A Bad Ticker

In 2015, Julie had her first real health scare. 

She and I lived alone at the time in Staten Island. (This year will be the subject of a future post.) Just the two of us. No wife, no dog. 

I doted on her even more than usual that year. It was so easy to spoil her, and that I did. She got treats every day. She was my top priority. Most weekdays, I’d get home from work pretty early, by six at the latest, and just hang out with her in this studio apartment. Watching Netflix, a spoiled Julie on my lap.

Yeah, it was a pretty great year.

I became worried about her weight. She’s always been a big girl — big-boned, as they say! — but she clearly needed a diet. 

And for a week or two, she seemed to be a little off. She was vomiting a lot, not pooping as much as she should have, and, I don’t know, I was just a little concerned. What would I do in this tiny apartment without my Julie? 

So I brought her to the vet, with an odd litany of concerns, and basically asked them to run her for everything they could think of. 

And they found something, but not what I expected. A heart murmur. Early onset heart disease. 

This news panicked me. How on earth could I let this happen? My love for Julie had clouded my vision. I alone controlled how much she ate. What did it say about me that I let her overeat, that I let her get to seventeen pounds? 

After a few weeks, I contextualized all of this. 

For one, she had (and still has) heart disease. Not heart failure. She could live with heart disease for many years without progressing to heart failure. (Spoiler alert — that’s what happened.) 

And, of course, I realized something I should have known already. I had no excuse to overfeed Julie. She will eat what I feed her, no more. 

I got her on prescription UTI food, small cans. One in the morning, one in the evening. 

I got her healthier treats, which I fed her, at most, twice per week. 

And that was it. 

She begged. Oh, how she begged! 

At first, it was tough.

It’s still tough, sometimes. 

But she got used to it. What else could she do? 

And she lost weight. It was gradual. No Atkins diets for Julie, just continued weight loss into the higher end of the healthy range. 

The vet in Staten Island told me to count Julie’s breaths when she slept, to see if her heart rate was elevated. For years, I did just that whenever I saw her sleep. 

I’d grab my phone’s stopwatch, set it for a minute, and count: One, two, three…

Any number of twenty or lower was fine. And she was always under twenty. 

I still keep this count, to this day — or at least I did until three weeks ago. 

My wife has a running joke about her own diet. “We don’t all have it as easy as Julie,” she’ll say, “where someone else gets to have complete control over what you eat.” 

Julie didn’t appreciate that benefit at the time. But she adapted. She never stopped chirping for food in the mornings, but as she slimmed down, I learned something else about Julie…