Del.icio.us
Digg
Reddit
Facebook
StumbleUpon
A Daring Rescue
Meanwhile, we continued to go to Dr. Weiss, sometimes two or three times a week when the inflammation flared up. Dr. Weiss said he really couldn't tell us what would happen. The disease was like the stock market, unpredictable.
Krista's vision deteriorated again, and Dr. Weiss suspected that a cataract caused by the uveitis had gotten worse. He removed the lens in her right eye, and she was fitted for a contact lens to replace it. She regained a good bit of vision, but the inflammation would often flare up under stress.
Bob and I are both self-employed. No benefits. Very high deductible on our health insurance. No coverage for prescriptions. A good way to save money, we once thought. Krista's prescriptions often cost over $100 each; they kept changing, so we had hundreds of dollars of leftover eyedrops sitting in the medicine cabinet. We felt as though we were shoveling money into a big furnace. But we didn't dare leave New York and relocate to a cheaper place. We needed Dr. Weiss.
Then, when Krista was 11, her eye seemed to stabilize. She very much wanted to live in the country, especially if it meant we could have more pets. So we took a chance and moved to the more affordable Hudson Valley. It would turn out to be a difficult transition for Krista.
She couldn't fit in with the clique at her new school. She hated being "different" and calling attention to herself. Hated her round, chubby face and bloodshot eye. Grew terrified that she would never be able to make friends. The girls at the school made fun of her. "Do you only have one pair of pants?" one asked. Krista and I decided to shop for pants the next time we went to see Dr. Weiss.
On our shopping trip, she stopped in the middle of a street in New York and said: "Are we shopping because I need pants or are we letting that girl tell us what to do?" With only one pair of pants (mine), she clearly needed more. But she was developing a tough strength and wonderful values.
Krista wanted to be an artist; her teachers in New York had praised her work. But there was one more obstacle: She was kicked out of the art program because her grade wasn't good enough. She dug in, took art lessons and signed up for a six-week summer course at the Rhode Island School of Design.
Krista wrote her college application essay about her eye, how she'd first discovered the problem. "One eye open. Shut that one. Open the other one. Shut that one because it doesn't work. Left eye. Right eye. Left eye. Right eye is the wrong eye."
By Krista's senior year of high school, Smudge and her summer art school experience had given her the confidence she needed. She could become an artist. She didn't have to believe the teachers at the high school who told her she wasn't talented. She began to shop at thrift stores and buy wildly colored vintage clothes, and put patterns and colors together in a magnificent way.
When Smudge turned up missing that Sunday, the garden pond was the first place we looked for him. He wasn't there.
Five days after he disappeared, we got a call from the animal hospital. Smudge had been found that afternoon, caked with mud and burs, wandering down a road into a busy intersection two miles from our home. Bob went to pick him up. I called Krista. "I'm so glad you didn't tell me when he was lost," she said. "I don't think I would have made it."
The two of them had switched roles. Smudge was completely blind now and could no longer find his way. He was lost much too often and was miserable as a result. We knew he wouldn't be with us much longer. More and more, Krista was moving out on her own. Camera in hand, she was following her own route to becoming an individual. And she earned straight A's, even in the wake of that last difficult operation.
Soon she would travel to Venice for a special month-long photography seminar. Would we wait until she'd gone to Italy, she asked, before we put Smudge to sleep? She knew it had to be done but couldn't bear to be there with him when he went. We did as she asked, and Smudge was put to rest in the spring of 2006. The dog who'd turned our lives upside down left us having put everything right.
Advertisement 
Your Comments
See all
...