Today, SweatpantsandCoffee published one of my blog posts, with a new intro and a link to the #whatwouldyougive campaign. So cool! Thanks Amy Ferris, Nanea Hoffman, and Eva Zimmerman for making it happen. You ladies are fabulous! Now onto today’s blog…

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Otto is asleep in a crate next to the dining room table, curled up on top of one of my old purple cardigans and a towel. Breathing evenly, he snuggles with the new toy that Scarlett picked out for him, a squeaky bright green bunny with a name that’s fun to say: Kong Wubba. Kong WUB-BA.

Otto is a new puppy, not quite 8 weeks old, and, like the average human baby, he sleeps 18 hours a day. Some of this happens in my lap, and despite having lived with him for less than two full days, our family has fallen in love. I’ll enjoy my little lap dog while I can. He came from a litter of 13 German Shorthaired Pointers. Big, high energy hunting dogs.

We went to visit the puppies in their home in Sacramento about a week ago, where it was 100° and all of the dogs, plus Scarlett, were wilting in the heat. There was no way to get my wheelchair into the house, but I was able to roll it through to the backyard, where I sought out a small patch of shade, and succumbed to the wiggly puppy invasion. Puppies have no fear, and the wheelchair didn’t faze them a bit. They climbed all over me, finding little nooks to tuck their tiny bodies into, and then settling down to chew on my Uggs, a  stupid choice of footwear given the weather. 

The owner looked at me and my wheelchair and asked, not unkindly, “How will you take care of a puppy from a wheelchair?”

“Oh, I won’t,” I laughed. I find that sometimes the best way to deal with the realities of a disability is to cheerfully acknowledge them and then move on.

But it was a discussion Rob and I had had many times. “You want to get a dog,” I’d say, thinking carefully about how to phrase the rest of my statement, and ending up with something along the lines of have you lost your mind completely?

As has been regularly established on this blog, Rob has a lot of responsibilities in our house, and  I wasn’t convinced that the time was right to take on one more. Though in theory, we both liked the idea of a pet, we ended up talking ourselves out of it completely. Then we spent three days watching my sister’s dog, and suddenly the conversation had reopened. We knew that Liz’s already trained, eight-year-old dog was not the same as a puppy. We knew that, but we kind of ignored it because puppies are cute and that fact has been scientifically proven to melt brain cells.

On Saturday, we  headed back to Sacramento to bring Otto home. Rob plugged my BiPAP into  the car charger, and I wore it for the two-and-a-half-hour ride. I was comfortable, but unable to have a conversation with Scarlett about the cows she was spotting along the side of the road, and, more importantly, unable to sing along loudly with every song on the radio. This latter fact probably registered as a victory for Rob.

During the day, I can use the nasal pillow mask for the BiPAP,  but when I try to do that at night, it somehow causes my cheeks to puff up with air, until I look like a paralyzed chipmunk in a nightgown. So it’s full face mask at night, and I’ve had two successful nights so far. I appreciate the encouragement from everyone who told me I’d eventually get the hang of it. As with all ALS-related devices, I hated the idea, but love how it improves my life.

Why the name Otto? I don’t really know…he’s German, and some of the other suggestions (from Guess Who) were Cheer Bear, Dora, and Sparkelina. I suppose you could argue that he looks like a Sparkelina. He has very bright blue eyes, and the ticking pattern across his little body is reminiscent of fireworks. But he looks more like an Otto.

So here we are, our melted brains having made us a family of four. It’s good to have one more responsibility, one more little guy to love.

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