The Puppy Diaries: Raising a Dog Named Scout by Abramson Jill

Author:Abramson, Jill [Abramson, Jill]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: Henry Holt and Co.
Published: 2011-10-10T21:00:00+00:00

Tiny Dinah

A week later, Dr. Young called me with a devastating diagnosis. Dinah did indeed have Krabbe disease. There is no cure, and most afflicted dogs die within a year. This disease also affects humans, and in infants it’s often fatal before age two.

When I got home from work that night, I found it almost impossible to believe that the perky little pup licking my face was likely to be gone in a few months. After a flood of tears, I called the breeder and informed her about Dinah’s disease—since both parents have to carry the Krabbe gene for it to be transmitted, I knew she would immediately stop breeding Dinah’s parents. Happily, the Murrays’ puppy, named Furry, did not exhibit any signs of the disease; as well, she had already been spayed, so there was no danger of her passing on the gene for Krabbe. As heartbreaking as this situation was, I was glad it was our misfortune and not the Murrays’, whose little girls were over the moon about their first dog. After all, we were still blessed with healthy, wonderful Buddy.

Not long after receiving Dinah’s diagnosis, I got a phone call from Dr. Mark Haskins, a professor at Penn’s School of Veterinary Medicine. Dr. Haskins told me that having a dog with Krabbe would be extremely valuable to his research, because while some Westies and cairns carry the Krabbe gene, it’s extremely rare for a living dog to have the actual disease. He also hoped we’d donate Dinah to the large animal colony at Penn’s veterinary hospital complex and invited me to come for a visit.

The notion of giving Dinah up was even tougher for our family to absorb than the fact that we would soon be caring for a puppy who would suffer seizures, blindness, deafness, and loss of motor control. We wanted to give her our love, not give her away.

Nonetheless, right after the Thanksgiving break I traveled to Philadelphia to meet Dr. Haskins, a kindly man with a gray beard and mustache. The Penn veterinary facilities are impressive indeed. The animal colony has enough room for dogs to roam free, and there are treatment rooms with little gurneys, some with tiny stirrups, just like human ones but in miniature.

Then Dr. Haskins gave me a stack of newsletters to read. They contained accounts written by the parents of children with Krabbe, and most were accompanied by pictures. The stories documented how this disease ravaged families by robbing children of their early motor development and then causing death. Reading the newsletters was emotionally draining, but it also put our own family’s plight in perspective. If Dinah could aid the research of this fatal disorder—if she could help researchers take even a tiny step toward finding treatment for these children—how could we say no?

I asked Dr. Haskins if we could strike a compromise: what if we kept Dinah at home but brought her to Penn, as frequently as he wanted, for testing and observation? He agreed and even said he would help with the commute.

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