REX AND THE CITY, Part XIII- The Hypochondriac's Guide to Overprotective Dog Care

My transformation from a sane, calm, not-worried person into a super-woman who worried about her dog’s health all the time.

MUST LOVE DOGS is a reader-supported publication. If you have the means and value this work, I’d be so grateful if you’d consider becoming a paid subscriber. This will help me sustain these offerings.

Dear Readers -

Welcome to another installment of my “Rex in the City” series. For those readers who are new: this series originally ran in the late, great Bark magazine for several years in the Aughts. Many of these pieces also made their way into my memoir REX AND THE CITY, published by Random House and Diversion Books. (I am attaching the pages as images, not as text, which is probably another reason why I am not algorithed as a dog writer. ) In any case, this essay chronicles my evolution from a sane, calm, not-worried person into a somewhat overly-protective super-woman who worried about her dog’s health all the time. I like to think that this is a phase all new dog parents go through. Otherwise, we can call it a neurosis. :) A temporary neurosis. I certainly don’t act this way now with the dogs I care for.

These pieces were originally published in the early Aughts, as I’ve already stated, but another thing to point out is that these essays chronicle my life in the late 90s. This was a time before Google, if you can imagine such a thing. So to educate ourselves on all-things-dog, Ed and I had to walk to physical bookstores, and buy physical books, and read them in their entirety to (hopefully) find the information we were looking for. Oh, how things have changed!

But I miss those days with Ed—sitting at a large table at Barnes and Noble with our cups of coffee and cinnamon rolls, and several enormous, four-color dog books spread out between us. I miss the camaraderie of those days, of our shared purpose of trying to rehabilitate our troubled dog. We both cared so deeply about Wallace—and that, in so many ways, was our greatest bond.

Thank you, Wallace, for swirling into our lives like a tiny tornado, and clearing a path for us to move forward as a couple. Thank you for opening me—us—up to such a pure love.

And now, on to Rex #13, which carries one of my favorite titles of the series—The Hypochondriac’s Guide to Overprotective Dog Care.

“Very early on in his career as the English Setter Patient ( a nickname that Ed had coined), Rex had received a written warning of sorts. Someone at the vet’s office had written CAUTION in black magic marker at the top of Rex’s chart. This is another story, which requires a lengthy explanation, but the point is, I started to wonder if the CAUTION referred to me.”