I think Rosie had a good time on our vacation to the Adirondacks, by and large. Granted, she had to endure two extremely long car rides, which she hates, being prone to motion sickness. Nonetheless, she got to spend a week and a half in beautiful wilderness. The Middle Of Nowhere. She spent those eleven days straining at the leash to chase every animal and smell every patch of dirt and eat every fern. She seemed to have a blast.
But when we returned to the city, she collapsed. She is always lethargic after a trip, even a short one. When we are in the city she sleeps for most of the day, but when we go away to the country, she's usually more active, looking out of windows to keep guard and going for long, energetic walks. So when we return home, she sleeps more than usual, presumably recharging after an exhausting weekend of wakefulness. With all this in mind, I fully expected her to return sleepy, yet I still found myself unable to let go of the anxiety that her drowsiness was causing me.
I mean, I am pretty prone to health-related anxiety—one need only look through the archives of this blog alone to realize that. And that's just Rosie-related health anxiety. I have long been a bit of hypochondriac with regards to myself, although I have mostly reined it in over the last few years, as I have been on a general trajectory of self-improvement. Still, when I got my recent stomach virus, I found myself compulsively checking my temperature, and if things had been different, I probably would have spent the whole time looking up symptoms on WebMD and obsessing over how I felt for at least another week.
Rosie has, to some degree, acted as a displacement for all of that health anxiety. I am responsible for this little pup, and if anything preventable ever happened to her and I didn't act, I could never forgive myself. I am apt to fantasize about terrible scenarios in which I carry Rosie, gasping her last breaths, to the vet, who proceeds to tell me that there's nothing she can do, if only I had brought Rosie in a day earlier—IF ONLY!
I am used to feeling this way about Rosie, by now. I have had my new-dog-owner freak-outs about the slightest little cough, and I've spent way too much money on unnecessary vet visits and medications, and I've also had some experience with the serious problems. I've learned to, by and large, tell the difference between the two, and when I can't, I've learned to do some moderate research, sit tight, and monitor the situation for any signs of changes, good or bad. In many ways, I've come to the same emotional place with regard to Rosie's health as I came to with regard to my own. Nonetheless, I found myself worry constantly about Rosie's state after this vacation. I even joked with friends that I thought she was dying, just because it made me feel better to say my worry out loud, even if I was couching it as a joke. I realized eventually that two things were happening at once, and because of context, Rosie became a convenient focal point for those issues.
The least important aspect is that I had a mostly marvelous time on vacation. This is difficult for me, because I've been trained over the years that the world is a zero-sum game. If I am having a good time, then someone else is having a bad time, and if I am having a wonderful time, then someone is suffering terribly. I feel guilty over the slightest pleasures, so I think there is a way in which I have been punishing myself, emotionally, ever since I got back from vacation, possibly just to set things right; if I am making myself miserable, then maybe someone else is feeling great.
The more important piece of the equation is my mom's health, which I suppose has been a source of anxiety for most of my life. Perhaps it explains, in part, my personal and long-lived hypochondria—my psychoanalyst certainly seems to think so. It is his belief that, at least to some degree, I have been trying to relate to and recreate what I saw in my mother for years, acting sick to be more like someone who seemed sick for most of my life, and certainly my childhood, stricken with constant migraines and biennial bouts of laryngitis, as well as shingles, acid reflux, and various and sundry colds and stomach viruses that would pop up now and again. More importantly, though, she got cancer. And even more importantly, she underwent her second surgery in as many years shortly before I went on this vacation. Everything went as successfully as could be hoped, and she is in chemotherapy again, and hopefully cancer-free, although my understanding of these things (admittedly and purposefully limited) is that she's probably not, and the cancer is something that will have to be managed as best as possible.
I can't do anything about my mom, but I take care of Rosie daily. I can focus on Rosie's health and feel that it is in some way my responsibility, even though it too is subject to the vagaries and randomness of life. I think that I feel in some ways responsible for my mother's own failing health, just out of a general sense of well-cultivated guilt, but it was too hateful of a notion to admit. So I saw in Rosie's lethargy a sign of the terrible horrors I have brought upon my loved-ones, and the lack of responsibility I deserve, as opposed to what her tiredness actually was: a direct result of the heat, and the busy, fun time I gave her in the country.
Some people have the ability to turn their shitty lives into gold, by the process of denial, while I do just the opposite. I'm not exactly jealous of those other people—I think that self-delusion to that extent is a dangerous and damaging thing—but I do wish I could live a bit more grounded in positive reality, and take more time to appreciate the joys that surround me when they do. There is certainly no better lesson to be taken from watching any loved one dealing with the perils of a life-threatening disease.
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