Veterinarian Dr. D.’s New Place

Have you seen the new Orcas Veterinary Service? It’s awesome! I was just there so our dog could have major dental work. (It’s at 9 Hope Lane up Mt Baker Road near Uzek’s automotive place.)

I am amazed at what Dr. D. and her team were able to do for Roxy. She came to us from the Friday Harbor shelter with teeth you’d see in a much older dog, and she was only about one or so (we think). Not ever having experienced a dog with such teeth, I assumed whatever happened in her young life was irreversible.

Her teeth continued to worsen over time, and several years ago Dr. D. urged me to schedule Roxy for a dental appointment. I blew it off, thinking it was a first-world luxury thing that only some people did.

It wasn’t until after our neighbors (who have veterinarian children) kept Roxy for us while we were traveling that I truly understood we needed to do something. When we returned home, our neighbor advised us to go to the vet – that Roxy’s tender eating and bad breath were signs of something wrong. My husband had been feeding Roxy each day, and he had been noticing the same tenderness for a little while. When our neighbor happened to mention that his cats’ plaque comes right off when it is worked on – something I didn’t even know was possible – I realized I had blown it by assuming Roxy’s worsening dental situation couldn’t be fixed.

Ever since we got Roxy, I grew so accustomed to the fact that she didn’t welcome hard, crunchy food that I never even saw that as what was perhaps an even earlier sign that something was amiss – oh, all the years people have offered her hard biscuits and I’ve told them she doesn’t seem to care for them.

I don’t usually think of myself as inattentive, unobservant, or worse, dense. I have children and I take pride in being a parent who is on top of things. In my own life, I usually take agency over things because I don’t ever want to experience regret. (Though I’m starting to see a trend – I haven’t visited the dentist myself since COVID started in March of 2020!)

I regret that I didn’t see clearly long ago. Wrapping up Roxy’s eating particularities into her other idiosyncrasies – not wanting to walk on a leash (she was abandoned on a leash), not allowing my husband to pet or cuddle her for the FIVE YEARS she’s lived with us (she was harmed by a man in her past), not allowing herself to enjoy other dogs (perhaps she had to defend herself while abandoned attached to a leash) – I think I dismissed it all as a big ball of unfixable issues.

The irony is that if Roxy had been able to chew on things all along, it would have helped her dental situation by cleaning her teeth along the way. But she’s not a ball fetcher or a stick chewer, and we didn’t keep bones around the house because we didn’t love the idea of slobber everywhere.

Learn from my mistakes. If your pet is showing signs of something, don’t assume it can’t be fixed. In one dental visit, Roxy’s terrible teeth were completely transformed. They are unbelievably, beautifully white now. She had seven teeth extracted (!), two of which were loose. Poor dog! How long were those teeth loose? Gosh, the negligence I feel. Yet this is the same dog I carried on and off on walks every day for four years, only giving up this past year due to back issues that probably began from doing that. This is the dog that we roll around on the floor with; the dog that ran up to the Turtlehead outlook with me every day last winter when it was all my back would allow (oddly); the dog that sleeps next to my son every night; the dog that is an important part of our family life every day.

While I don’t love being transparent about it and telling the world how I’ve blown it, I think it’s important to let others know that even when someone is right under your nose, you can misread signs when they can’t speak to you. Especially when you’ve always had healthy dogs who didn’t have problems or past families who abandoned them; whose white, healthy teeth never showed signs of needing brushing or periodic trips to the doggy dentist. Don’t write off obvious things as quirks that a dog must be stuck with, or as things that are unfixable.

Now that I’ve stood inside Dr. D.’s new office, reading her certificates while waiting for Roxy to be brought back out to me, I’m ready to go back for doggy acupuncture to see if it can help her with her “man stress” and her nervousness around strangers and dogs. I found a previous article in The Sounder in which Dr. D. said, “Acupuncture has been useful for managing arthritis, musculoskeletal pain, seizures, asthma, behavioral problems, gastrointestinal issues, nausea, incontinence, etc.” I know it firsthand, as one session of acupuncture with Dr. Shu back in September saved me from having an impending surgery on my L5-S1 disc in my back. Perhaps Dr. D.’s acupuncture knowledge can help Roxy shed some of the stresses of her past.

For now, I’m excited that Roxy has been freed of the dental stresses she’s had for who knows how long. Not everything in her mouth was reversible, but hopefully her pain is gone and she won’t have trouble eating. Perhaps I’ll come to realize that she actually loves hard biscuits. And wow, her bad breath is completely gone. It turns out it wasn’t just a “little dog issue,” as one person told me. Time to start brushing her teeth, as Dr. D. advised long ago.

Thank you immensely, Dr. D. and all your staff.

I just called my own dentist’s office and made an appointment. My turn now.

Photo of Dr. Swaran Dhaliwal above courtesy of the Orcas Veterinary Service website.