I am looking for feedback on this book idea, and you also might find what I present here helpful and worth reading on its own. What I am trying to do with this book is present a personal journey out of a deep pit of seemingly hopeless suffering into the full light of joy, purpose and fulfillment. If that climb can help even one person who feels there is no hope to find it, this effort will have been worth it. But it obviously requires some skill in the writing in order to have the intended effect, so feedback is helpful. I’m not looking for specific editing suggestions - I’ve had plenty of those already. What I hoping to see in posting this are comments like, “yes, this looks like something I would want to read,” as opposed to “stick to your day job.” Or worse, “if I wanted to get nauseous, I would tune into a White House press conference.” Thanks for any feedback.
The glass mountain ascends to the sky above you
silent, immense, its face a treacherous impossibility
scarred by jagged rifts with razor edges
You cringe powerless at its base
Unwilling to try, unwilling to begin
How can such a thing be climbed?
Ways exist, you find your way
The glass mountain is inside you, in the heart of you. It’s the whole tangled knot of confusion, inadequacy, anger, need, greed, depression, anxiety, fear, dread, on and on that makes life feel so incomplete, so just plain…hard. The truth is that there is more to existence than feeling lousy and incomplete from day-to-day, despite everything you have achieved and accumulated. Despite the love you once found that somehow drained away from the repeated blows life can deliver. Oh so much more.
Prologue
The young girl stood in front of me holding a limp puppy in a foul blanket soiled by what was undoubtedly bloody diarrhea, judging by the exam room-saturating reek. The little being that had been an irresistibly endearing bundle of eight-week-old Aussie-cross puppy charm a couple of days earlier was now an emaciated gray lump, not moving at all as she set it down on the formica exam table.
She couldn’t have been more than eighteen, but frown lines of worry had morphed her face into a worn, firestorm-refugee mask. Limp, dark brown hair sat atop a plain, clean face, no makeup. She wore an old t-shirt and faded, stained, recently washed jeans - plain Levi’s without the manufactured holes that are supposed to make us look cool. She just looked exhausted, I’ve-had-enough tired. Enough to make me want to offer whatever help I could.
Amanda I think was her name, and I could tell she was struggling to maintain some sort of stoic country-girl visage, but the effort was a piss-poor disguise trying to mask anxiety and pain, the kind that can shrivel us into husks.
Yet there was a spark of something else I had seen so many times in my career as a vet. “Help me doc, save Barney or Sophie or ol’ Yeller, give them back to me whole and well, I know you can do it. I hope beyond hope that you can do it.”
Hidden in that was the flip side – “my heart will break if you don’t.” Glancing at her, I could see futility and sorrow bearing down on us like a caravan of doom even then, after that first look at her holding the motionless puppy. Hear the hammer blow echoing in my mind that I would have to deliver pretty damn quick - “I’m so sorry Amanda, he’s really, really sick, and we could lose him maybe before I can do much of anything to help.”
With those words, I would no doubt stomp on the light of love within a young girl’s heart that was permitting her to endure and maybe even enjoy another difficult, lonely day. Hope would sputter and dim, and yet another grieving owner would fall off the cliff into loss and sorrow.
The failures also took a real toll on me, having to see the color and spark go out of a face as I tried to convey in what felt like a pathetically inadequate way to the Amanda’s populating my vet career that a precious part of their life had been lost, or would probably be departing soon. Maybe others could be the cool and collected caregiver, the dispassionate professional, but I was about as good at that as Pee Wee Herman would have been at playing John Wick.
“His name’s Bank, he’s an Aussie cross, eight weeks old. Me and him’s been together since he was born along with the five other pups. I love ‘em all, but he just tugs at me. I don’t hardly go nowhere without him.” She hesitated, frowning even more, then, “I ain’t one to scare easy but he was fine night before last, then I seen yesterday morning that he wasn’t eating. He started with the diarrhea and vomiting in the afternoon, and this morning he was just lying there, couldn’t hardly raise his head. Two of the other pups kinda did the same thing, but they was dead when I got up this morning. It all came on so strong, so fast…” She stopped suddenly, as if the effort to say anything more would open up an irreparable wound that could crush her fragile heart.
Not the sort of history a vet likes to hear, ever. Seeing her choke back tears as she relayed that bleak information didn’t help. I have lost many of my own pets over the years - I loved them all to pieces and it always hurt because for me they were family, but for some sensitive folks they are pretty much a lifeline. And I sensed that was the case with Amanda - everything in her voice and her posture said, “I can’t take much more.”
I lifted up his lip hoping to see just please God a little pink, but all I saw was a sort of brown/gray nearly matching one of the shades of his fur. I checked for pulses and could feel only a nearly imperceptible slow beat. His temperature had sunk to around ninety-four as I recall, seven or eight degrees below dog normal. I put a tourniquet on his arm hoping to see the rise of a vein filling with blood, but saw with a blossoming futility that there was none.
The only chance this little guy would have, and even then it would be a very slim one, would be if I could get a catheter into that vein and pump him full of possibly life-saving fluids and meds, for days in this kind of critical case. How could I possibly do that with zip blood pressure and no visible vein to hit?
The three of us - Amanda, Bank and myself - formed a pretty miserable triangle of fear and doubt, maybe a circle of doom is a better geometry metaphor. Amanda and my tech LeRoy stood around the inert puppy as I poked and prodded a bit, buying time to try to find some way to tell her that this was almost certainly impossible and that he was going to die, and soon. I knew from a lot of experience even before I did the quick stool test that this was Parvovirus, a lethal, heartless killer of mostly young dogs. I glanced up at LeRoy, and saw the futility in his eyes that all members of the sincere caregiver class feel when the reality of the limits of medicine run smack into the horror of compassionless deadly disease.
“He’s really, really sick Amanda. I think you already know that. I can try, but I don’t want raise your hopes too much. This is almost certainly a Parvovirus infection, and it hit him really hard, really quickly. He is pretty far gone in terms of how far this has progressed. Bacteria get into their blood stream because the virus kind of wipes out the intestinal wall and allows them to become what we call septic, which can kill them very quickly.”
It’s always a fine line between offering too much hope and being like, “he’s a goner, might as well get out the Hefty bag right now.” You need to be honest, and at the same time to have enough humility to not kill them by giving up before you ever get started. Sentencing them to euthanasia because of your ignorance of your own limitations, and your own possibilities. We are not gods as caregivers, and what seem like miracles do occur. Bright, uplifting, unexpected grace is sometimes given if you just try. Try out of your own deep compassion for suffering critters and the desire to help and to heal.
I realized immediately that I did want to try to save him, practical considerations of “idiot, you could just as easily swim across a lava lake as bring him back to health” be damned. Whatever deep scars and aching clouds of distress that often afflicted my life at that point, and there were plenty, I did care. More than most. Yet I could also screw up so blindly and idiotically and cause pain.
The seemingly inexplicable, hurtful moral mistakes I could commit, the sometimes ugly, unforced errors that harmed myself and others, were more than offset by the selfless compassion I could show in a case like this and in other ways. You are where you are at any point in a life and you do the best you can. My combo of generous good combined with occasional forays into hurtful bad was hard on myself and hard on others. But when you carry a large load of deeply buried hurt from Day One in life, stuff happens.
Basically, I wanted to save them all if I could, and so I generally busted my ass to do that, regardless of finances, other’s judgements or the phase of the moon. On the plus side of the Dave balance sheet had always been a load of compassion for critters, and, somehow, hope for myself. Facing situations like this with caring, worried-sick owners like Amanda, and dying-sick pets like Bank, I generally opted to try despite the precarious financial situation of my young vet hospital and the fact that Amanda told me straight up she had very little money.
So I tried. I told Amanda to do the best she could to hold on to some hope despite how grim things looked and she left, clenching her jaw and blinking back tears. Her rural resolve not to cry was being sorely tested by her love for Bank and her deep desire not to lose him. He was a beacon of warmth, of love, in what otherwise was a hard life. And at least until she got out through the front door that effort held.
For me, seeing this young girl so loving and so caring, very probably on the way to losing her little friend, was a real test of emotional control too. The compassion that I brought to my vet career, the willingness to say yes, I’ll try, came from somewhere deep inside, and sprang from a flowing wellspring much bigger than me. In that place, real tears of compassion, and laughter and love, live and thrive. The smallness of ego shrinks to nothing. To close off that place, to shut it down, because we are lost in the confusion of these difficult lives we stumble through moment-by-moment is such a dreadful mistake. It’s a choice we make out of fear and pain. And it is just, really unwise.
Somehow I threaded the catheter into the collapsed eight pound puppy vein I could not see, something I had done at other times in my career without really knowing how the miracle had occurred. I felt a soft pop, almost imperceptible, as I slowly advanced the needle, maybe penetrating the collapsed vein wall. I know now that we often get help from something greater than ourselves when we need it, and ask desperately for it with our hearts in the right place, but you never truly know. There are no celestial trumpets and soft angel feathers floating down out of the sky to give you a divine bed of joy to lie on. But it feels damn good when you hook up a bag of fluids to a comatose puppy and the healing liquid flows freely into a being that so needs your help.
A flow and a glow rose up within that little triumph that bathes you in the quiet waters of warm, selfless love. It’s the Universe tapping you on the shoulder and saying, “yeah, see, that’s what comes your way when you say ‘yes’.” LeRoy’s face lifted into a small grin and he shook his head. For both of us I think, that warm bath of wonder lifting us from within was an absolute, unconscious indicator that we were on the right track, and that we are not alone in a difficult world. It was also a wondrous reminder telling us that there is so much more possibility to life than we usually think. More hope. More fulfillment. More purpose. “This way,” it says, “seek out all of the ways of living, the ways of thinking and speaking and doing, that put you in this place of effortless goodness.”
Bank was in the hospital for four days, kept in strict isolation because the Parvovirus is so explosively contagious. LeRoy and I would be all dressed up head to toe in protective gear as we went in to the quarantine room to treat him. There are foot baths as you leave the isolation ward, constant antiseptic washings of equipment, scrubbing your hands until they are raw, etc etc. For the first two days Bank hung on the knife edge between life and death, alternately leaning one way and then the other. We would have precious hope for part of the day, then despair when he seemed to be plunging into the sinkhole of imminent death. He poured out bloody diarrhea, vomited frequently, and looked just so miserable. Because he was.
Then glory, glory he clearly started getting better, and then got better rapidly! Oh, were we happy. His Aussie cuteness was almost too much to look at and not be blinded by the benevolent sun of it. I clearly remember calling Amanda and giving her the glad tidings that he would make it, and arranging for her to pick him up the following Sunday morning.
She didn’t seem to understand for a few beats, then “You means he’s going to be okay…?” And then I heard kind of a choking noise and realized she was having trouble going on, couldn’t really speak without bursting into a Niagara of tears, too overcome to say much at all.
I always get kind of choked up myself when I deliver good news to an owner and I see, and feel, a Thanksgiving bounty of gratitude pouring out of them. The highlights of those moments play like the best greatest hits album you could ever want to have, except a whole lot better than mere music, as grand as that can be. There are cases like that going back thirty-eight years for me that I can recall clearly. And cherish.
“Yeah, he’s a bright, precious little boy, Amanda, and I’ll see you tomorrow morning” was about all I could manage, and we ended the call. She had neighbors who were really worried about her and who had brought in some money to pay for his treatment, which at any hospital that could do this high level of care would have cost over three thousand bucks at the time. The payment was not much, but I was very grateful for it as I was expecting to get nothing for spending so many, many hours of care on him, and plenty of bucks we didn’t have for meds.
She called back a bit later, her voice steadier and now bubbling a bit with pure happiness. “I have another puppy, Kylie, who started to get sick and then recovered. She don’t have no further signs of being sick now. She’s a cutie, independent and smarter than hell, and I want her to have a good home and know you would be a great dad for her. I know how much you did even when you knew I ain’t got much money, so I was wonderin’ if you would accept her as part of the payment. I was goin’ to try to sell them for seven or eight hundred dollars.”
I was not really shopping for a puppy at that point, yet her offer was so sincere that I said yes. She arrived at the hospital that Sunday morning carrying another fluffy bundle of Aussie wonder, Kylie, Bank’s brother, slightly bigger than Bank and carrying the same mega-load of cuteness that would have lit up Hannibal Lecter. Immediately, all my reservations about a new puppy evaporated, my heart was smitten and stayed that way for many wonderful years with Kylie. Fourteen of them.
Hope, precious hope, that’s what Bank gave us, and we gave him, in this little drama of everyday triumph that brought a life teetering on the abyss of death all the way back into the light of fullness and possibility. It came about because Amanda and myself and the staff of my hospital were willing to say yes when it was so, so easy to say no.
********
I wanted to begin this book with a story like that, one of many in my long career as a vet, because there are so many of you out there for whom the relentless hammer taps of everyday life make it so damn easy to say ‘no’, or to feel there is no hope. It doesn’t have to be that way, for any of us, no matter how much we are suffering. When I first saw Bank, his beauty and possibility were sliding away, covered over by foul excrement. He was being ravaged by a severe illness that would have killed him within hours, maybe even minutes, sinking like a stone. He was the hurting kid I had been decades before, going down for the third time, a life about to be extinguished in pain and misery, enduring soul-crushing anxiety attacks that I could find no reason for, and no answers.
So very many of us wake up each morning with a grey ache in our belly, especially as we age and the naive dreams of our youth are splintered by the harsh reality that human existence is often very hard. The more intense sufferers like me endure a tangled knot of pain coiled up in our gut that weighs us down seemingly every single moment, but very nearly all of us are saddled with the discomfort of sensing that life should be about so much more but somehow is not.
And now I sit in my recliner for an hour or so in meditation each morning, often my purring cat Leo the fuzzball cuddling on my lap, a trickle and often a flood of purity and joy bubbles and percolates through the center of me where so much pain used to sit like an immoveable stone. If an intense sufferer like me can get to this warm place of…hope, then anyone can. You don’t have to just cope and endure, you can heal and find all of the radiant possibilities that these lives of ours really do have to offer.
I can also tell you that if you are lost from that place, if what I describe of it makes it sound as strange and unfamiliar as the surface of Mars, then read on, because this book as much as anything is a description of a road home, one person’s journey back into the land of milk and honey out of a hard, dry, nearly unlivable desert. If a person who at age twenty was so distressed that he was drifting rapidly towards the edge of a cliff that would have resulted in a fatal drop into institutionalization, drugs and alcohol, or even suicide, managed to make the journey successfully, it makes sense to pay attention.
This book is about the journey of one person from agonizing distress, the kind that drives us to drink and to drugs and even to suicide, up the steep hill to a place where suffering no longer has a claim on us. We climb the glass mountain because we have had enough and are willing to try. We seek out answers and find them, not the intellectual kind but the real stuff of wisdom that effort and willingness heap on us when we say yes and not no.
We discover diamonds that sparkle and shine, the gifts that we earn when we try really, really hard in the right way and keep fighting our way up to the higher peaks where the view is magnificent. Somehow we know down deep in a place that never really stops speaking to us that the pain is not permanent and fixed but a burden that is entirely curable, healable.
And so we climb despite the pain, because of the pain actually - it’s the compassionate Universe’s way of saying, “hey buddy, something’s wrong, fix it.” We keep going until we reach a place where all of that suffering is forgotten and we dwell in gratitude and humility and love. There really is an oasis of wonder waiting for us to find. You just have to look.
Excellent story well told!!!!
I strongly believe this will be a wonderfully successful book; thank you for sharing it at this level. You clearly have a command of the core elements of writing such a story, and I found your ability to express painful emotion breathtaking. It was moving and easily led me to looking forward to reading the whole book.