10/24, 6:00pm—Austin TX, South Lamar

I promise you that when I started my Olive Garden newsletter, I didn’t intend it to be an ongoing chronicle of my dog’s health. But life takes you unexpected places.

(So as to not leave anyone in suspense, I should tell you that he is still alive at the end of this letter.)

So he had surgery last week. The recovery was going slowly, but each day showed signs of progress, until Tuesday morning, when it did not. Instead, it showed signs of an infection. I called the vet, and they recommended bringing him in—sure enough, that’s what he had. It was not a minor infection, because I guess few of them are immediately after surgery. He had an abscess near the incision site, and the infection was eating at the tissue in his abdominal wall. When I got him to the vet, I was told that he had a fever of 105.3, which sounds more like a radio station than a body temperature, and I had to be reassured that a dog’s body is naturally several degrees warmer than a human’s. The vet told me that she did not like the look of him—he was very low energy, not really walking, barely interested in water, let alone food. I asked how worried I should be, and she told me, “I would be pretty worried.” I asked a few more questions and thanked her, and then asked if I could see him again. She said yes. I expected to be ushered into a back kennel, but I guess they are particular about who goes into them—instead, a tall man in scrubs entered the room, carrying Dio in his arms. He set him on the ground, where he plopped over, and I just kind of gently stroked his fur while the vet stood awkwardly by the door and thought, “This can’t be the last time I see you, buddy,” knowing that it could. He didn’t really seem to notice.

After about five minutes, I left. I called Kat, who had flown back to Los Angeles the night before, and told her what had happened, that it was serious, that we didn’t know what was going to happen, that the vet couldn’t offer reassurances. She accepted that news bravely, asked me if I needed anything from her. I didn’t. I didn’t really need anything from anybody. I just wanted my dog to come home again.

It was a rough day. I didn’t go to Olive Garden that night. I didn’t eat much of anything. I didn’t really want to talk about what was going on with Dio, either. It’s weird—I know that some people don’t really get it, that people have different relationships with pets. There are people who do understand, of course—who love their animals fiercely, and would do anything to avoid seeing them suffer, who would happily trade years from their own lives if it bought extra years for a pet they love—but there are a lot of people who don’t. Kat had asked people she works with in L.A. not to share what was going on, not to tell other people they work with that the reason she had flown home to Texas was because her dog was sick, because to people who don’t get it, it sounds trivial, and the idea that this thing that can quickly consume your whole world—will my dog be alive tomorrow?—might be trivial to someone is an unbearable thought. The idea of having to explain it to someone who doesn’t get it just feels impossible, fills you with resentment, breaks your fucking heart, makes you feel crazy, does all of these things all at once.

I went back home after going to the vet and told my friend Lindsay what was happening, because she’s a good friend who has a cat who is about the same age as Dio, and I know that she understands veterinary scares in the exact same way that I do. Telling more people—even people who I know care, people who have been so kind and generous and thoughtful—just felt like it would wipe me out. Lindsay asked if I found shopping distracting, if my attention could be diverted by colors and textures and smells at a store. I hadn’t really thought about it like that before, but it seemed like a good idea. We went to the mall and smelled things at Aveda and the tea shop, looked at colorful things at Sephora and Express, touched textured things at the Lego Store. I didn’t break down at the mall, not even once. When I started to think about my poor dog, feverish and lethargic and oozing from his abscess in a veterinary hospital just a mile or so down the road, I had something else to touch or smell or look at, just for a minute. It was a really good trip to the mall.

By the time I came home, Kat had posted an update on Facebook about what was going on with Dio, which I was grateful for—I wanted people to know, I just couldn’t imagine telling anybody. My friend Emily texted me to ask if I needed anything, and because she is the sort of person who really means it when she asks, “Is there anything I can do?”, I asked her if she had any Xanax. She had something similar, and asked if I wanted her to deliver it to me. It was 11:30 at night, and she has a newborn and a toddler. I asked if that was something she could do, and she said yes, of course. They were, I suppose, already asleep. She brought me an old prescription and sat on my couch while I talked about what the vet had told me, and about how scared I was of the phone call that would be coming in the morning, how I could already imagine it opening with words like, “Things took a turn in the night…”

But they didn’t. I took a pill and went to sleep, and in the morning, when they called, they informed me that his fever was gone and he was more alert. He’d eaten some food, gone for a walk outside to pee, was lying down on his own and resting comfortably. They told me that visiting hours were from 3:30 to 5:30 and asked if I would be in. I told them that I would. The nurse who called said that they still considered him day-to-day, but that today seemed like it might be a good day.

I only kind of remember the afternoon, but I know I got more work done and participated in a meeting and then left the house at 3:30 to drive to the vet’s office for a visit. The veterinary surgeon who had operated on him last week was there, and told me what had happened: The infection seemed at the moment to be responding to antibiotics, but they were awaiting a culture on it to be certain it was being treated with the right drug. He was looking much brighter, but that there was some real damage to his abdominal wall and she wasn’t sure if he would recover from that on his own, and that the integrity of that part of his body was very important—without it, his organs could pass through the gaps, which sounds both disgusting and extremely dangerous. To fix that might require an additional surgery. She talked about the cost of the surgery, which is expensive, but she seemed optimistic about its prospects. “When you brought him in yesterday, I thought that there was a fifty percent chance that he wouldn’t make it,” she told me, which was somehow both terrifying and reassuring to hear out loud. I mean, I knew that. But something about hearing a number—even an arbitary, made-up number—made it feel so much more real. It was a relief to hear her say it in the past tense, to hear her talk about the likelihood that he would recover from a second surgery, to hear her primary concern be about the expense of the surgery rather than the risks. Our financial situation, with Kat’s job gone, is still extremely tenuous, but we have CareCredit cards and people have been incredibly generous toward the GoFundMe campaign that my brother set up, and we will gamble a bit with our financial security if it is what we have to do.

When she brought him out, he was a little spacey—he’d been given fentanyl before I arrived, because she wanted to add a few stitches to the parts of his abdomen that had struggled with the infection—but he was calm. The last time we’d visited him at the vet, he was on fentanyl, too, but he was anxious, and he seldom calmed down when we got him home. He would pace around, panting, refusing to lie down on his own. He’d eat—on Sunday, he developed a strong appetite for chicken—but he was not well, was not calm. But today, he was. When the vet left, he lie down for a while, then explored the perimeter of the room. He kept his distance from me, which is weird, it’s weird when a dog hurts your feelings—but eventually he came back over to me and lay down, his head pressed against my leg. I sat on the blanket next to him for over an hour, petting his fur and feeling him take deep breaths. He’s skinny—down more than six pounds from his normal weight, which a chart at the vet’s office reminded me is the equivalent of me dropping about 25 pounds in a month—and I’m worried about the holes in his muscle wall, but he is still my dog, still in there, still waiting to feel better.

Eventually, the nurse came into the room because visiting hours had ended thirty minutes ago. She asked if I was ready to leave, and I was. I didn’t have the same fear that it would be the last time I saw him, even though I know that it could be true, because who ever knows anything with stuff like this?

I got into the car and decided to eat a meal. The vet’s office is about a mile from the Olive Garden, and so I went by myself. It was early enough that there was no wait, and I took a table in the restaurant proper. It was the first meal that wasn’t toast or clementine oranges that I’d eaten in a couple days, and it was good. I had the Zuppa Toscana, which I never order, because it was cold and rainy and that sounded nice. I liked it a lot more than I expected to. I asked for five-cheese marinara and crispy chicken, because I just wanted something warm and rich and salty and comforting.

And all of this, of course, is free right now. That’s not something I take lightly in this moment, where finances are stretched thin—my meal cost a $3 tip, and it included a leftover portion (rigatoni with meat sauce and sausage, definitely the largest meal you can get to-go with a Pasta Pass) that I can eat tomorrow. Austin is experiencing a water crisis, but the bottled water with my meal was included for free, as well.

I thought about the dog while I ate. He loves pasta—will eat a piece of spaghetti uncooked and crunchy, right off the floor, if I drop it—and has made many of the friends who love him and text me to ask after him and on whose Instagram pages he’s made guest appearances at our house when we’ve invited people over for pasta. (When Kat is in Austin full-time, we often host events in our house for people to gather over spaghetti, since pasta is very cheap and easy to cook in bulk.) Eating pasta is something I do with all of my best friends, and that definitely includes this little dog who’s sick in a veterinary hospital 9.6 miles away from my house right now.

And I know there are people who are like, “Man, this is cool and all, but also, like, it’s just a dog, right?” And I don’t really have a great response to that. I get that different people put different values on that stuff, that people who’ve lived through the lives of several pets might well have a different perspective than someone like me, who’s still living with the first dog that was ever really mine. I get that someone who’s never loved a dog before might think of it more like an accessory or, I don’t know, some kind of weird robot and not a creature that’s alive, that’s full of life, that has a strong personality and a strong will and things he loves and cares about and looks forward to. One of the hardest things about the past week is that one of the best ways I have to deal with my anxieties and find peace at the end of the day is to take him out for long walks—when he’s healthy, we usually go out for three or four miles a night—and that’s gone right now, too. I’m glad that he’s in the hospital right now, because they know how best to take care of him and what to watch out for in ways that I do not. But I just miss him a lot. I hope he comes home, and I am allowing myself some optimism that he will, that we’ll go for long walks again soon, that I’ll eat some leftovers from the Olive Garden before this Pasta Pass expires and drop a bit of grilled chicken on the floor like it was an accident, to watch him run over and grab it, aware that food that makes its way onto the floor is his by a secret, unspoken compact between human and dog. I am allowing myself to believe that it might happen again. And in the meantime, I ate food today, and I kept it down, and I remembered to get enough that I’ll eat something tomorrow, too. When things are hard, sometimes that’s about all you can ask of yourself.