Bandit is part husky and part shithead.

Rumbling on the hardwood above and a yelp and I have to guess that Bandit nipped or frightened Lily.

Dogs are funny and pant when they're nervous or excited and both Bandit and Lily were circling, tongues dangling, and their sides heaving. Lily rushes to me, ears down, and stands sideways to lean on me. Bandit lets his one lazy ear flop while he perks up the other. Did I do something, he appears to ask. I pet him too.

Lily follows and Hershey wedges her brown sausage body into the middle of hands and snouts and paws and sticks her nose at me for attention. Ozzy the pug takes the moment to steal Hershey's bed, which is really his bed.

What the hell was all that, I ask Jerry.

I don't know! They were both Over THERE. I look and the little braided rug is a mess. It's where Lily usually plunks down at night.

Now she's with me in the basement and my fingers are cold. It's March and we have water trickling across the unfinished floor until it meets tile and pools. It's just passing through I suppose. Me too. Some days life feels to me as if i am standing at a bus station in a foreign country. The little folded schedule says I am in the right place, I think. I lean against a poster dated for last year. The sun has faded out names and faces. With my stupid yellow ticket wrapped in my grungy fingers I stand there wondering of the bus will ever come.

This morning I want to find my body's lingering warmth in bed and fit myself back in place. It was 6-something and I got up to get Lily's food ready. I mix enzyme powder into her food, moisten it with tap water and shove it into the microwave where no one will eat it spill it steal it off the counter. For $100 bucks a bottle I confess that if the wrong dog gets a nose in that bowl and downs Lily's food, I am going in there to get it back.

I clomp around the house doing normal things but I am not normal. I feel like someone took our a mega eraser and smudged all my feelings out. Jerry sits stressing about things way more important than my feelings, but someone stole my tongue and I keep quiet. Actually, I think my tongue, along with happy thoughts has been stomped kicked poked swung at and hit shoved in front of a speeding train truck bus and generally left out in the cold on purpose by myself and others. Nice.

Anyway, I leave Jerry to himself and thoughts probably of his daughter his health the bills the flood in the basement the new floor and desire to drag that crapper back in from the patio but, I am too tired today or I would do it now, he told me earlier. I sit here in the chilly basement.

This morning I did try to get back in bed, but it was a really regretful move, sort of like making a face at the last second and for eternity there you are right in front like blemish on the family photo. While I wished for sleep, that independent and unfortunately dominant part of my brain took out its serious weapons and commandeered my head for the day. It wanted quiet, so I have been very very quiet. The nagging and worrying began while I felt around the sheets for my other sock before hopping in. It said: you have to get up in 20 minutes anyway to give Lily her food you have to take a photo and go to the town hall you have to run Lily through the woods so you aren't brushing at your shoulders all day trying to knock off the guilt.

Out of bed with way too little sleep and I give Lily her dish. She unhinges her jaw like a snake and shovels in her breakfast. She looks better and has a puppy's energy back and I can see her body reasserting itself over her concave little skeleton. When I think of a couple of weeks ago when the specialist finally diagnose her and handed me the magic remedy, I realize that without it I don't think Lily would have lasted until today. I would right this second be staring at all the places from which she is absent. Won't need her food bowls anymore. Won't need her doggy bed or leashes. Lily would right now be just a blank space on the basement tile where a dog once slept. The end. Something in my head must have slammed a door on that thought while the vet and I searched and searched for the problem and cure. Why hadn't I totally flipped?

Spring. Late March with lots of water seeping in. Daffodils. The smell of moist earth. Easter only days ahead. I am depressed. Who cares about anything anyway? Jerry says, GO to BED already! I wish I could. After all the housework and bills and writing and everything is done, I get a few minutes to myself and I am finally feeling peaceful as if my life is my own and does not belong to some mean bastard randomly shuffling me through the maze. At night he sleeps and I am free to let my mind roam where it want to roam .

Tonight Lily cast long creepy shadows while sniffing for a good spot. Her legs were like black ink tossed across the muddy ground. Shadows of her ears were the size of bright orange emergency cones.

Tomorrow we go to the vet so he can tell me if the little bubble on her belly is anything to worry about.

Everyday life really screws up everything.

As in, I want coffee, but I am late for work. I want coffee Lily is bouncing all over the place and she needs to get out and RUN already. Someone has to call the vet finish the laundry do something about the mounds of trash fermenting on the patio fix the vacuum so it sucks as much as I think it sucks who will do the damn dishes?

Jerry put a new cool black and white tiled floor in the bathroom, so our toilet is out on the patio too. This place is beautiful.

Lily has to sniff the stupid thing every time we hop outside. Didn't she sniff it enough when it was parked in its corner of our bathroom? How can I take advantage of a patio toilet? My neighbors loath us enough, so I am thinking I should plant something in it and see how long it lasts out by the mailbox with the lid up. Enjoy your morning speed fest on your way to work ... maybe an unsightly crapper will ease your foot off the gas.

Let me mention something that I can't resist: How often is it that you step over a crumpled dog and are cleaning your teeth with your face stretched and grimacing at the mirror when you notice a pure white and nearly clear little spider repelling off your chin lapel zipper and zooming past your waistband on its way to the floor? At the same time the endless rain we've endured for days finally has swelled up in the ground, knocked politely at the foundation stones, then trickled streamed poured through the cracks? I have an inch puddling in spots around my computer chair.

It's meandering along now in the seams of grout, or clogging up with tons of dog hair and lint it collected on its way.

Lily and I don't mind being wet in the mornings on our quick bolt through the woods. I had been throwing a stick and Lily came back with a giant tree limb. Maybe I should throw a dollar.

Monday I popped off my wet sneakers and watched steam come rise from inside my shoes. Shower.

Lily and I will go to our vet Thursday afternoon and find out about the little bubble on her tummy next to her belly button. I press on it and it feels like a little glob of jelly under there about the size of my thumb.

She runs out of her Viokase enzyme treatments about once a week. It's $110 a bottle. Oh My God.

I don't know if it's stress or what but my back is covered with huge, sore acne and on my collar bone is one red and blistered boil that I will eventually stab in exasperation, but not just yet.

Remember that record Lily and I set for the most consecutive days of making, then cleaning up diarrhea? The stench of bile and rot clinging to our living room upholstery, staining the brown wooden walls a darker hue, and smashing into guests with a fetid blast of gore has been replaced by and equally vicious fool. It's me.

I am mean nasty intolerable and the cause of screaming raw throats and swearing. What am I going to do with myself? Why can'tI just shut up and leave everyone else alone and in peace where they are on the couch or bed or wherever. I am going through a weird and impossible rage and want to hurt. I want to break things I want pain and to spend my fury in some exhausting way. Maybe It's too long with the strain. Maybe I am standing there inside my head with one foot over a fire and the other in quicksand. Goodbye, I say to myself. I hope the people I care most about are still here when I crawl back out of the muck to apologize.

The past couple of days have been rough.

When the stress gets to me I am usually sick with it. It’s like a blinding headache that sets up shop in my eye sockets, opens its tools, and puts as much pressure on that delicate bone and thin skin as it can. It spreads into my head from front to back, and somehow this weight settles like pooling lead at the back of my skull. By then it has made me nauseous and my apologies to all who are anywhere near me when I feel this way.

Gauging by my mood I always see this day coming. Signs showed up Wednesday when I snuck to a different, less visible desk tucked into a quiet corner at work. Approaching the nice, dark room without anyone else in sight, I overheard a one-sided conversation. Peering into my sanctuary I found a coworker on the phone.

Panic. Now where do I go?

Plopping down in a chair near other friends in the office I wondered, what now? I am near tears, I tell them, which I was. I am stress saturated. No more stress can pass through this mind and body so I am feeling the hit like a raw nerve like the dentist is drilling for China like everything is huge and loud and forcing me into a claustrophobic corner. I wait and my stomach hurts. A magnet is in there pulling my head toward the floor and my eyelids are gummy and want to stay shut. Out in the sun I go momentarily blind and the needles of sharp pain rush in through the eyeball to worm around the moist nooks and crannies of my brain. It’s not long, I know, before that sluggish weight stabbing into the back of my skull returns the jolt of pain, whacking it hysterically like some stupid kid playing ping pong.

Later, with my hiding place to myself again I called mom. Mid-chat someone dashed past me and snarled, we can hear you, ya know!

How thoughtful. I hope you trip.

So here I am bothering myself, Jerry at home, my coworkers in the office, and probably everyone else on earth. On my mind is on Lily and her enzyme powder and the tons of cash it will cost meal after meal after day after week after year. Oh well!

I wonder how big she’ll be when she is back to normal. From 43 pounds and counting.

Rain is a better lullaby than mother's songs or strong whiskey.

The sound means put your tools away and get inside, tapping into some withered and dusty shred of instinct inside us that seeks warmth and shelter.

Lily prances with her stick, leash dragging on the ground behind her like a balloon string.

I want to drive over there and punch that doctor, Jerry says. Weeks ago we had thought she might have a pancreas problem, but after a blood test the vet had said it's not her pancreas. We were left to grapple with a huge question mark, but we have no room to put this cumbersome thing.

She has a puppy's energy as her flesh and sinew and muscle and substance reconstitutes. Behind me stretched on the cool basement tiles I hear her sigh. With a glance over my shoulder I find Lily curved like a comma, her front paws crossed and her head on top like a paperweight.

Everything smells like dog shit. I am sitting and reading my book and as I switch one foot for the other on the stool in front of me I smell the faint, pungent yuck. Shit on my shoe my boot the backyard the floor the towel I used to chase one of Lily's messes. It will all fade, but here it is for now.

I listen to Lily breath as she lays across her pillow. For the first time she is not curled in a ball, maybe her body's way of wrapping around itself in some protective fold. Don't we all begin and end in some fetal pose? Tonight her breathing is the rhythmic beat of a girl who ran in the woods over rough ground streams rocks fallen trees rises dips valleys and paths from who knows when and now she rests. Her body has been warmer lately under my fingers and where I place my palm on her belly. She is stretched across her doggy cushion like someone took a wet towel and tossed it over a railing in the sun.

One in the morning now, and I get these words out. Lily brought out the diary that apparently was sitting inside me taking a bath, having a snack and then napping. Now it is running away with my thoughts and dragging more and more of them from me like a greedy vacuum cleaner.

Strange, but I don't know what Lily really looks like. I only know her as the bony girl draped in a German Shepherd's loose hide. Like stones inside a pillow case landing on the ground, Lily finds a spot to curl up and rest on the kitchen floor.

Since we started her enzyme treatments the diarrhea has disappeared. I picked up scooped mopped smeared and wiped messy liquid crap off my basement floor for about 82 days straight. That is my estimate as my fingers skipped from one day to the next to add the calendar squares. Finally with treatments the enzymes can rush around in her stomach giving orders to digest DIGEST!.

Out for a jog with Lily and a neighbor stops to ask, how is she? Earlier Jerry had asked, do you think she is looking a little better already? Look at her ribs, he tells me. They seem a little filled in, I think.

I wonder what she'll look like when she adds the 30 pounds she is missing, or probably more.

Today, March 20, was the first day of spring.

A glass of red wine sends streaks of pink across my polished wood bar; I reach for the glass and look at Lily. Eighty-two days I had waited to find out what is wrong with her. Since December 26 until Wednesday, March 17, I wondered why she had diarrhea and how we could stop it. The last couple of weeks left me wondering if we could stop it in time.

Lily was running out of body mass and energy. We would be out for a quick jog and she would just stop. Standing there in the road Lily would look at me the trees a passing car a neighbor, but she was not interested in taking another step. Pulling at her leash, her fur would bunch up behind her ears, but her feet stayed glued to that little patch of pavement. I think of the times she let me coax her. I guess she was putting up with me when I thought that I was helping.

A bad pancreas. It’s an answer and it’s something we can treat. Now I am wondering what kind of dog Lily will become once her weight is back. Already she is energetic and eager and ready to burst.