Updates on Joni.

Boxers can only live for so long. Apparently, even Joni.

Joni is likely dying.

She probably has congestive heart failure. She also has signs of kidney failure. She also has a dark spot near her lungs that could be cancer. All of this is, as of yet, frustratingly inconclusive since, for reasons that aren’t entirely clear to me, the $550 X-ray/ultrasound I paid for to be interpreted by a veterinarian (a doctor of animals, mind you), can’t be completely divined by a regular vet, but must be interpreted by a veterinary cardiologist, at a cost of yet another $800 to $1200.

The operative assumption in American healthcare, for dogs as well as people, seems to be that unless you’re just fabulously wealthy, you really shouldn’t get sick. And if you do, that’s on nobody but you, buddy.

I haven’t yet decided whether I will go the route of hiring a cardiologist. Joni is old, nearly fourteen, and even with top notch care and sparing no expense, I am told that if she indeed has congestive heart failure (the technical term is “boxer cardiomyopathy”), then she will only live another six months to a year anyway—or perhaps more. Or it could be something else entirely. We don’t know. The $550 wasn’t enough (and the $450 for the blood panel and exam wasn’t enough) for anything more conclusive than that. I will hear more tomorrow, supposedly, once someone else—someone other than the veterinarian I took her to—has a chance to look over her X-rays.

I feel sort of numb about the whole thing. I won’t get maudlin. Not yet, anyway. Joni is alive, after all. She’s coughing her little lungs out on the couch downstairs as I write this in my office. When I click “publish” on this post, I will head back downstairs and comfort her.

But I also want to write this now because, truth be told, if and when she goes, I worry I won’t have the wherewithal to eulogize her properly. And she deserves…something.

She’s eating well. Blue Buffalo wet dog food for every meal. I swear this stuff is better than most of my meals in college: carrots, beef, chicken, peas, brown rice, all sorts of macronutrients and such. Good stuff.

She’s also taking some meds to help relieve the fluid on her chest, but it’s just a stopgap measure; it won’t actually heal anything.

Joni has many admirers, which is partly why I decided to post here. Many of them subscribe to this newsletter.

Here are a few pics of the old gal in better times (yes, okay, she sleeps a lot):

Joni loves my grandmother more than anyone in the world. Even me.