Back to Index | Next Chapter

Chapter 15
Marcie's Story

Jeremy and I lived in Vantage Hill Apartments in Reston. When I had told Fr. Carey that I was going to live in Reston, near Lake Anne, he warned me to be careful, that there were a lot of drugs in that area. Jeremy and I never did see any evidence of drugs there; in fact we would both be over 40 years old before we ever tried an illegal narcotic.

We didn’t have many friends during those early years, but that was okay, as the newness of our relationship kept us busy for many years. Jeremy was mindful of the fact that my experience base was very small, so occasionally, with both of our desires and approval; we would invite a person from the bar to come home with us for the night. Once the newness of all of this settled in, and our careers started moving, we withdrew, even from the bar scene, and became a more traditional monogamous couple. The AIDS crisis was also becoming known, and this further encouraged us to keep things only between the two of us.

Stephen graduated from Loyola University in New Orleans and decided to move to the Washington DC area. We renewed our acquaintance with him and he became our best friend. He was over at our apartment all the time.

Jeremy and I bought our first home together about three years after we moved here. We bought a townhouse in Woodbridge Virginia; about 45 minutes south of the Capital Beltway that surrounds DC. The reason we moved so far out was that we could afford to buy out there. Our first home cost about $65,000.00. We lived there for about 6 years. When the commute, traffic, and the tiresome distance from DC got to be too much, we looked into buying a home back in the Reston area again.

We bought our second home just outside of Reston. I don’t remember how much it cost, but it was our first single family home. It had a 3 car garage and a huge back yard. We lived there for another 5 or 6 years. The main reason we decided to again look for a different home was we had gotten a Vietnamese pot bellied pig, and Fairfax County didn’t yet allow them as pets.
Since we’ve begun the topic of pets, I should back up a little.

Jeremy and my first pet was a puppy from a litter that was abandoned on the side of the road in Reston. Someone brought the box of puppies to the lobby of the building I worked in. I called Jeremy to tell him about the abandoned puppies. Then I called him to try and convince him that we should get a puppy. Then I called again to once more try to convince him. My last call of the day was to tell him there was only one puppy left. I came home with a puppy that night.

We named the puppy Marcie, after the character in the Peanuts comic that is always calling Peppermint Patti “Sir”. Marcie was a wonderful dog, and we doted on her. We gave her puppy intelligence tests and she made high marks on them. She learned each of her toys by name. If you asked her to go get her frog toy which we called her “hop-hop” she would bring the right one. If for some reason she brought the wrong one, we learned, it was because that was the one she wanted to play with. If we insisted:

“No, not your hamburger, your hop-hop!”

She would drop the hamburger and go back to rummaging through her toy basket till she found the “hop-hop”, she’d bring it over, drop it at our feet, then pickup her hamburger toy again, the one she really wanted to play with.

She also loved to play hide-and-seek. I would make her sit and I’d cover her eyes with my hand. Jeremy would go hide, then I’d uncover her eyes and ask her “Where’s Jeremy?” she would then run all over the house looking behind things until she found him. She loved to play this game. We could do the same thing with one of her toys, and she would sniff it out wherever we hid it. She was the first pet that I’ve ever owned that showed such a remarkable capacity for learning. When we lived in the apartment in Reston, the door was one of those self-closing kind, and had huge interior spring loaded hinges. We used to hang her leash from the top hinge. When Marcie needed to go outside, she would come over to us with an excited look on her face. If we ignored her, she would go up to the door and push her leash against the metal door causing the metal clip to bang against it. If this noise failed to get her point across soon enough, she would grab the leash in her mouth and drag it into the living room to drop it at our feet.

One evening, after we had gone to bed, she came into the bedroom barking excitedly, waking Jeremy and me up. We told her

“ Marcie, you already went outside for the evening, be quiet and go back to sleep.”

But she kept on barking. We finally got up and resignedly agreed to taker her for a walk, but, instead of going to the outside door, she went into the kitchen and was pawing at the dishwasher door. We had started the dishwasher just before going to sleep and it was in its drying cycle. We unlatched the dishwasher and opened it to find a small fire inside. A plastic utensil had fallen on the heater element and was burning. Move over Lassie, Marcie was here! She was doing, in real life, what Lassie did in fake, staged movies.

In Marcie’s elderly years she developed Canine Lymphoma, a virulent cancer that started in her lymph glands. We first noticed it when we found these banana sized growths in her pelvic area. When the vet confirmed our fears we realized we had some tough decisions to make. We asked what our options were and the vet told us that most people make the dog comfortable for the few months that they could and then euthanized the dog when they got too weak. We had no desire to lose our little girl and asked what OTHER options were available? What about chemotherapy? The doctor said he’d heard of it, but mostly in really rich areas like New York, or California. We asked him to look into it and to get back with us as soon as possible. The vet got the information on the chemotherapy protocol used with dogs and we brought the prescription to the human pharmacy at our local Giant Food Store. When we picked up the medicine, the pharmacist came out; we could tell that he was being compassionate and warm because he knew the seriousness of the drug. He was very surprised to learn that we were paying for the prescription ourselves and not putting it on any insurance card. He didn’t know that it wasn’t for a human. He assumed it was for a member of our family, and he was right, a very treasured member, though of the Canine variety. Jeremy and I vowed to continue therapy with Marcie as long as her quality of life was good. We’d know, and she’d tell us, when it was time.

Marcie lived for over two more years. They were pampered and cherished years. When she got too weak to play anymore we could see the request in her eyes for us to let her go. We gently lifted her into the car and took her for her last visit to the vet. We prepaid and made all the arrangements ahead of time, for when it was over we just wanted to be alone with her for a few minutes, pay her the respect she deserved, and then go home without all the administrative hassles. The doctor put her on an IV of fluids to maker her more comfortable, and then after we had said our goodbyes, he injected her with the deep purple colored anesthetic. She put her head in my lap and gently closed her eyes for the last time. The doctor listened till her heart stopped beating and told us it was over.

We were so moved by sharing our lives with Marcie that Jeremy wrote a short story about her. It was a way of reaching closure, and since the field of Canine Chemotherapy was still in its infancy, Dog Fancy Magazine bought the story and published it. When it was published, they even included several pictures of her. The article was titled “Canine Chemotherapy – Marcie’s Story.”

Back to Index | Next Chapter