Bananas
My son Gus had told me that he wanted either a baby brother or a pet monkey. I said No to both. And then one night, when my husband was leaving for work at 3 am, he came back inside to tell me that there was “an enormous, soaking wet dog on the porch.” Awesome. I tried to go back to sleep, but curiosity got the better of me, and I got up to go see. When I first looked outside, I thought maybe in his sleep-deprived state, he had hallucinated it. There wasn’t a dog to be seen anywhere. As soon as I turned around to go back to bed, though, I heard the softest, saddest whine. And there he was. An enormous, soaking wet dog whose coat, it turned out, looked a bit like an extremely overripe banana. But it was 3 in the morning. So I told him, “Not tonight.” And went back to bed.
In the morning, I called my mom, who lived just 2 miles away, and asked her if she knew anyone out there missing a dog matching that description. She didn’t, but said she would call around and see if anyone knew anything about him. The thing was, we already had 2 dogs, and 2 kids (and 2 cats, but they were strictly indoors). What if he was aggressive or reactive to other dogs? I gave everyone very clear orders not to get too close, took the kids to school, and went to class myself. By the time I got home that evening, he and my son were best friends, and his name was Bananas. It turned out the other dogs thought he was awesome as well. So now we were a 3-dog household. But (and this was important) no monkeys! And suddenly I didn’t hear about them, or the baby brother again.
Bananas wanted to be an outdoor dog. Asti and Brownie were indoor/outdoor dogs (they were only outside with supervision). The kids wanted him to come inside, too, but he was adamantly opposed to the idea, even peeing on the kids and the entryway when they tried to bring him in because of a tornado warning one evening. He didn’t like storms; he’d sit on the porch and bark at the lightning, but we couldn’t change his mind. We, of course, had no idea about his circumstances before joining us, but he definitely had some issues. I’m fairly certain he was abused in some manner. And he had a pathological case of separation anxiety. So much so that when we tried to leave, he would run back and forth in front of our car trying to keep us from leaving. He would follow us all the way to my parents’ house (again, 2 miles away) and then stay at the end of their driveway until we came home, at which point he would run in the ditch alongside the car at speeds of up to 15 mph until we got back home. This continued for at least a month, until he finally realized that we always came back.
He, unfortunately, liked to chase cars. He almost always did it from the safety of the ditch, though. Small comfort to me, having lost 4 dogs to cars on that exact road as a child. One early December morning, however, he chased a car and decided to run back home on the road, right into the running board of a passing semi. My husband was outside at the time and saw it happen. He came inside and asked me to help him get Nanners, as he was called by then, off the road and inside. I was heartbroken. I had never had a dog get hit by a car, let alone a semi, and survive, so I was pretty sure I knew where this was heading.
We got him inside, and he was still breathing. But there was a gaping hole in his face. My son came out to check on him, and Nanners tried to get up and go to him. He was in bad shape, though. We lived 30 minutes outside of the closest town with an emergency vet, but they closed at 8, and this happened between 7 and 7:30. I was calling every vet in town, but it was too early for them. I told my husband that if he was still alive in half an hour, we’d take him to town and find someone open. I didn’t have a lot of hope, though. Again, my experience made me pessimistic.
Thirty minutes later, he was still hanging on, and my husband had finally reached a vet. He told them our dog had been hit, and they said to bring him in. Not an easy prospect. Again, this dog was very big. He weighed at least 70 pounds. We slid some cardboard under him as a makeshift sling and got him into the backseat of my husband’s car. I loaded the kids up and took them in mine.
When we arrived at the vet and got him inside, the vet took one look at him and exclaimed, “Oh my GOD!” Not a reassuring start. She said she was expecting maybe a broken leg, or something, not an open gaping wound on the face. Especially shocking was that he was conscious. She was a young veterinarian who had just joined the practice. She and the senior vet who owned the practice took him into surgery. It took hours. By the time she called to update me on his condition, I was barely holding on.
During the surgery, his heart had stopped, but they managed to bring him back. They found that he had a broken bone in his neck. She said neither of them had ever seen a dog with a fracture in that bone that had survived. He additionally had a broken bone and an open wound on the lower part of one of his front legs. The biggest concern, though, was the open wound to the sinus. They used a powder to help the bone regrow over and around it (I am not a vet, and this was 15 years ago, please give me some grace if I am not 100% on the details), and sewed the wound shut. He had to stay for a couple of days, but then we were able to take him home.
And just like that, Nanners was suddenly an indoor dog.
