Tumor Shmumor

What Leo lacks in brain power he more than makes up for with pure instinct. Why else would he have been pressing his muzzle against the car window as we pulled up to the veterinary hospital, wild with anticipation about his return visit to the place where he had been poked and prodded and cut open and sewn up like a stuffed animal two weeks earlier.

It would have been nice if he could talk; he could have calmed me, told me the news would be as good as it could be for an old dog with aggressive, highly metastatic cancer. The oncologist laid it all out for me as Leo barked happily at the parade of canines visible through the glass door panel of our consultation room. The wildly successful removal of his cancerous spleen alone would buy him little more than two months; chemo could buy him six to nine. Add a little more magic potion after the standard chemo, and who knows, he could get more than a year. But none of this could happen unless the day's screening showed no metastasis in his liver, lungs, or brain.

So I waited anxiously while they screened him for raisin sized clusters in his major organs, thankful they were not going to bother screening his brain, which itself is the size of a raisin. I didn't want to risk a false positive. I sat at my friend's birthday lunch, staring at the extra craisins she had ordered for her salad as if they were little time bombs. Couldn't she have just gone with extra blue cheese?

As Leo knew all along, well before he bolted from the car to reconnect with his hospital friends, the high tech screens would detect no raisins, no evidence that the lethal cancer cells had travelled anywhere important. I signed off on the chemo, and the race is on. Those cells don't have a chance. That's my story and I'm sticking to it.

The good thing about having a brain the size of a raisin is that you live in the moment. I'm not sure what that says about us faithful yogis and yoginis, who try, as best as we can, to do the same. But the truth is we humans are incapable of doing what dogs do naturally; we are smart enough to put up with a little suffering to keep ourselves alive and at the top of the food chain. Most of us will agree to puke our guts out for months if there's some promise of a future.

It's a trade off. Dogs don't give a shit about the future, but they, unlike us, will give more than one hundred per cent of themselves to enjoy the present. If the chemo gets tough for Leo, Leo will prefer to be left alone. And we, and the doctors, will respect that. For now though, I have visions of smashed raisins dancing in my head, and have actually developed a bit of an aversion to all varieties of dried fruit. Leo, with his tiny little brain and huge capacity to enjoy life, is taking things the only way he knows how -- one moment at a time.