt Border Collie puppy…
Sometime during that summer our agility instructor told me that there was going to be an agility
meet in Grand Junction in a few weeks; I had never seen a real agility course or meet, so took the boys
to go watch and “see how it was done”. That was ZDD’s DOCNA meet in 2010, and
I’d have to say that our visit to watch a meet has certainly changed all of our
lives. Neither of my dogs had ever tried anything like a DOCNA beginner course,
but the ZDD people were so friendly and encouraging that over the winter we
decided to give it a try at the 2011 Moab trial and registered with DOCNA. I
knew that Bo was confident with all the skills and obstacles, but we didn’t have
much experience really running courses yet, and Jackson only made up in energy
what he lacked in attentiveness and confidence. But Jackson was great fun to
play agility with, and he really loved the time with me alone. Jackson had
learned most of what he knew about agility from being forced to watch Bo in the
ring every Saturday during Jackson’s adolescent year, so by the time he actually
started agility at age 2, it seemed he knew what all the contacts and obstacles
were all about already and he was a quick learner.
We went to our first meet in Moab and did probably about like all newbies, brief moments
of moderate competence separated by far more frequent instances of my getting completely lost midway
through the course or my dogs deciding to take the nearest tunnel or jump, regardless of
where I was going. But it was fun, and I knew we’d do another. The only thing
that was disturbing was that Bo, who had never seen a fence he couldn’t
jump effortlessly, had a fault or two on every run from knocking down jump bars
and did not seem to have anywhere near the speed or jumping ability that he had
always had. These were only 16” jumps and it made no sense. I chalked it up to
us doing this new thing in a new place, but was a little worried when a couple
of experienced competitors said that they had seen that his right rear leg was
the one always knocking the bar.
After we got home from the meet I noticed that he still seemed a little stiff, and so took him to the vet.
X-rays were taken and nothing seemed unusual except there was a shadow that the vet thought might
be a little bone chip. Range of motion, tightness of the knee and other joints
all seemed fine, no arthritis, so the vet said give him some rest and
anti-inflammatories, he was pretty sure he’d be fine in a few weeks.
We competed one more time in 2011, at the May event In Farmington, and Bo got his first and
only Q (in a beginner standard agility run), but Bo’s gait and running got worse over the next few months, to
the point where I had to stop his bigger activities like bike rides and long
hikes in the mountains above treeline. No more agility after those 2 meets.
Many trips to the vet…
By August, it was clear that he was becoming
lame and by early September I panicked. One specialist after another,
restricted activities, more x-rays and examinations, more theories as to what
was causing his lameness, but nothing looked wrong with the joints or muscles or
skeleton, and I could not find any more specialists locally who might be able to
diagnose the problem. From previous experience, I knew that I had to get him to
the Veterinary Teaching Hospital at Colorado State because they had all the
disciplines in one place and I felt that was the best chance to get this
diagnosed. By that time, he could hardly walk across the street to pee.
The best guess of the vets at the time was
that it was some unknown type of neurological problem, which scared me in its
vagueness and uncertainty, or perhaps an orthopedic issue that needed better
imaging and more skilled diagnostics to find. But, instead, when the CSU doctors
came back into the room late in the day to tell me that they now knew what was
wrong with Bo’s leg, my excitement that after 7 long months we finally at least
had a diagnosis very quickly ended when they introduced me to a new doctor, an
oncologist. I went to pieces that very moment, but sort of managed to hear that
Bo had a very large tumor throughout his pelvis area that enveloped his sciatic
nerve, and there were limited treatment options. I did not know if I would have
the strength to even make it out of the hospital that evening, but I carried my
wolf dog to the truck and went to the hotel to cry and to think over the
options.
There were three options. A radical hemi
pelvectomy, or something like that, where they could remove the cancer by
cutting off his leg and half his pelvis. Or a series of radiation treatments
over the next couple of months that might shrink the tumor and reduce the
swelling / inflammation and buy him some time, perhaps a few months. And the
last option was to use medications, perhaps with some radiation treatments, just
palliative care to make him more comfortable during what they were implying
would be his final months. I did not hear any options that gave me any hope at
all.
Lots of questions about the risks and possible
outcomes of each, lots of anguish as I drove back to Carbondale the next day
about what I should do, several discussions with the doctors, but we finally
settled on an intensive, closely spaced series of radiation treatments, the
sooner the better. So we went home, unpacked and re-packed, and left again to
go back to CSU for awhile. A little more than a week later, we were all headed
home; the oncology team at CSU said that they had done everything they could and
we’d just have to see whether the radiation would shrink the tumor in a
beneficial way over the next while.
The cancer was not going to go away, they made
that pretty clear. It was a nerve sheath tumor and the only way to completely
remove the cancer would involve severing the sciatic nerve completely by surgery
or radiation, in the process rendering the leg useless which would in turn
require amputation. One afternoon while waiting for Bo to come out of
anesthesia, Dr. Lynn and I were sitting in her office; we were looking at her
computer model of how they program the computers and machine to move and
position 6 guns in a complex spatial and time sequence to precisely dose the
tumor without damaging the adjacent spine, colon, and other nearby organs while
Bo’s whole body is marked with targets and immobilized in the same position, day
after day. I finally had the chance to ask her, without her having to temper
her comments in any way, about what I could really expect for an outcome and
what the next weeks or months would be like and how this last part of Bo’s life
was likely to go. She said that I could expect a pretty good recovery for
awhile, that he should have a lot less pain until the cancer starts growing
back, and that his quality of life would actually be pretty good, at least for
awhile. I asked her what that meant, and I could tell that she saw the
disappointment in my face when she said that a good quality of life would be
with little or no pain and able to go on walks. For Bo, and for the two of us,
that would be a big, big adjustment. I would be happy just to have those eyes
staring at me for awhile longer, but he would likely have just 6 or 8 months and
she prepped me to accept that our activities were over. I had told her along
the way, of course, that this all came to light when we ran in our very first
agility meet earlier in the year, and she commented that unfortunately his days
of doing agility were certainly over. After living with this dog for ten years
and seeing how far he had come from his very unpromising start in life, the only
thing that I could think of to say was “I wouldn’t bet against this dog…”
So we went home the next week, just before
Thanksgiving 2011, into the start of a winter filled with uncertainty and
unknowns. I was really encouraged when the effects of the radiation assault
started to subside in about a week or so and he started to walk again. We
resumed his acupuncture treatments with Cindy Wallis once he felt better, and
added some homeopathic components to the pain and anti-inflammatory meds from
CSU. About a week after the radiation, I shot a video of him trotting for a
short distance down our driveway, something I hadn’t seen since September. At
that point, the doctors told me that “he’s got to work that leg regularly and
often, and you can’t hurt him, just stop when he’s tired”. We kept doing a
little more and a little more. Two weeks after radiation, he was on his regular
walks of 1 – 2 miles, albeit more slowly now. The next week he ran after a
tennis ball.
Just four weeks after radiation, on December
17th, we went to Grand Junction for a ZDD club
practice, and Bo ran a full course, made all the contacts and all the jumps,
even though the jumps were just set at 8”. I sent the video to Dr. Lynn and
reminded her to not bet against this dog.
I really only had two goals for our time
together, but neither of them involved agility. The first was that I hoped that
he would be with me long enough that we would be able to go on at least one more
hike together, maybe in the spring. The second goal was that, at least one more
time, I wanted to take him cross country skiing because he loved that so much
and he had so much fun in the deep snow. Those were my only goals, as I thought
we were about out of time. I never had a goal that he would do agility again,
but I’d let him fool around on the course if he felt up to it when I took
Jackson to practices or classes.
By January, Bo was able to go with me on a
snowshoe event that our shelter was putting on at the Sunlight ski area, about a
1,000 vertical feet up and then down. I was astounded. By late January, we
were hiking on the snow and doing up to 4 or 5 miles regularly. By February, we
were going on ski tours, and we continued to do that all winter.
In March, we went to the DOCNA meet in Moab
again and, just so he wouldn’t annoy me all weekend by barking in his crate when
I wouldn’t let him run, I signed him up for a beginner standard agility run and
one more run each day so he’d have something to do. I figured there was no way
he would actually complete a course, but he’d be happy and I’d be ecstatic to
see him out there even if we had to walk off part way through or scratch from
events; after all, he had only been to competitions a couple of times, both of
them at age 10 plus and with the unknown cancer already causing him significant
pain, so it wasn’t like I exactly had performance expectations. None of these
people would ever get to see the Bo that I knew run at a beautiful full gallop,
none of them would see Bo bashing those skinny weave poles and slamming teeters
authoritatively, they’d never see how fast he used to run and how easily he
jumped for a big dog. But if he wanted to play a little, I’d be happy to pay an
entry fee or two. I was just thrilled that we’d been able to do some outdoor
stuff over the winter, and that he seemed happy every day.
So we went to Moab. His first Standard course
on Saturday went pretty well, a couple of dropped bars but he actually finished
his course. Then he barked to tell me he wanted to run his Snakes and Ladders
(which I had chosen because it’s all on the ground) so we did, and that went
pretty well. I was thrilled! Jackson had a bunch of Q’s that day and so we
went to the motel thinking that this whole trip was already a huge success –
Bogey had entered an agility meet and had legitimately run 2 events. I sent an
email to Dr. Lynn telling her that she had most definitively lost her bet.
But on Sunday it all changed. Bo ran in two
events, Standard and the North American Challenge, not because I thought he
could do the NAC at Intern level, but because it was most like the Standard
course that he was familiar with and so he’d be comfortable. This day, things
did not go according to plan or according to realistic expectations. In the
morning NAC, Bo proceeded to qualify for the Nationals in what was probably his
second NAC run ever, just a little over three months after his radiation and
being unable to walk across the street. Although he just barely made time, he
ran totally clean and had no faults. He qualified!
Before I could get over the shock and embrace
the significance of what he had done, he went out in the next event and did it
again! Another clean run in Standard for a Q, over 3 yards per second and some
20 seconds under time. Two clean runs in one day, one above his pay grade at
Intern level!
By the next month, Bo was having more up and
down days and there were periods where he seemed to struggle with walking again.
He had definitely peaked, it seemed, and I thought that it was probably the
inevitable time when the cancer was coming back. We had had a great time of it
for awhile, but now there were days when a long walk or time at agility was too
much. We just celebrated what we had that day, and I stopped worrying about
what I thought I knew the future to be. We made plans to go to Christa’s event
in Farmington in April, more because Jackson was really on a roll at Moab and I
had thought he was ready for a good year, and for the good company of the people
who go to that event and who I now regarded as very important friends. It had
been a tough few months for both Bo and me, and I thought a weekend with dog
folks seemed like just what the doctor ordered.
I only entered Bo in a couple of Standard
Agility events, one each day, and we did Trigility to fill out a team, but I had
thought he wasn’t up for much. I spoke to the judge beforehand and let her know
that Bo wasn’t in pain or risking injury, but that I might walk off if I thought
it best for him to not finish.
On Saturday, he missed time by less than a
second but ran clean at his full jump height. Certainly better than I had
expected.
On Sunday, he ran what would now be his fourth
consecutive clean run at his full jump height. He was comfortably under time,
so he got a Q, and therefore he had now earned his one and only agility title,
his Beginner Standard. All of those Q’s when he was over 10 years old. With
cancer. With a leg that didn’t want to work some days. But when he got to the
start line, he knew this was his job and he forgot about his limp.
There were a lot of tears of joy in that arena
on that Sunday, and when Christa finished her scoring and walked over to me and
Bo with that big title ribbon and a hug… well, she and I got to share a moment
that was somewhere between improbable and impossible and I will never forget how
happy I was for both me and Bo right then. Although I sent her another email, I
don’t think Dr. Lynn fully understood yet by what a large, large margin she had
lost that bet…
The day after the trial, we headed back to CSU
for another MRI. It confirmed what I guess I had already been shown in other
ways – the cancer was much smaller, and now appeared to have margins from his
vital organs. The radiation had been, medically speaking, a rather large
success. Although he was having good days and bad days, he wasn’t done quite
yet.
So that is how we got to make our trip to
Golden. I had known that Jackson would be going to compete as he also qualified
early in the year, but in all honesty I had expected to be going to Golden with
a dedication to forcing myself to enjoy my time with Jackson in order to honor
the memory of a great, great dog that I had shared so many years with and that I
sorely missed. Instead, I was now packing up both dogs and preparing for
a very, very busy weekend of having to prep two dogs who would be running almost
back-to-back in the same class, with very different needs and abilities. I was
so thrilled to have this problem, I can’t tell you.
Bo and I had quite a few months between the
Spring trials and the Nationals in late September, and it was never certain
whether his health and abilities would actually allow him to compete at
Nationals. Nobody could ever take away from him the fact that he had, this one
time, qualified to go to Nationals, but it was a long summer of daily activity
intended to keep him in the best shape possible and just see what happened.
Every day that cancer didn’t win was a victory for Bo and me, and I can honestly
say that we didn’t waste any of those days, they were all celebrated. It was a
week before the trial when I finally let myself say out loud that all three of
us were going to Golden, that Bo would run. Dr. Lynn said she’d be there, she
wouldn’t miss this.
Obviously, the point of going to Golden with
Bo was not to win ribbons or see if he could compete in all those events at
Intern level. That he completed all six of the courses that he ran, that he
opened the weekend with a perfectly clean run in Friday’s Intern Standard
Agility, that he only had about 4 or 5 dropped bars all weekend and those were
his only course faults, even the medals and ribbons that he won for regional and
national finishes in the NAC, those were all just amazing, unexpected things to
celebrate and enjoy. Most of his runs were slow, and competing for 4 days was a
lot to ask, but on Sunday afternoon this remarkable dog dug deep and willed
himself up and over the A frame one last time and I could hear what sounded like
everyone at the trial applauding and cheering him on – he had done it, and he
ran clean from there to the finish.
For me, the highlight and the thing that I
will remember forever was simply the six times that weekend that I got to fetch
my companion of 11 years, work on his leg for awhile to warm him up and get the
nerve responding, and then walk together with my buddy to the start line and
think “we’re at Nationals!!” To think of how amazing it was just for the two of
us to be there together and hear the announcer say “go” at least this one time.
It was very, very special.
I have to thank both of you, Jim and Mary Kay,
as there were many times during the months leading up to the Nationals when I
didn’t know if he would make it, when my hopes seemed totally unrealistic and I
feared that we would disappoint the people coming to watch. All during those
times, Jim’s regular comments to me from DOCNA were that Bo had earned this and
that if he was physically up to it, at any jump height, he would be welcome to
come to Golden and run to any extent that I thought right. That encouragement
and support meant a lot and kept in the forefront of my thoughts that the
purpose of this event and of DOCNA agility was to celebrate and enjoy our time
with our dogs, simple as that.
In fact, I believe that Bo’s participation in
DOCNA meets this year has significantly contributed to his quality of life and
his drive to live and play. Although we had never been “serious” agility
competitors and had barely started competing, I found that since his cancer
treatments our going to the agility practices with ZDD and weekends at the meets
actually seemed to be more important to him than ever before, as shown by his
new-found habit of barking non-stop in his crate until I let him do one more
run. And on Sunday afternoon in Golden, after the meet was over and everyone
was packing up to go home, I listened as my dog Bo sat and barked his head off,
wanting to do that one more run.
Thank you both. And thank you to Cindi and
Terri and Donna and all the other understanding judges, and all of our new
agility friends. I am forever grateful for what DOCNA has given the two of
us.
Bill, Bo and
Jackson
Golden. Jackson has qualified for the Nationals in both of the years that we
have been going to agility trials but it was Bo’s first time to qualify, at the
age of 11. We had a wonderful time during our four days there, as we always do
at the DOCNA meets we’ve been to – time to visit with the agility friends we’ve
made, learning by watching the really good handlers and dogs, cheering on our
friends that are more at our level as they get better and better with every
meet, and making a bunch of new acquaintances from the Denver area this time.
The efforts that Jim, Laurie, Christa, and all the folks from the host club put
forth to stage such a complicated event and deal with the surprises that popped
up never ceased to amaze me and, as always at the relatively few DOCNA meets in
which we’ve participated, I am always, always impressed by everyone’s support
for all the other competitors and everyone’s willingness to pitch in at every
turn so that the meet can run as smoothly as possible. Thank you, everyone, we
had a great time.
I thought that Jackson and Bo did really well considering our level of experience; they had
good finishes in their events, got some ribbons, and by and large I was able to avoid messing up
their runs and causing them to fault. But whether they did well or not was not really what this
particular trip to the Nationals was about for me. Although I was pretty sure
that Jackson could qualify again this year, I did not think that I would be
bringing both dogs to the meet, let alone that both would be competing…
Bo and I never really planned to participate in agility competitions, although we have taken
classes off and on for a number of years and enjoyed doing it together. I only started doing agility
with Bo when he was about 2 years old because I had unintentionally ended up with this
young, very strong, and pretty large dog that I desperately needed to exercise
to an insane degree and who really needed, well, a job. Bo and his brother were
the last of a litter that was abandoned at about six weeks when the family took
the mother dog and just moved away; the puppies were left on the farm to fend
for themselves and a couple of months later, the last two were rescued by the
Roice Hurst shelter in Grand Junction. After surviving on their own for months
they were completely un-socialized and pretty much feral, and Roice Hurst
regarded Bo as an unadoptable dog who would just safely spend his years at their
no-kill shelter. I happened to visit that shelter in November 2001 and Bo was
the first dog that I saw there. He was scary and pretty crazy looking, jumping
to the top of the chain link enclosure, barking his head off, and snarling /
aggressive to anyone who dared walk by, especially children. You couldn’t walk
him, because he would tear loose and run back to the building. Just a lovely
dog….
But he looked like no other dog I’d ever seen, and he had this look in his eyes. He never took his
eyes off of me that day, even when dinner was served and every other dog was face down in their bowls –
he just sat there in his cage, staring me down, his eyes always following me. I
left that day, but I woke up in the middle of the night thinking of him and,
irrationally and without thinking it through at all, at 6 AM the next morning I
was making the two hour drive back to Grand Junction to get this dog.
I have had 11 wonderful years with Bo, but they were not without their challenges early on.
He wouldn’t get in a car and had a great fear of any enclosed space, he wouldn’t go into my house
when we got there, he was totally without a clue as to what the purpose of housebreaking
was, and – remarkably for a strong, athletic dog – he had absolutely no physical
coordination because he had never really learned to do anything. He was
about 6 months old and in the process of growing from the Border Collie size dog
that I wanted and thought I had adopted, to the wolf size dog that he became.
He could be sitting on the floor and do a sitting jump up onto a kitchen counter
if he saw something he wanted, but he couldn’t catch a tennis ball without it
bouncing off his head and when he tried to chase a Frisbee he ran into trees or
posts. He kept losing his balance and falling on his chin when we tried to hike
through a boulder field. The next summer I found a woman who offered agility
classes and we signed up, and I started hiking with him at least once a
week.
Shortly after I got Bo, a new challenge appeared. It turned out that he had been born with an
eye condition called viral keratitis, a herpes-like virus that has no cure and that usually causes
blindness within a year or two. The ophthalmologist suggested that I move to
sea level as the virus is triggered by high levels of UV, but instead we started
on a program of eye meds and wearing Doggles and managing his exposure to UV,
and I resigned myself to having a dog that would someday be unable to see. But
it was too late to change my mind, he was my dog now and I loved him. We have
been very fortunate - 10 years later and the early damage has been reversed, to
the point where his eyes have been perfectly clear and functional for a long,
long time. And he’s got the coolest collection of Doggles…
It took about three years and constant de-sensitizing efforts to make him feel pretty comfortable
around most people, but I now had an incredible athlete of a dog. He could hike all day, race me
down the mountain through powder while I skied and yet always knew where I was
going to turn and where he needed to be, accompany me on mountain bike trips of
practically any length, and became an absolutely wonderful and skilled fishing
companion. Bo used to love to race along side of me when on bike rides - one
time on the mountain above Snowmass, I was going downhill at 30 MPH by the
speedometer, Bo was running alongside in a beautiful full gallop, and he looked
over at me as if to say “bring it on”, and then just put it into overdrive and
dusted me. I have no idea how fast he was capable of running, but it was faster
than I could ride a bike. For many years, we did everything together, as there
was little he could not do and he had terrible separation anxiety.
When I got Jackson 4 years ago this month, we resumed agility classes the following summer as
I thought I now had a full-fledged agility dog on my hands. But one that that was at that point a
crazy, 220 volt Border Collie puppy…
Sometime during that summer our agility instructor told me that there was going to be an agility
meet in Grand Junction in a few weeks; I had never seen a real agility course or meet, so took the boys
to go watch and “see how it was done”. That was ZDD’s DOCNA meet in 2010, and
I’d have to say that our visit to watch a meet has certainly changed all of our
lives. Neither of my dogs had ever tried anything like a DOCNA beginner course,
but the ZDD people were so friendly and encouraging that over the winter we
decided to give it a try at the 2011 Moab trial and registered with DOCNA. I
knew that Bo was confident with all the skills and obstacles, but we didn’t have
much experience really running courses yet, and Jackson only made up in energy
what he lacked in attentiveness and confidence. But Jackson was great fun to
play agility with, and he really loved the time with me alone. Jackson had
learned most of what he knew about agility from being forced to watch Bo in the
ring every Saturday during Jackson’s adolescent year, so by the time he actually
started agility at age 2, it seemed he knew what all the contacts and obstacles
were all about already and he was a quick learner.
We went to our first meet in Moab and did probably about like all newbies, brief moments
of moderate competence separated by far more frequent instances of my getting completely lost midway
through the course or my dogs deciding to take the nearest tunnel or jump, regardless of
where I was going. But it was fun, and I knew we’d do another. The only thing
that was disturbing was that Bo, who had never seen a fence he couldn’t
jump effortlessly, had a fault or two on every run from knocking down jump bars
and did not seem to have anywhere near the speed or jumping ability that he had
always had. These were only 16” jumps and it made no sense. I chalked it up to
us doing this new thing in a new place, but was a little worried when a couple
of experienced competitors said that they had seen that his right rear leg was
the one always knocking the bar.
After we got home from the meet I noticed that he still seemed a little stiff, and so took him to the vet.
X-rays were taken and nothing seemed unusual except there was a shadow that the vet thought might
be a little bone chip. Range of motion, tightness of the knee and other joints
all seemed fine, no arthritis, so the vet said give him some rest and
anti-inflammatories, he was pretty sure he’d be fine in a few weeks.
We competed one more time in 2011, at the May event In Farmington, and Bo got his first and
only Q (in a beginner standard agility run), but Bo’s gait and running got worse over the next few months, to
the point where I had to stop his bigger activities like bike rides and long
hikes in the mountains above treeline. No more agility after those 2 meets.
Many trips to the vet…
By August, it was clear that he was becoming
lame and by early September I panicked. One specialist after another,
restricted activities, more x-rays and examinations, more theories as to what
was causing his lameness, but nothing looked wrong with the joints or muscles or
skeleton, and I could not find any more specialists locally who might be able to
diagnose the problem. From previous experience, I knew that I had to get him to
the Veterinary Teaching Hospital at Colorado State because they had all the
disciplines in one place and I felt that was the best chance to get this
diagnosed. By that time, he could hardly walk across the street to pee.
The best guess of the vets at the time was
that it was some unknown type of neurological problem, which scared me in its
vagueness and uncertainty, or perhaps an orthopedic issue that needed better
imaging and more skilled diagnostics to find. But, instead, when the CSU doctors
came back into the room late in the day to tell me that they now knew what was
wrong with Bo’s leg, my excitement that after 7 long months we finally at least
had a diagnosis very quickly ended when they introduced me to a new doctor, an
oncologist. I went to pieces that very moment, but sort of managed to hear that
Bo had a very large tumor throughout his pelvis area that enveloped his sciatic
nerve, and there were limited treatment options. I did not know if I would have
the strength to even make it out of the hospital that evening, but I carried my
wolf dog to the truck and went to the hotel to cry and to think over the
options.
There were three options. A radical hemi
pelvectomy, or something like that, where they could remove the cancer by
cutting off his leg and half his pelvis. Or a series of radiation treatments
over the next couple of months that might shrink the tumor and reduce the
swelling / inflammation and buy him some time, perhaps a few months. And the
last option was to use medications, perhaps with some radiation treatments, just
palliative care to make him more comfortable during what they were implying
would be his final months. I did not hear any options that gave me any hope at
all.
Lots of questions about the risks and possible
outcomes of each, lots of anguish as I drove back to Carbondale the next day
about what I should do, several discussions with the doctors, but we finally
settled on an intensive, closely spaced series of radiation treatments, the
sooner the better. So we went home, unpacked and re-packed, and left again to
go back to CSU for awhile. A little more than a week later, we were all headed
home; the oncology team at CSU said that they had done everything they could and
we’d just have to see whether the radiation would shrink the tumor in a
beneficial way over the next while.
The cancer was not going to go away, they made
that pretty clear. It was a nerve sheath tumor and the only way to completely
remove the cancer would involve severing the sciatic nerve completely by surgery
or radiation, in the process rendering the leg useless which would in turn
require amputation. One afternoon while waiting for Bo to come out of
anesthesia, Dr. Lynn and I were sitting in her office; we were looking at her
computer model of how they program the computers and machine to move and
position 6 guns in a complex spatial and time sequence to precisely dose the
tumor without damaging the adjacent spine, colon, and other nearby organs while
Bo’s whole body is marked with targets and immobilized in the same position, day
after day. I finally had the chance to ask her, without her having to temper
her comments in any way, about what I could really expect for an outcome and
what the next weeks or months would be like and how this last part of Bo’s life
was likely to go. She said that I could expect a pretty good recovery for
awhile, that he should have a lot less pain until the cancer starts growing
back, and that his quality of life would actually be pretty good, at least for
awhile. I asked her what that meant, and I could tell that she saw the
disappointment in my face when she said that a good quality of life would be
with little or no pain and able to go on walks. For Bo, and for the two of us,
that would be a big, big adjustment. I would be happy just to have those eyes
staring at me for awhile longer, but he would likely have just 6 or 8 months and
she prepped me to accept that our activities were over. I had told her along
the way, of course, that this all came to light when we ran in our very first
agility meet earlier in the year, and she commented that unfortunately his days
of doing agility were certainly over. After living with this dog for ten years
and seeing how far he had come from his very unpromising start in life, the only
thing that I could think of to say was “I wouldn’t bet against this dog…”
So we went home the next week, just before
Thanksgiving 2011, into the start of a winter filled with uncertainty and
unknowns. I was really encouraged when the effects of the radiation assault
started to subside in about a week or so and he started to walk again. We
resumed his acupuncture treatments with Cindy Wallis once he felt better, and
added some homeopathic components to the pain and anti-inflammatory meds from
CSU. About a week after the radiation, I shot a video of him trotting for a
short distance down our driveway, something I hadn’t seen since September. At
that point, the doctors told me that “he’s got to work that leg regularly and
often, and you can’t hurt him, just stop when he’s tired”. We kept doing a
little more and a little more. Two weeks after radiation, he was on his regular
walks of 1 – 2 miles, albeit more slowly now. The next week he ran after a
tennis ball.
Just four weeks after radiation, on December
17th, we went to Grand Junction for a ZDD club
practice, and Bo ran a full course, made all the contacts and all the jumps,
even though the jumps were just set at 8”. I sent the video to Dr. Lynn and
reminded her to not bet against this dog.
I really only had two goals for our time
together, but neither of them involved agility. The first was that I hoped that
he would be with me long enough that we would be able to go on at least one more
hike together, maybe in the spring. The second goal was that, at least one more
time, I wanted to take him cross country skiing because he loved that so much
and he had so much fun in the deep snow. Those were my only goals, as I thought
we were about out of time. I never had a goal that he would do agility again,
but I’d let him fool around on the course if he felt up to it when I took
Jackson to practices or classes.
By January, Bo was able to go with me on a
snowshoe event that our shelter was putting on at the Sunlight ski area, about a
1,000 vertical feet up and then down. I was astounded. By late January, we
were hiking on the snow and doing up to 4 or 5 miles regularly. By February, we
were going on ski tours, and we continued to do that all winter.
In March, we went to the DOCNA meet in Moab
again and, just so he wouldn’t annoy me all weekend by barking in his crate when
I wouldn’t let him run, I signed him up for a beginner standard agility run and
one more run each day so he’d have something to do. I figured there was no way
he would actually complete a course, but he’d be happy and I’d be ecstatic to
see him out there even if we had to walk off part way through or scratch from
events; after all, he had only been to competitions a couple of times, both of
them at age 10 plus and with the unknown cancer already causing him significant
pain, so it wasn’t like I exactly had performance expectations. None of these
people would ever get to see the Bo that I knew run at a beautiful full gallop,
none of them would see Bo bashing those skinny weave poles and slamming teeters
authoritatively, they’d never see how fast he used to run and how easily he
jumped for a big dog. But if he wanted to play a little, I’d be happy to pay an
entry fee or two. I was just thrilled that we’d been able to do some outdoor
stuff over the winter, and that he seemed happy every day.
So we went to Moab. His first Standard course
on Saturday went pretty well, a couple of dropped bars but he actually finished
his course. Then he barked to tell me he wanted to run his Snakes and Ladders
(which I had chosen because it’s all on the ground) so we did, and that went
pretty well. I was thrilled! Jackson had a bunch of Q’s that day and so we
went to the motel thinking that this whole trip was already a huge success –
Bogey had entered an agility meet and had legitimately run 2 events. I sent an
email to Dr. Lynn telling her that she had most definitively lost her bet.
But on Sunday it all changed. Bo ran in two
events, Standard and the North American Challenge, not because I thought he
could do the NAC at Intern level, but because it was most like the Standard
course that he was familiar with and so he’d be comfortable. This day, things
did not go according to plan or according to realistic expectations. In the
morning NAC, Bo proceeded to qualify for the Nationals in what was probably his
second NAC run ever, just a little over three months after his radiation and
being unable to walk across the street. Although he just barely made time, he
ran totally clean and had no faults. He qualified!
Before I could get over the shock and embrace
the significance of what he had done, he went out in the next event and did it
again! Another clean run in Standard for a Q, over 3 yards per second and some
20 seconds under time. Two clean runs in one day, one above his pay grade at
Intern level!
By the next month, Bo was having more up and
down days and there were periods where he seemed to struggle with walking again.
He had definitely peaked, it seemed, and I thought that it was probably the
inevitable time when the cancer was coming back. We had had a great time of it
for awhile, but now there were days when a long walk or time at agility was too
much. We just celebrated what we had that day, and I stopped worrying about
what I thought I knew the future to be. We made plans to go to Christa’s event
in Farmington in April, more because Jackson was really on a roll at Moab and I
had thought he was ready for a good year, and for the good company of the people
who go to that event and who I now regarded as very important friends. It had
been a tough few months for both Bo and me, and I thought a weekend with dog
folks seemed like just what the doctor ordered.
I only entered Bo in a couple of Standard
Agility events, one each day, and we did Trigility to fill out a team, but I had
thought he wasn’t up for much. I spoke to the judge beforehand and let her know
that Bo wasn’t in pain or risking injury, but that I might walk off if I thought
it best for him to not finish.
On Saturday, he missed time by less than a
second but ran clean at his full jump height. Certainly better than I had
expected.
On Sunday, he ran what would now be his fourth
consecutive clean run at his full jump height. He was comfortably under time,
so he got a Q, and therefore he had now earned his one and only agility title,
his Beginner Standard. All of those Q’s when he was over 10 years old. With
cancer. With a leg that didn’t want to work some days. But when he got to the
start line, he knew this was his job and he forgot about his limp.
There were a lot of tears of joy in that arena
on that Sunday, and when Christa finished her scoring and walked over to me and
Bo with that big title ribbon and a hug… well, she and I got to share a moment
that was somewhere between improbable and impossible and I will never forget how
happy I was for both me and Bo right then. Although I sent her another email, I
don’t think Dr. Lynn fully understood yet by what a large, large margin she had
lost that bet…
The day after the trial, we headed back to CSU
for another MRI. It confirmed what I guess I had already been shown in other
ways – the cancer was much smaller, and now appeared to have margins from his
vital organs. The radiation had been, medically speaking, a rather large
success. Although he was having good days and bad days, he wasn’t done quite
yet.
So that is how we got to make our trip to
Golden. I had known that Jackson would be going to compete as he also qualified
early in the year, but in all honesty I had expected to be going to Golden with
a dedication to forcing myself to enjoy my time with Jackson in order to honor
the memory of a great, great dog that I had shared so many years with and that I
sorely missed. Instead, I was now packing up both dogs and preparing for
a very, very busy weekend of having to prep two dogs who would be running almost
back-to-back in the same class, with very different needs and abilities. I was
so thrilled to have this problem, I can’t tell you.
Bo and I had quite a few months between the
Spring trials and the Nationals in late September, and it was never certain
whether his health and abilities would actually allow him to compete at
Nationals. Nobody could ever take away from him the fact that he had, this one
time, qualified to go to Nationals, but it was a long summer of daily activity
intended to keep him in the best shape possible and just see what happened.
Every day that cancer didn’t win was a victory for Bo and me, and I can honestly
say that we didn’t waste any of those days, they were all celebrated. It was a
week before the trial when I finally let myself say out loud that all three of
us were going to Golden, that Bo would run. Dr. Lynn said she’d be there, she
wouldn’t miss this.
Obviously, the point of going to Golden with
Bo was not to win ribbons or see if he could compete in all those events at
Intern level. That he completed all six of the courses that he ran, that he
opened the weekend with a perfectly clean run in Friday’s Intern Standard
Agility, that he only had about 4 or 5 dropped bars all weekend and those were
his only course faults, even the medals and ribbons that he won for regional and
national finishes in the NAC, those were all just amazing, unexpected things to
celebrate and enjoy. Most of his runs were slow, and competing for 4 days was a
lot to ask, but on Sunday afternoon this remarkable dog dug deep and willed
himself up and over the A frame one last time and I could hear what sounded like
everyone at the trial applauding and cheering him on – he had done it, and he
ran clean from there to the finish.
For me, the highlight and the thing that I
will remember forever was simply the six times that weekend that I got to fetch
my companion of 11 years, work on his leg for awhile to warm him up and get the
nerve responding, and then walk together with my buddy to the start line and
think “we’re at Nationals!!” To think of how amazing it was just for the two of
us to be there together and hear the announcer say “go” at least this one time.
It was very, very special.
I have to thank both of you, Jim and Mary Kay,
as there were many times during the months leading up to the Nationals when I
didn’t know if he would make it, when my hopes seemed totally unrealistic and I
feared that we would disappoint the people coming to watch. All during those
times, Jim’s regular comments to me from DOCNA were that Bo had earned this and
that if he was physically up to it, at any jump height, he would be welcome to
come to Golden and run to any extent that I thought right. That encouragement
and support meant a lot and kept in the forefront of my thoughts that the
purpose of this event and of DOCNA agility was to celebrate and enjoy our time
with our dogs, simple as that.
In fact, I believe that Bo’s participation in
DOCNA meets this year has significantly contributed to his quality of life and
his drive to live and play. Although we had never been “serious” agility
competitors and had barely started competing, I found that since his cancer
treatments our going to the agility practices with ZDD and weekends at the meets
actually seemed to be more important to him than ever before, as shown by his
new-found habit of barking non-stop in his crate until I let him do one more
run. And on Sunday afternoon in Golden, after the meet was over and everyone
was packing up to go home, I listened as my dog Bo sat and barked his head off,
wanting to do that one more run.
Thank you both. And thank you to Cindi and
Terri and Donna and all the other understanding judges, and all of our new
agility friends. I am forever grateful for what DOCNA has given the two of
us.
Bill, Bo and
Jackson
