Rusty joins the Prozac nation

I drove up to the pharmacy's Drive-Thru window, and handed the prescription for generic Prozac to the pharmacist, a rather short, gray-haired man with uneven teeth, who seemed to recognize me and smiled.

"It's for him," I said, smiling back and signaling with my head toward Rusty, who was sitting in the back, blithely looking out the window with partial interest at the exchange between me and the unknown man.

Today, the vet prescribed Prozac for my dog after I asked whether she thought it would be helpful. He's been on a mild anti-anxiety medication for a few years, but as he gets older he gets more, not less, anxious. So I'm trying the big guns now.

Rusty's story is a sad one up until the time my husband and I brought him home, one year after we were married. He must have been the cutest of puppies, and when his puppy-like qualities come alive (less often now because he's almost 14), he gives us a glimpse of the care-free, smiling, bounding dog he would've been, if he hadn't been tortured as a puppy.

Rusty came into our lives because of a mistake. After cajoling my husband into agreeing to adopt a dog, I spread the word that I was looking to rescue a Labrador Retriever. When my gringo boss, back in 1995, said his neighbor had a Lab and wanted to get rid of it because it would eat his hens, I jumped at the opportunity to rescue an unwanted dog. My boss said the dog had spent most of his first year tied up because of his taste for chicken, and that he was in really bad shape.

When my husband and I went to pick the dog up, sight unseen, we traveled about 45 minutes into the hills of Caguas, Puerto Rico. When we arrived at my boss' home in the country, he (who had already taken the one-year-old dog from his cruel neighbor) handed him over and told us that his name was Rusty. I took one look at the dog and felt like I had made a terrible, terrible mistake.

First, there was nothing of the Labrador about the dog, so I don't know what my boss was thinking (he probably just used that as a ploy to convince me to take the dog!). The scrawny, mange-covered dog was rather smallish (at his heaviest he now weighs 52 pounds), with wolf-yellow eyes, and fur that has more in common with the color of a Golden Retriever than a yellow Lab. I was so let down that I wept as we drove off with the smiling dog in the car to God-knew-what kind of future.

But I knew there was no going back. Disappointed as I was that Rusty was not the kind of dog I wanted, I would've never dumped him at a shelter, knowing that he would get put down pretty quickly. In fact, we are convinced that if we hadn't adopted him, Rusty would likely not have survived long.

It's been 13 years since that moment, and I still feel ashamed when I remember how disappointed and upset I was that he wasn't a Lab. What a comemierda I was! After all, once he recovered from his sarcoptic mange and put on weight, he became a very handsome sato, with intelligent and soulful eyes that sometimes seem to beg me to translate some situation into dog-speak so he can understand.

From the first day we brought him home, he bonded with us. That day he stayed with my husband, who was working from home back then. When I arrived that evening from work, he started barking at me, letting me know that there was a new defender of the house. My husband had to remind him of who I was before he would stop warning me away from my own home.

When we first took him for a walk, we noticed that Rusty didn't know how to mark territory. He only knew how to pee squatting, like a female. Slowly but surely, however, he figured it out somehow, and started marking territory with a vengeance. He eventually realized that he was meant to be an Alpha dog, which has meant a lot of re-education on our part so that he knows que no se manda y que ésto no es una república.

To this day, he only accepts into his pack those people he met during those early years with us. New acquaintances and friends, those we've met here in Ohio, he mistrusts as strangers and must be kept away from all visitors, especially tall men, because he does have a tendency to nip to assert his Alpha status.

Now that he's elderly and not as nimble, we often recall how he loved for us to take him to the park, where he would run in large, long circles, chasing an invisible rabbit, or how he loved to run in the sand of a solitary beach, though (true to his not being a Lab) he hates the water. But he'll still chase a squirrel up a tree, if given the chance. And he loves to pretend that he could chase down the deer he sees when we're at my small college on the hill.

It's true that he's a lot of work, almost (but, of course, not quite) like having a human child. It's also true that he is on expensive medication for reflux disease, for arthritis and for his anxiety, and that he requires a special diet of costly food and treats because he has allergies to the common proteins that dogs love (like his life-long favorite: chicken). But I wouldn't change Rusty for the world.

And I'm going to miss this old dog terribly when he finally goes to the Doggy Park in the Sky to chase squirrels and run with the wolves forever. He's been my faithful companion all these years and he's been a fixture of our marriage almost from its beginning.

Now, as the countdown gets shorter for how much longer he has to be with us, I want to give him the best quality, since I can't do much about the quantity, of life (that's mostly up to God). That's why my dog has joined the Prozac nation and we'll be trying out the medication to see if it helps ease that perennial, unshakable anxiety that preys on him. It's like he cannot shed the memory of having spent one year as a tortured animal even when the last 13 have been spent as a pampered, loved and cherished pet.

But, like for humans, there are memories that must be impossible for dogs to set aside. Humans, at least, have repression to help them and I know that the few traumatic memories of my childhood are buried so deep that I cannot (and wouldn't at this point) call them up, hard as I might try. That's how our minds protect us, keep us sane and functional.

Dogs don't have that capability and while they do live mostly in the moment, and that's why we've been able to get glimpses of the carefree dog Rusty might have been, whatever that man did to Rusty is burned in his consciousness never to be erased, until he dies.

If I sin of anything with that dog it is perhaps by trying so hard to make him happy, by living my life around the dog's needs, and by my inability to tell myself: "It's just a dog!" I made a pact with Rusty the day I rescued him, even if he wasn't the dog I thought I wanted back then.

That pact is for the rest of his life and that pledge means that, as long as I have the means and the ability, he will not want for love and for care and for security. Here's to hoping that his initiation into the Prozac nation makes a difference for both of us.