Transparency

- Intermezzo -

I should be drinking coffee and reading a book right now. I should be at home, instead of this emergency clinic.

Third time. Two years.

At least we got insurance for him about a month ago, once it finally dawned on us what kind of dog he was.

The reason I'm here is the same as the previous two occasions: Kingston Felix's inability to differentiate what does not belong inside his stomach.

It's my first time at this particular clinic though, and I'm already a fan.

This place employs what you call an 'open-space' concept. Basically, there's no lobby or room to wait in as your accident-prone furry companion is removed from your sight. You have front row seats to everything they do to and for your dog (this goes for the other dogs and their owners occupying this shared space).

But rather than staying a mere observer in the entire process, you become a participant. It has the effect of humanizing the experience–the memory of your parents standing next to you as the doctor administers his treatment.

So when your dog yelps as they inject him with a vomit-inducing substance, you wince. As he starts to convulse like an old lawn mower that keeps failing to start, you get queasy. Once the contents are eventually expelled onto the padding on the floor, you're glad you didn't have a big breakfast.

As an aside, your dog apparently does not chew his food well, as evidenced by the soggy, uneaten cereal-like mass that was inside him just a moment ago.

One of the staff comes by and starts sifting through the pile like she's playing 52-card pickup. She's taking longer than expected and my apprehension is rising (i've been told the cause of today's visit doesn't show up well in x-rays, and who knows what the next step will be if it comes down to that). Then suddenly elation, followed by instant mortification as she finds that which I was so embarrassed to refer to by name (she says they remove this very same object once a week. if she's lying i do not care because it makes me feel better. and for those of you with morbid curiosities, it begins with a t and ends with an n).

I now want all my subsequent visits to be like this; I like the idea of having nothing to hide.

But there's a limit to how much I would want to see. For example, I'd like to very much not be in the operating room. In a similar vein, I'd like to turn a blind eye as to how the chicken I'm going to eat later was prepared for my eventual consumption.

Then I start thinking about how seeing what usually remains invisible isn't always helpful. Like the time the doctor called to inform me she found a suspicious growth on Kasper's x-rays. No way to determine the exact nature of said suspicious growth without additional tests. Additional tests not recommended due to his advanced age. And even if the hypothetical test results showed a negative finding, the resulting surgeries would in all likelihood not be worth the risk.

What's interesting is that the closer we got to the end, the stronger my belief became in God. There were clear limitations to what I could do, but that didn't stop me from accepting the unknown and adjusting accordingly.

I hate being kept in the dark though. It's hard not to feel sad when in those ten minutes at the emergency clinic, I trusted those people more than my own parents my entire life.

Why did they always ask me to take them at their word when their actions frequently told me otherwise? Why were promises made to be broken?

Those feelings are in the past, but this does nothing for my worries as they get older. The topics we discuss become less important and more trivial. They act like they're going to be around forever, instead of talking about what's going to happen when they're gone.

What my parents want is for me to take them at face value, to trust that everything is taken care of and will be accounted for. What they fail to understand is how much this hurts me, that what I want more than anything is for them to tell me right now instead having to find this all out later. By myself.

Maybe I'd be better off thinking of them not as my parents, but as gods.

I don't have this problem with my dogs though. I love them very much. I'll do anything for them.

With them I never have to guess.