The Little Furry Prince

We are his humble servants.

If you have pets and no human children, I think it’s safe to assume that you’re a crazy person. Chances are you do things for that pet that you’d never do for another human being. For instance, Jared and I have become Noodle’s personal chefs. I spend my days soaking and cooking lentils, making brown rice, baking sweet potatoes, and boiling eggs—FOR THE DOG. Jared has cooked so many mini turkey burgers, he’s qualified to be a shift manager at Wendy’s now. The ingredients listed above make up Noodle’s gourmet grain bowls. But this dog is such an ingrate, he’ll leave stuff in the bowl he doesn’t feel like eating. Sometimes it’s the whites of the egg or a pile of red lentils. It’s as if he’s completely forgotten his traumatic youth, when he was rescued from a hoarding situation. Noodle doesn’t even care when we tell him that a stray dog would kill for a meal like his, but he’s hard-of-hearing now, and he’s a dog so he doesn’t know what the hell we’re talking about. Meanwhile, when it comes to cooking for myself, I’m so burnt out, I just eat whatever is in reach—a bag of nuts or a loaf of bread—and call it a day.

This dog has a bed in every room. Can you imagine having a place to rest your weary bones in every room of your house? No. You can’t. You’d never be that good to yourself. Our couch looks great and cost a fortune, but it’s not built for comfort. The little buttons on the cushions dig into my legs and butt, and I have to sit on a blanket like the god damned Princess and the Pea just to get some relief. Noodle’s beds are soft piles of stuffed fluff. He’s on one of his little padded clouds right now, in my office, snoring away, not a care in the world, whereas I’m perched on an ergonomic chair made of some kind of space-age polymer in the hope of preventing skeletal atrophy.

Several years ago, I started taking Noodle for non-anesthesia dental cleanings. These cleanings cost as much as a human dental cleaning. Noodle goes twice a year. Do you know the last time I had a dental cleaning? Me neither. I think it was in 2019.

Noodle is possibly fifteen-years-old now. I’m not exactly sure because when we adopted him, they said he might be one or two-years-old. Since it was a multiple-choice answer, I went with one-year-old. A few years ago, Noodle’s leg buckled and he couldn’t walk on it. It turned out he had a cancerous growth called a nerve sheath tumor on that leg. The vet removed it, but said these tumors always come back in the exact same place. He suggested we consult a cancer specialist, so we took Noodle to a westside clinic that surely fancied itself the Sloane Kettering of pet cancer. There, a very arrogant doctor, surrounded by diplomas from various hoity-toity universities, insisted that Noodle would need radiation on his leg five days-a-week for three weeks and he’d have to be put under anesthesia during the procedure. And that might not even prevent the tumor from coming back. When I responded that there was no way I’d put my eleven or maybe twelve-year-old dog through that kind of torture, especially if it wasn’t a cure-all, this guy gave me a ton of ‘tude and assured me the tumor would come back. I think I said something like, “Oh yeah? We’ll see!” before we hightailed it out of there. After that, I decided to change Noodle’s diet. I figured if people could live to be 100+ on the Greek island of Icaria, Noodle might also benefit from a Mediterranean diet—hence the aforementioned elaborate grain bowls. Maybe that sounds crazy, I did say that pet-people are crazy, but it seemed to work!

For the past few years, Noodle has been happy-go-lucky and cancer-free. But the tumor recently came back (damn you, jerk know-it-all veterinarian!) and these types of tumors are fast-growing. He’s having surgery to remove it on Tuesday. I’m trying not to stress out too much about my senior dog going under the knife. According to the vet, Noodle is in great health and he can’t believe that this dog might be fourteen or fifteen-years-old. And I’m thinking, well of course he’s in great shape, he lives like a freaking prince. But, tbh, I’m a nervous wreck and so, if you can, please send good thoughts to our little furry ingrate for an easy surgery and a speedy recovery. I’d be beyond grateful. THANK YOU!