We used to call Oscar "the face that launched a hundred Westies". You see, Oscar was our first Westie (West HIghland White Terrier, if you don't know...the dog in the Caesar dog food commercial?).
He didn't come from Westie Rescue of Missouri, we didn't know about them back then. He just turned up on Petfinder and we just couldn't let him get away from us. Little did we know what we were in for.
Oscar was rescued from a puppy mill and it must have been the puppy mill from hell. His condition when he arrived was enough to make you cry. His feet were horribly infected from standing for years in his urine and feces. His mouth was filled with sores and rotting teeth, he needed tons of antibiotics and we had to extract a good number of his teeth. We weren't sure he was going to be around for more than a few months. He supposedly was five years old, but we found out that the mills never really kept the records except to prove that the breeding dogs were purebred. His age was, and will always be, a guess from our vet Steve Bleish.
Oscar put his feet on grass for the first time the day he stepped into our backyard. He wasn't sure what to make of it.
To make matters worse, Oscar had no social skills, the only people he saw were there to hurt him and being "a dog" was entirely foreign to him. He knew how to be a pet as much as I know how to flap my arms and fly.
The early days made us question what we'd done. He was not even close to being housebroken and if you got too close to him he would either ignore you or (all too often) try to bite you. He almost took off my face one time I got too close. Really! We thought we were getting a new pet and we had our hands full.
I know most people would have shipped him back, honestly, very few agencies would have let Oscar go to a family at this stage, he needed socialization for trained professionals, not a couple of clueless suburbanites.
But, I felt there was a dog in there somewhere and we could find it. I said that if we just love him and keep him safe and he could turn around.
So, the journey began. It wasn't always easy, in fact, at first I was beginning to wonder if we'd lost our minds. Even when I thought we were making progress, he's slip back into his old habits. I was wondering how you can get a dog to "unlearn" behavior, especially one with Oscar's history.
But, little by little, a dog emerged. Okay, he wasn't the brightest bulb on the tree, but he became a very sweet dog who began to understand the the strange people he lived with loved him very deeply and weren't going to give up on him and ship him back to a filthy cage. He learned that a hand reaching out to him was affection, not aggression. If you got close it wasn't to shove him into a cage, it was to hold him and protect him.
As we added to our Westie brood, he seemed to pick up on the behavior patterns of his housemates. When he arrived, we had Duncan, an aging 105 pound Golden Retriever and I'm sure Oscar thought he was living with livestock.
When Daisy, our second Westie arrived, he seemed to learn from her behavior and that if you let people get close, they'd pet you and talk sweetly to you and look at you with love in their eyes.
As the brood grew, next with Lucy, then Libby (rest in peace, sweetie) and then Maddie, he became a real dog, with real emotions of joy and a playful nature we never could have expected. Because he was so crippled and his back legs wouldn't work properly, he always had trouble keeping up with the rest of them, be it wasn't for lack of trying. Mary referred to him as "Mr. Hip-pity Hop-pity" for the way he bounced on those back legs. Okay...maybe he never totally got that housebreaking thing down, but he certainly got better.
He never was in the best of health, but you'd never know it by the way he acted. For Oscar, it was just life, and life had become pretty good.
Several weeks ago, he seemed to not be his usual self, so I took him to Steve's. Blood tests revealed liver disease and decreased kidney function. Steve put him on antibiotics and meds to help his movement (the arthritis in his legs, hip and spine had gotten worse). And, after a few days he was his usual self, Mr. Hip-pity Hop-pity.
Last week he seemed to have a relapse, so, it was off to Steve's on Thursday. his liver numbers were actually better, but still nothing to write home about. I'm not blind, I know that an aging dog and illness are a bad combination with only one possible outcome, but I just wasn't ready for that yet, besides, we'd seen him come back from so many things that we thought he'd do it again.
It wasn't meant to be.
Friday night, mary and I heard a sound coming from the living room around 10:30 p.m. It was Oscar and he seemed to be crying. I tried to get him to take a pain pill but he just wouldn't. The crying stopped but was replaced by heavy panting about a half hour later.
I wrapped him up and put him on my lap in my favorite chair and held him as close as I could. I didn't want to believe it, but I couldn't ignore what was happening. I thought about trying to get him to the emergency room but I was afraid he wouldn't make it.
It was obvious that he was in pain and watching him struggle with the pain and gasping for air, my heart broke.
At 12:12 on Saturday morning, Oscar took his last breath.
As I laid him wrapped up on the carpet of my home office, I thought of all the lives he touched and didn't even know it. You see, he was the face that launched a hundred Westies. This little guy got us involved with Westie Rescue of Missouri, not only adopting our brood, but finding homes for a number of other Westies who had been cast aside, or whose owners loved them, but, through no fault of their own, could no longer keep them. And they helped to find more homes, and then those people helped find more homes, and...
No, he never knew what he meant to a lot of people.
As I sit here with a hole in my heart and a face streaked with tears, I remember a dog who didn't know he was a dog until he was loved and, in a funny way, i think we're all that way. We never know what's inside us until we experience love.
And, I'm sure he never realized it, but his love made me realize that, with love, all things are possible.
Godspeed Oscar, until the Rainbow Bridge, we love you and miss you.
Gregg
