When You Defer Your Dreams to Take Care of Yourself

I made the list in a park one summer afternoon. I’d seen a woman walk by with a pair of angelic red dogs: the Hungarian Vizsla, recognized equitably for high energy and clingy love of their owner. They were even cuter as a duo, and as the group passed, it appeared one of the dogs was grinning.

“Getting a Vizsla, being a writer, having a baby.”

This was what I wanted in life and this was the list I made in a red Moleskine notebook. I was thirty-three years old, and I’d just finished checking my blood sugar; a leftover droplet from my middle finger stained the page. Sealed in blood. Perfect! I put the notebook away and resolved to be in this life—to stand on its earth, rather than orbit around it.

Though I’d been diagnosed with two different autoimmune diseases in the span of eighteen months, I sometimes liked to pretend I hadn’t been much affected by them. They were there, sure, and I had them, fine!, but I was nearly always at the cusp of overcoming.

There was Grave’s disease, a condition where too much thyroid hormone floods the body and revs its systems to an eleven. What began as an acute case of pulsating mania the year I turned thirty—dotted with episodes of sleeplessness and thoughts of drowning myself to relieve the twitches—had subsided to a dry, mundane cycle of six-month checkups and tweaks to my pill regimen.

Type 1 diabetes appeared soon after, just after my thirty-second birthday. I’d stick myself with an insulin pen and wonder if there was something missing. A reason, a diet, a belief system—something that I must have overlooked and therefore was now paying the price: mundanity seeped in continuous glucose monitoring and carb counting and chronic diarrhea.

I felt that if I could find that missing thing, if I knew what it was—I could feel better and live out the other parts of my life once and for all. The parts where I made something. The parts where I had something to show for what it meant to be a person living my real life.

By the time I made my notebook list, my Grave’s disease—when did my mind decide that Grave’s was ‘mine’? I shuddered to think I’d own this strange, boring condition for the rest of my life—was under control. But the drugs I was on to keep it that way caused birth defects. After three and a half years of drug therapy, the next step to resolve it permanently, and to be able to safely carry a child, was radioactive iodine therapy.

The doctor explained how it would go using his hands. “Your thyroid is moving like this, and your body is going to hit a wall when the treatment hits.” He sped one palm into the other, a resounding thwack! to finish.

“The bounce off the wall is going to hurt, and it will take some time for things to adjust.”

I opted in for it in the late fall, two months before I moved into the new apartment I’d bought. I swallowed the iodine through a straw delivered by a radiation safety officer. I went home and slept for the next five days in isolation, until it was safe to reenter the world. A few weeks later, on Thanksgiving morning, I headed to New Jersey out of Penn Station, where two armed guards and a German Shepherd circled toward me as I leaned against a wall eating popcorn.

My family laughed when I told them I’d set off the bomb alarm. They asked if it felt strange to be in a body that was technically radioactive. I said it didn’t matter. I was leaving all that radiated pain and sadness behind when I moved into my new home. It was comforting to think that feelings could be like the old couch that wouldn’t fit through my new doorway and became a sidewalk donation on moving day.

Three days into my new apartment, I made my very first call to 911 on behalf of an emergency low blood sugar episode. Vomit poured out of my mouth onto my new bathroom tile as I repeated my new address back to the operator.

“You’ll be fine eventually,” I mumbled into the floor. I lay very still.

“You’ll be fine eventually,” I mumbled into the floor. I lay very still.

I encountered my first Vizsla when I was eleven years old. My parents picked me up from a friend’s house and I spotted the red dog in the driveway across the street. She was flipping her head back and pawing the concrete with absolute, long-legged delight. Skinny, pink-nosed, and the goofiest angel I’d ever seen.

“Look at that dog!” I exclaimed to my parents.

“Honey, get in the car.”

I kept an eye out for the next twenty years. “Caira loves those red dogs.” It became a known association, and New York was the perfect place to spot them. I’d sense them before they came into view, trotting down the sidewalk.

“Is that a red dog?” I’d ask, out loud and to no one, with a high-pitched gasp.

And then, full focus: the amble, the bouncing ears, sauntering along in slim, rhythmic cadence. I looked for them in every dog park I passed, peering over the bushes to catch a glimpse of one streaking across the sand. I’d see them trotting down the sidewalk, noses pointed. There they were, panting through the West Village for Sunday brunch.

I got into the habit of lunging at the person holding the leash every time I saw one. “Excuse me, sorry, but where did you get your Vizsla?”

“Upstate,” I heard.

Or “Pennsylvania.”

“New Hampshire.”

Sometimes it was just a dismissive wave. A curt nod. “Thanks.”

Spring came. The pricklings of change following the radiation therapy began to appear in my body—I was awake! I could button my pants! I’d also gotten deep into the habit of chain-smoking American Spirits out the window in my living room. I’d stick my feet out over the ledge. I’d light up a cigarette. I’d stare into the back alley and focus on the moment the nicotine hooked to the back of my throat, the way a necklace clasps after a few moments of fidgeting.

I’d ended my long-term, long-distance relationship. I’d jumped face-first into a new one with an across-the-hall neighbor; that ended too. Sometimes, I leaned out the back window of the bedroom, spidering myself out on the fire escape, to just stand there. To be outside without leaving my apartment. To feel connected to something that wasn’t there. To know that something had been, and that for a brief time, I had been there too.

You can still move forward with your list, I reminded myself.

On an unseasonably balmy night in March before the snow reappeared, I spotted a beautiful red girl, moseying down a neighborhood sidewalk with her owner.

“Massachusetts.”

I called the breeder. There was a litter due in May. It felt like as good a time as any. I looked into the sky and felt the quiet dusk. I felt stillness. I breathed it in. Suddenly, it didn’t matter if I was still stress smoking, or crying about how lost I got in a relationship, or struggling to manage two diseases I hated. This could just be it.

When the puppy was born, I got a text saying my baby girl had arrived. I was mid-cigarette, legs stuck straight out and feet on a chair. Seeing the words “your” and “baby girl” and “arrived” took me back to a full-length closet mirror in my old studio apartment. For a week in January of 2017, just before I’d turned 33, I stood in front of that mirror every day for periods of time, marveling at how beautiful the body could be.

I looked at my belly. I looked past my insulin pump. I put a hand on my stomach, and breathed in the touch, the relief, of what life beyond myself could feel like.

But outside of the brackets mounting the reflective glass to the closet door, nothing was there.

I whispered to the face that returned my gaze, “It’s not the right time now, sweetie.” Tears ran down her cheeks.

I sent pictures of the litter—eleven ecstatic little piglets, romping through a plastic playpen filled with colored balls—to friends, family, coworkers. This was the thing I had wanted for so long, and now the thing was going to live in my apartment.

A beautiful friend, her hound dog, and my anxiety drove 217 miles in a Zipcar to Acushnet, Massachusetts, on a Saturday morning in July. We drove 217 miles back to New York the same evening with an eleven-pound, red velvet Vizsla puppy dozing in my lap. The pictures from that day show a woman at the height of euphoria, in sheer, utter disbelief and gratitude that something like this could exist in life—that there were friendships to get you on the highway to an actual Vizsla paradise, that the life I held in my arms could actually belong to me.

On the way home, in the dark, I fretted about being fined by Zipcar for the dog hair on the seats. I thought about how nice it would be to get a good night’s sleep after a long day, but remembered that the breeder said it was unlikely either of us would rest much the first night. And I thought about that pregnancy from the year before—the one I didn’t, couldn’t keep, that had appeared like some jokey end-of-year sale reminder, before the radioactive iodine, of what was possible, but not available.

I was afraid to set the pup down, to let her sniff the grass. I was afraid she’d be hurt and I wouldn’t be able to protect her. I was afraid to admit what I was feeling again, what I had seen in that fifty by fourteen-inch mirror—a portrait reflected back to me of what I wanted, what I’d been clamoring to get to once I made it through the sludge and the chaos of present day. How strange that I now wanted to climb out of the portrait’s frame.

The next morning, my little buddy peered her perfect head over the stairs, ears flopping forward. It was our fourth trip outside and she was already a sidewalk sensation. Strangers cooed over the baby Vizsla. They wanted to crouch down and pet her head, stroke her little ears, kiss her nose. I’d lived on my block for months and had never seen any of these people before. They flocked to us. I was a dog owner.

On the first few ventures to the sidewalk, I carried her down the hallway stairs and back up again, but by the afternoon I wanted to test her reaction to making the descent on her own. She scoffed and shrunk back into her slightly oversized collar. I was afraid to tug on her teeny neck, but gave just the tiniest pull of the leash. She furrowed her brows and squatted in prim, sitting posture.

I looked at this small, puzzled, rusty-hued creature. I realized then, “Don’t force it, Caira. She’s never been here before. It will take some time.”

“Don’t force it, Caira. She’s never been here before. It will take some time.”

I picked her up and carried her out, nuzzling her silken ears all the way. My floppy little angel.

We lasted two days together.

At four o’clock that Monday afternoon, I dropped to the floor on my knees, gagging on the glucose tablets I was trying to shove into my mouth. I’d forgotten to keep an eye on my blood sugar after a miscalculated insulin dose. Somewhere in the background, she gnawed on a Kong ball. I kept my cheek to the floor. Drool collected in a sweetened pool.

After my blood sugar stabilized, I lay on my bed and stared at the ceiling.

“Well, Caira. I don’t think we can go drop you back off at the breeder, now can we?”

The thought of driving myself out to nowhere, or opening the car door and watching diabetes hop out onto the pavement was hysterical. I laughed the strange, loud, relieved laugh of a person utterly defeated.

“I just don’t want a dog right now.”

I Just. Don’t. Want. A. Dog. Right. Now.

“I just want to take care of myself.”

I breathed in and out. I could feel my heartbeat. Tap, tap. How funny it’s always there, but I only notice it sometimes.

I closed my eyes and mumbled to the dimming afternoon. You can know what you want. And you can know it’s not the time to have it.

“This is going to hurt, Caira.”

It did.

A friend of the breeder’s just outside New York who’d adopted from an earlier litter was willing to take the pup. She would have a big backyard, an older brother, and two teenage children to look after her. We took a Lyft to her new home around midnight. She slept in her dog bed in my lap the entire way. I stroked her small puppy head and stared out the window. If the driver wondered why there was a little Vizsla in the car on the way to Nassau County on the drive out, and then an empty-handed, silent thirty-four-year -old on the drive back, he didn’t ask.

I slept for twelve hours and woke up confused. A few beats passed and I realized—the apartment was silent and I was alone. I tried coaxing myself to just go back to sleep, that I didn’t have to do this right now. I didn’t have to look at the emptiness I’d made.

“She needs to go outside,” I thought. “I need to pick her up and take her outside without her little paws touching the ground first so she knows to go potty.” But she wasn’t there. Nothing was.

“What have I done?” I couldn’t breathe.

The sadness felt familiar at first, but I was swept into an undertow. It was a thousand parts of pain, breaking at the surface and running down my face.

“What kind of a person am I to want something my whole life and have a nervous breakdown when I finally bring it home? Am I a monster?” I asked my friend, in a text.

“Nope,” he said. “That’s bananas! We got a basset hound named Humphrey once and he jumped on my parents’ bed and took a giant piss and my dad was like, alright! Back to the pound for you, little guy.”

I started hyena laughing.

The dense cluster of dread in my chest dislodged briefly and, for one flash, I felt relief. This wasn’t it. I wasn’t going to be saved by this after all. Caring for the puppy in my apartment wasn’t going to bring me home. I’d been mining for the answer for so long I’d forgotten what the question was. In that brief, breathable moment, it felt like it could be OK.

I pulled out a trash bag and started picking up the dog things I’d collected the past few weeks. The pee pads and the soft chew training treats. The paw-printed plastic bags I’d rolled up and stuffed in my pocket on our hourly ‘let’s go outside!’ enchantments. The hand-me-down dog collar from my family’s fourteen-year-old Doberman we’d said goodbye to in the spring.

I stopped when I saw her elevated doggy dish, the water and kibble still in their bowls from the night before. I’d mixed in a teaspoon of coconut oil with the kibble, because it’s good for their young coats. I put down the trash, momentarily stunned from the pain.

I couldn’t just throw it all away like it was never here and move on. Not yet. It was too much. It was too much, and I couldn’t do it.

And then, “Don’t force it, Caira. You’ve never been here before. It will take some time.”

I sat down at my table and blinked my living room into focus. The window unit AC hummed from the bedroom. It was warm outside, and quiet. “It is just me for now,” I thought. I almost smiled. How boring and painful and necessary.

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