“Sami, you must come here!” It was the sound of my mom yelling enthusiastically from the other room. I was paging through a magazine in my room, and I didn’t want to move—an obvious consequence of teenage laziness. I inquired further as to what might be worth me moving off of my bed, and the answer was to see different puppy breeds on TV.
The specific dog my mom wanted me to see was a new hybrid dog being referred to as a puggle. It was a mix of a beagle with a pug that created that just-enough squished face with floppy ears and an adorable flipped-up tail. “If we ever get a dog, that’s the kind of dog we are getting,” my mom said.
Of course I thought those dogs were cute, but I also knew that the chances of me getting a dog were very slim. We had a dog briefly right before I turned 5. Snickers was a very good dog. Unfortunately, on my 5th birthday, I woke up to a cardiac arrythmia episode, and I had to go to the emergency room.
I’m not exactly certain how it was deduced, but it was assumed that a severe allergic reaction to the dog triggered something with my asthma that caused heart issues. We had to give the dog away. It was sad.
As the years went on, however, I never really had problems around dogs. Regardless, my family lived in a condo complex that did not allow dogs. A dog was a nice thought, but it certainly wasn’t going to happen.
Months later, I was 17, in college, and once again in the hospital for a blood clot. This time, it wasn’t caused by a port, so the doctors were extra nervous, but at least the clot had been caught much sooner. They were again treating me with TPA to break up the clot and keeping me monitored to make sure the clot didn’t break off and become a pulmonary embolism.
It is very easy to get bored in a hospital. This was a number of years ago. I did not have a laptop. The hospital did not have WiFi. I could not say, “Siri, show me…” into an iPhone. I had a Nokia cellphone that probably weighed a pound, and technically, I was not supposed to be using it at all due to hospital rules about equipment interference. I would send messages on the sly and then bury my phone in my blankets.
Sometimes when the nurses ended their shifts, they would stop in to watch Grey’s Anatomy or whatever TV show was on at the time. Sometimes certain med students would come in and hang out. I was about two hours away from any friends, so I had no other visitors.
The closest thing to salvation for me was a computer lab that was down the hall. One day, I announced to my mom that I was unhappy, climbed out of bed, and started making the trek down the hall. This may not seem like that big a deal, but I was hospitalized in the intermediate intensive-care unit and not supposed to go anywhere because of all of my monitors. I’m sure it initially was a scare for my nurses to know their patient had wandered off, but I agreed from that point on to let them know before I meandered around.
When I got to the computer lab, I journaled a little, wrote a few e-mails, but mostly searched for pictures of puggle puppies. Puppies, puppies, and more puppies. This was months after having seen a puggle on TV and not having thought about it since. My mind was set. I walked back to my room afterward and announced to my mom that we were, in fact, getting a dog.
I do weird things like that—make random decisions that I find to be important. I focus my mind so intently on them. It’s like in college when I decided that the living room furniture was gross and moldy, and I replaced it all with a bevy of floor pillows and low-to-the floor tables. That was an interesting experience for my roommate. I feel bad for my future whomever-it-is spouse. Someday he’ll come home to find a picnic table for a dining room set, or something else ridiculous like that. Don’t put it past me.
Here I was set on a dog. My parents thought it was a joke until we went on a spring vacation to the Mall of America. I went into a pet store and came out with a food bowl, a water bowl, and a collar with my future dog’s name in rhinestone letters. I decided her name would be Mimi, after the main character in the musical Rent.
My immunologist thought getting a dog would be really beneficial for me. It would be a great source of positivity, and it would get me out and about walking. He wrote a letter to the management group of my condo complex, suggesting that it make an exception and allow my family to get a dog. They didn’t quite buy into it.
The Catholic elementary school where my mom worked also thought that a dog would be great for me. The teachers turned down their Christmas bonuses and instead pooled the money into a Sami Dog Fund. People are compassionate and amazing.
A few days after that Christmas, I developed another blood clot while on vacation in Chicago, and my family decided to move closer to the hospital, which was about an hour and a half away from home. The most important criterion for the new condo: it had to allow dogs.
There were a few other obstacles to getting Mimi. I spent a good deal of time looking online for places I could find a puggle puppy. I wasn’t able to find a puggle breeder in Wisconsin. The best breeder I could find was in Texas, close to the Louisiana border.
It wasn’t until October that we picked Mimi up at O’Hare International Airport in Chicago. The pilot carried her off the plane and handed her over, saying she was the cutest thing he had ever seen. She had perfectly black-lined eyes that made her resemble statues of ancient Egyptian royalty.
However, she has not had perfect health. Leave it to me to have the dog with weird health issues. She is strangely allergic to multiple vaccines. She has trachea problems—I think of it as dog asthma—that mean she needs steroids. She’s intolerant of most treats and has to eat very specific food.
She catches dog infections, respiratory and GI in nature, very easily because she doesn’t have the greatest immune system. We’ve had to take her in multiple times for swelling after being bitten by bugs. She frequently needs Benadryl. She kind of fits me.
When I get hospitalized, it is really difficult for her, and during my last two stays she had to go on Xanax because her anxiety was at overwhelming levels. She was a surprise visitor when I was in the hospital last year. Everyone else at the hospital was as excited to see her as I was.
She loves watching Sponge Bob. If we ever don’t see or hear from Mimi for a while, it’s probably because there’s a Sponge Bob marathon on TV. She carries a pink and brown baby blanket in her mouth wherever she goes throughout the house.
On Saturday mornings, she lies across my legs and we watch shows on Bravo. I’m obviously bypassing any mention of the times she unnecessarily barks out the window or how she tries to take me out for 80,000 walks a day. All in all, she’s an amazing dog.
We’ve since acquired one other pup, an Italian greyhound/pug mix named Tessa. She was a puppy mill rescue that my mom and I saw on TV before I went in for an endoscopy. Once the endoscopy procedure was over, my mom and I went directly over to the Humane Society, and we felt we could not leave without bringing Tess back with us. My mom had to carry her in a baby sling for over a month because she was so malnourished, and she was afraid of the world around her. She wouldn’t go for a walk for almost a year.
I also got a rabbit after my hospitalization this past January. I’m not sure why, but I just wanted a rabbit. Her name is Beckett, after the playwright Samuel Beckett, and she is a rabbit with a lot of personality.
The thing that is great about pets is that they can bring so much positive energy into your life. I’m certain that Mimi can tell when I’m not feeling the greatest. She’s usually more content to have a low-key day on those days. She truly is my “get better” dog. I’m sure it’s biased to say my dog is the best dog, but what other dog sits around in her free time dressing up like Peter Pan? Exactly.