Sophie

By Michael Behar

March 31, 2011

Sophie entered my home for the first time on September 15, 2001. She was exactly eight weeks old and scarcely longer than my unfurled palm. A silken salt-and-pepper coat, which would eventually become uniformly platinum, was just beginning to emerge through her chunky puppy fur. Miniature schnauzers are renown for their smarts. But Sophie had an intellect that transcended her canine kin. Housetraining took just four days. Puppy school was a breeze. When we'd visit a dog park, Sophie was playful but also wary. The lawless chaos seemed to befuddle her sense of logic and order. She rarely strayed far, and wandered toward the exit gate after just ten or fifteen minutes - a cue that she'd had enough.

I was living in Washington, D.C., where I had moved with my wife, who was attending graduate school. Sadly, our marriage dissolved soon after we arrived. Newly divorced in a strange city left my social life in tatters. Sophie would become not only my closest ally and compatriot during those trying months, but often my only source of emotional interaction for weeks at a time. I was a freelance writer working from a cramped, one-bedroom apartment. Rarely did I get into the field. I'd do most of my reporting by phone, using a recorder to tape interviews. Sophie's yelps often found their way into the background din of those calls, captured in perpetuity on the archived audio tapes.

Running was my escape, and Sophie was my pacer. We'd log five, seven, sometimes even ten miles in an afternoon, and Sophie rarely tired. That's impressive for any dog, but miraculous for a dainty 14-pound schnauzer. Sophie was an athlete who blossomed further when I moved to Boulder, Colorado, in 2006. The mountain trails became her boundless playground. I remarried, and Sophie, who was the ring-bearer at our wedding, would invariably accompany my wife and I on daylong hikes into the nearby Indian Peaks Wilderness and on overnight backpacking treks to the high country. Last year, when our son was born, Sophie took on her nursemaid role with confident aplomb. If our son cried, Sophie was the first to leap from our bed (she slept wedged between us) and scuttle down the hall to his room to assess the situation.

We took Sophie's health with the utmost regard, never missing annual physicals or vaccinations, and keeping her on a lean, organic diet. Not once did she have a serious medical issue. That is, until mid-October 2010. We noticed a sporadic cough, as if Sophie had something lodged in her throat. Several trips to our local veterinarian and, later, to a specialist in Denver didn't yield a diagnosis. Baffled, our vet suggested we take her to the Colorado State University Veterinary Teaching Hospital. It took only a few minutes during a physical exam for the attending doctor to find the lump in Sophie's left lymph node. An hour later, after undergoing aspirations, Sophie was diagnosed with malignant histiocystosis, a rare but extremely aggressive form of lymphatic cancer. Ultrasounds showed additional tumors in her abdomen, spleen, and lungs. We knew it was grave when four CSU doctors came into the exam room to give us this terrible news. Her chances for survival, they told us, were zero. But her life could be extended beyond the normally grim four-week estimate if we allowed Sophie to enroll in a clinical trial that would entail a combination of cutting-edge drugs to fight her tumors. We agreed, and our oncologist, Dr. Kristen Weishaar, was supremely thorough and competent in administering the trial.

After Sophie's first chemotherapy treatment, Dr. Weishaar called our home numerous times to check on her condition. At first, Sophie seemed to bounce back, nibbling on snacks and gulping water. And then just as abruptly, she stopped eating entirely. Soon her body began to wither, along with her moxie. Dr. Weishaar doled out nearly every drug in the CSU pharmacy trying to kindle Sophie's appetite. Nothing worked, and after a series of X-rays and ultrasounds we discovered why: Her tumors had more than quadrupled in size in just three weeks. Despite the best treatment in the United States with the latest experimental therapies, the cancer was simply too strong to arrest. Sophie's weight continued to plummet and by New Year's Eve her sprightly gait had become a precarious hobble and then, two days later, she couldn't stand at all.

Sophie took her last breath at 11:20 AM on January 5, 2011, an unusually warm, sunny winter morning. Earlier that day we had propped her upright in our son's stroller and took her for a final cruise around the neighborhood. Sophie hoisted her head toward the shimmering blue sky, pointing her wet nose into the air to get her last whiffs of earthly existence. There is a deep void in our hearts that Sophie once filled, a hole that will never close. When a pet dies of a sudden illness, there is always doubt—that nagging question of whether you could have done more to save your faithful friend. But because of our experience at CSU, with Dr. Weishaar and her team, those doubts have been fleeting. Sophie's treatment was utterly exhaustive, leaving us confident that her death was inevitable and insurmountable, defiant of medical science. Today, Sophie lives eternally within us. Whenever we recollect her infectious energy and zeal for life, it puts smiles on our faces and warms our souls.

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