For the past week, when he’s regarded at a certain angle, an ethereal glow seems to emanate from our puppy’s head. With his soulful eyes, golden curls and patient mien, he’s been looking like a creature from an illuminated manuscript, some medieval scribe’s idea of a lion with a halo.
“He’s so brave!”
“He is like a saint!”
“He must hate wearing that thing!”
“Poor unmanned drone, poor little eunuch.”
“Ew, don’t call him that! Just say he’s been ‘fixed.’ ”
He’s been fixed, all right, has Billy the Wonder Dog. After the ministrations of our veterinarian, he has stitches in a very personal place and yet, as we have all remarked with surprise, he has accepted his changed circumstances with equanimity.
Not that he has the capacity to understand the implications of his minor surgery; no, the amazing thing has been his angelic patience with the most obvious attribute of his martyrdom, the Cone of Shame. The rigid, opaque plastic collar is designed to prevent him from gnawing at his incision, but unfortunately also prevents him from enjoying a normal life.
“Clonk!” goes Billy, if he passes too close to a piece of furniture.
“Bonk!” goes Billy, if a door isn’t opened widely enough.
Stairs are the worst: “Ink! Bank! Donk!”
With each sound, the poor animal’s head jerks as his rigid plastic collar makes contact with a hard object and knocks him back. Yet through it all, he has endured. He hasn’t fought the thing or clawed at it, and hasn’t even — as dogs apparently sometimes do — made a point of gouging at people’s legs with the cone so as to share his misery.
Of course he definitely is suffering in his cone, at least some of the time, but along with his virtuous forbearance he has a limited vocabulary for conveying distress. He can whine, bark or make urgent motions, but, as he’s discovered, there’s no guarantee that the obtuse humans around him will understand what he’s trying to get at.
Sometimes he’ll come up and give one short, sharp bark.
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“He probably needs water.”
Billy, looking hopefully from one person to the next, is trying to say, “Guys, I want you to take this stupid thing off my head!” but instead he receives a replenished bowl of water.
Occasionally he’s been able to get through to us, though. At one point the poor guy jumped up from the carpet and dashed around the kitchen. One of his hind legs kept flicking upward.
“I think he has an itch that needs scratching!” deduced a genius, “Billy, come!”
Billy came over, and when the genius thrust a hand under the cone and scratched his ears you would have thought that, like a real martyr, he’d died and gone to heaven. Of course, being a dog, he has a limited vocabulary for conveying happiness: In this case he just slumped against the scratching hand in a kind of paralyzed bliss. You could see him thinking, “Guys, at last! I’ve been asking you for this for days!”
When we left the clinic, the vet technician warned that we must keep Billy in his collar for the next 10 days. Ugh, we said, really? She nodded soberly.
“They will be the longest 10 days of his life, and yours,” she predicted. For us and our haloed lion, the prophecy definitely came true.
Meghan Cox Gurdon’s column appears on Sunday and Thursday. She can be contacted at [email protected].
