Dog Named Leaf (12 page)

The nurse explained that I had too many visitors for her to bring them all to the pre-op area. I said yes to her suggestion of going to the waiting room, forgetting how silly I looked in my new hospital ensemble. I wanted to see familiar faces, to talk with anyone who knew me and could confirm that I still existed.

I also kept thinking of Leaf and catching fleeting glimpses of him in my mind’s eye. He looked at me with his characteristic crooked smile. Someone had once called it Leaf’s “Elvis lip.”

The nurse guided me through the hallway to the waiting room. I spotted Linda right away and felt immensely relieved. She looked calm now, almost warrior-like in her determination that I would survive this. Seeing her made me feel whole again.

Seeing the rest of my family all together felt like I was attending a party in my honor. The scene was the closest thing to a wake that anyone could have while still being alive. Gale, Susan, and my mother were there. Our friends Arlene and Aubrey rounded out my “A-Team.”

Everyone looked tense, worried, and unsure of what to say to a man who might not even remember them by the afternoon. Should they acknowledge that this might be the last time they would ever see me? They remained silent, waiting for me to speak.

I hugged each of them and sat next to Linda. Glancing over to a large fish tank in the middle of the room, I was startled when an image of Leaf’s face reflected off the glass.

I hadn’t been given any medication yet that might have caused me to have visions. Still, I saw my sweet pup gazing at me lovingly. I blinked my eyes and looked again. He was gone. But in this brief vision, I saw him frantically grabbing slips of paper off the living room table and holding them in his mouth. The action was identical to what he’d done at home after I’d had the Building of Life dream.

The night before, while Linda and I lay together in bed, she’d said, “Tomorrow, they will let you talk to all of us before you go into surgery. You don’t need to be the life of the party, crack jokes, and try to make us feel better. Just be real.” Linda knew me well, and her advice was good. I sincerely thanked each person for all he or she had done to help.

Gale, looking fragile and scared, sat next to my mother. I told her how grateful I felt that she’d made so many sacrifices to be with me right now.
Susan gently attempted to pump me up with her positive attitude. I’d asked her earlier to keep her younger brother informed about my progress throughout the day. My mother forced a smile, but her eyes couldn’t conceal her worry. I assured her of my love and gratitude.

With his easygoing outlook on life and hearty laugh, my good friend Aubrey was as solid as granite. And I knew Arlene, the compassionate nurse, would look after Linda. But in spite of my attempt to focus on these loving people, I continued to worry about being separated from all of them forever as my dream had foretold. When the nurse signaled that it was time for me to return to the pre-op area. I kissed Linda once more and drew upon whatever courage I could muster.

Once in pre-op the nurses placed warm blankets over me, and the anesthetists, wearing blue scrubs, injected a tube in the vein in my arm. A man with a gray beard and glasses started an IV in my other arm and casually asked what I did for a living. I said that my wife and I wrote books about the human-animal bond.

Like so many others, the man launched into telling his own Angel Animals story. He said that when his son was a teenager, the boy had brought a dog home from an animal shelter but was not able to take care of the pup. Before long the rescued dog became the father’s. He admitted to being glad it had turned out that way. The canine companion had shown him nothing but devotion over the years and had actually brought his son and him closer because they both loved the dog.

The two men preparing me for surgery stepped back suddenly. A blond woman in her midthirties appeared where their faces had been. Calm emitted from her. I remembered her as the hospital’s chaplain. She reintroduced herself to me.

“Is it OK if I say a prayer?” she asked.

“Yes, thank you.”

Her prayer was filled with phrases like “trust in God,” “cycles of life,” “all is in the divine plan,” and “relax in God’s love.” Flashes of blue light sparkled around her head. Seeing the blue light reminded me that there is an essence of life that crosses the thin line separating the physical world from the heavens. For me, this essence can be seen as light at moments of heightened awareness.

The chaplain gently held my hand for a moment and quietly left the area. After she was gone the thought flickered through my mind that her visit and seeing the blue light around her would be a great send-off to the heavenly worlds. I relaxed with comfort in my belief that regardless of how things worked out, soul, the part of me that does not die, would live on.

An attendant wheeled my gurney into the surgical suite. Strong arms lifted me from it onto the surgical table. I’d soon be unconscious. In the corner of the room I saw bright flashes of blue and white light. A divine and loving presence was with me. I had nothing to fear. I surrendered to whatever was meant for me.

The breathing mask hovered ten inches above my face. It slowly lowered. I heard the bearded man on the surgical team say, “You are safe. We will be with you through it all.”

Before the mask reached my mouth and nose, I again had a vision of Leaf’s face. He still carried a sliver of paper in his mouth, as I had seen him do at home and in the reflection in the waiting room fish-tank glass. In that split second my sweet cocker spaniel dropped the piece of paper he had gripped so tightly in his mouth.

In my inner vision I reached for the paper Leaf had dropped. When I touched it I suddenly knew without a doubt what it was, and a calm understanding flooded my consciousness. Leaf had brought me my ticket. He’d been trying to deliver it to me all this time. Along with family and friends, I would awaken and enter the Building of Life.

L
INDA LATER TOLD ME THAT WHILE
I
WAS IN SURGERY, AT A TIME WHEN
my life engaged in a dangerous dance with mortality, a memory surfaced in her mind. Every spring large black crows perched in the tall oak and pine trees in our backyard. Their loud caws to one another were unnerving. Ever since we interfered with their natural cycle the previous spring, their caws had become louder whenever we walked from our house to the garage.

It happened on a walk with our yellow Lab, Taylor. We found a baby rabbit who had escaped the crows when they raided a bunny hutch. One of the birds probably dropped the bunny from his claws. The baby lay in the grass, eyes closed, but still alive.

With Taylor watching curiously, I scooped up the small rabbit in my hands and immediately became aware that the atmosphere bristled with fury. “You stole that crow’s lunch,” Linda said. She pointed to a crow about the size of a hawk. He screeched at me from a nearby tree branch. His buddies gathered with him and joined in a rage-filled chorus.

We brought the baby rabbit inside and made him a nest in a cardboard box. Then we placed the box with some water and chopped-up vegetables and fruit in a secure area under our deck. We hoped that the fencing around the bottom of the deck would keep him safe, until he was strong enough to return to his hutch or his mother found him. We
replenished the nest and water for the baby frequently. After a couple of days, the box was empty. We never saw the bunny again.

A year later, after rescuing the baby rabbit from the crows, we now had a twenty-five-pound cocker spaniel hanging out in our backyard. He made sure nothing there would harm him on the ground level. Unfortunately, he wasn’t in the habit of searching for predators in the sky.

One morning Linda let Leaf out in the backyard to take care of his bodily needs. She went back into the house but suddenly had an inner nudge to check on him. From our back deck she watched Leaf sniff the dew-coated green grass. Then she noticed a huge crow hovering on a high branch of our old oak tree. He glared down from his perch, ready to nosedive on to the back of our unwary little dog. The crow focused silently on Leaf as if he were thinking,
There’s breakfast!

Linda immediately called to Leaf to come back in the house. Our little guy remained oblivious to the fact that he might have been a tempting target. Could this have been the same bird whose bunny I had stolen a year ago? Was the look he gave Linda conveying,
You took something I wanted. Now I’ll get something of yours?

Part of the responsibility of being a pet parent is to teach our young ones how to protect themselves. We sat down to have a talk with Leaf about the facts of life in a neighborhood filled with crows. “Leaf, every time you go outside, stand on the deck and look up into the sky,” Linda instructed him. “Make sure no crows are in the trees before you run out into the backyard.”

Odd as this may seem, Leaf became even more aware of his surroundings. Before venturing into the backyard, he always stood at the top of the steps on the deck and surveyed the sky and tree branches. After he was certain no crows were around, he enjoyed his outing. I had been pleased to see that our pup, even early on, was a quick study in the ways of a natural world.

As I was lying vulnerable on the operating table, Linda didn’t know what would happen next. She also didn’t know that Leaf had delivered my ticket.

Fortunately, Arlene joined her at the hospital chapel, where they sat together in quiet contemplation underneath shafts of gentle sunlight. Linda felt an overwhelming sense of peace. She sensed the surgery had begun.

When she returned to the waiting room, Linda heard Nurse Jody being paged, “Come to surgery. Stat.” Knowing that Jody was Dr. Nussbaum’s main nursing assistant, and I was his only surgery patient at that time, she felt a wave of panic pass through her body as she watched Nurse Jody rush down the hall, past the waiting room, to the surgery suite.

By now, surgery had stretched from the two hours Dr. Nussbaum had expected it would last to four hours. He had sent no information about what was happening or why it was taking longer. The delay created fertile ground for my family and friends to imagine trouble. People were already calling Linda’s cell phone, thinking the surgery would be over by now. In a tremulous voice she’d had to report, “No word yet.”

My wife and everyone who loved me endured the torturous wait. Naturally they wondered if there had been complications. Or worse, that maybe I’d had a stroke on the operating table.

Nearly five hours later Linda sat in another part of the waiting room, talking to her mother on the phone. She glanced over at my mother and sister. Worry clouded their faces. Our daughter Susan paced the room, trying to stay calm, and said positive things every time anyone speculated about why the hours were ticking away. Because Linda didn’t want to increase everyone’s anxiety, she only told Arlene that she’d seen Nurse Jody rush to the surgery suite.

Finally, with the surgery over, Dr. Nussbaum and Nurse Jody entered the visitors’ waiting room. Linda quickly ended the phone conversation with her mother and hurried over to them. Dr. Nussbaum told Linda and my family that the surgery had started late. It had lasted longer due to its difficulty. The aneurysm was extremely tricky to clip, because my vessels were very thin. The shape of the aneurysm was ill defined, which we knew from the X-ray.

Each time Dr. Nussbaum clipped the aneurysm, the clip would slip down onto the main artery. He couldn’t leave it in that position, or the
clip would impair blood flow to the brain. “I had to try three different ways of clipping it before I found one that would last,” he said. He had called for Nurse Jody to help him finish up the operation.

When we had first seen Dr. Nussbaum, he’d explained that some people don’t choose to have an aneurysm clipped right away. They wait to see if it gets bigger. Now the doctor reassured my wife that I’d made the right decision to proceed with the surgery. The aneurysm’s shape and location indicated that at some point it would probably have burst. Then he said something Linda will always remember. “Allen will never have to think about this again.” She felt immensely grateful. Linda believed that no surgeon other than Dr. Nussbaum, with his experience and skills, could have accomplished what he did for me.

But the next twenty-four hours in the intensive care unit would be some of the most precarious hours of my life.