Part 2: My Service Pit Bull Pulled My Wheelchair Up That Hill Every Day — Until the Day His Own Legs Started to Give Out

Part 2

I should tell you what Strength’s pull felt like, because the pull is the whole language between us, and you’ll need it later.

A dog pulling a wheelchair is not a sled dog hauling for the joy of running. It is a partnership conducted entirely through a taut line. I could feel everything about him through that line. I could feel when he was strong and easy, the pull smooth and even, the chair gliding. I could feel when the grade got steep and he leaned into it, the line going from taut to singing. I could feel, through four feet of nylon, the exact mood and effort of an animal I could not always turn my head to see.

My name is Cora. I am thirty-eight now. I was a high school biology teacher before the MS took my balance and then my legs, and I mention the biology because it matters to how I eventually understood what was happening to him.

Here is the small thing. The thing I felt through the line for weeks and explained away.

The pull had changed.

It was subtle at first. A little less smooth on the flats. A small hitch, now and then, that I felt through the harness, like he was catching a back foot and recovering. I told myself it was the cold. I told myself he was getting older — he was only six, but pit bulls aren’t young at six. I told myself a hundred small things, the exact same hundred small things I had once told myself, years before, about my own legs, in the months before the words multiple sclerosis entered my life.

A hitch. A catch. A recovery. It’s nothing. It’s the cold. It’s age.

I had heard my own body make those excuses. I should have known the sound of them coming from his.

But it mattered. The change in the pull mattered. I just was not ready to feel it for what it was.

Part 3

Let me tell you about our days, because I need you to love them before I take one of them apart.

Strength woke me. Not with a bark — with a cold nose against my hand where it hung off the bed, checking, every morning, whether this was a good-legs day or a no-legs day. He learned to tell before I did. On the bad mornings he wouldn’t leave the side of the bed until I had a hand on his harness.

He got me up. He braced for the transfer to the chair. He pulled me to the bathroom, the kitchen, the door.

And then we went out.

The hill was the centerpiece of every day. It is not a big hill — a curving residential street that rises maybe forty feet over a couple hundred yards, with a stand of cottonwoods at the top that throw the most beautiful light in the late morning, this dappled, moving, golden light that comes down through the leaves and lies across the asphalt in coins. We would crest the hill into that light every morning, Strength and I, and for one minute at the top I was not a sick woman in a chair. I was a person at the top of a hill in the sun with her dog.

That was the whole point of the hill. That minute in the light.

Strength pulled me into it every day for two years. Rain. Heat. The days my hands were too numb to help with the wheels at all. He never once refused the harness. He would stand and wait, every morning, for me to clip the line, and then he would lean into it, and we would go.

People in the neighborhood knew us. The mail carrier called him “the engine.” Kids waved. An old man who sat on his porch saluted us, actually saluted, every single morning, and Strength learned to give one tail-wag back at the exact spot, which made the old man laugh every time like it was the first time.

We were a fixture. The woman and the pit bull who climbed the hill. Half the people who smiled at us, I think, had been told at some point in their lives that a pit bull was a dangerous animal, and here was one hauling a disabled woman up a hill into the sunlight every morning with the gentle determination of a creature who had decided this was his purpose on earth.

He had been “shut down.” “Unlikely to bond.” A throwaway dog with scars he didn’t get from being loved.

And he pulled me up that hill for two years like it was the most important job in the world. Which, to him, I think it was. Which, to me, it was.

I did not know, those two years, that I was watching the strongest part of our life together and that it had a clock on it.

Part 4

The Tuesday his legs buckled, the light at the top of the hill was perfect. I remember that. It is a cruel detail and it is true.

We were halfway up. The line was taut. And then I felt, through the harness, a thing I had never felt before — not a hitch, not a catch, but a drop. The whole back of him went down. His back legs simply folded under him, and the chair lurched to a stop, and I twisted around as far as my body would let me to see.

Strength was down. His hindquarters had collapsed onto the asphalt, his front legs still up, his head turning back toward me with an expression I have never been able to forget — not pain, exactly. Confusion. Bewilderment. The look of a body that has always done what it was told suddenly refusing an order.

I knew that look. I had worn that look, the first morning my own legs didn’t answer.

I said his name. I said, “It’s okay. Stay. Stay down, baby, it’s okay.”

And Strength did not stay down.

He got his back legs back under him — shaking, scrabbling on the asphalt, his nails actually catching and tearing — and he stood. And he looked up the hill. And he leaned back into the harness.

I said no. I said stop. I tried to set the brakes on the chair to take the load off him.

He pulled anyway. He pulled us both up the rest of that hill on legs that had just failed him, dragging the chair and me and his own betraying body up into the cottonwood light, because that was the job, because I was at the other end of the line, because in two years he had never once not finished the climb and he was not going to start now.

We crested into the gold. He stood at the top, sides heaving, three legs solid and one trembling, and he turned and pressed his head into my lap the way he did at the top every morning.

And I sat in my chair in that beautiful light with my hands in his fur, and I felt the back half of his body shaking against the side of the wheelchair, and I knew. Some part of me knew before any vet said anything.

I made the appointment that afternoon.

Part 5

The vet ran bloodwork and a neurological exam and then sent off a panel I had to wait two days for, and on the second day she called me, and I could hear in her voice before she said anything that she had been thinking about how to say it.

She told me Strength had an autoimmune neurological condition. The canine version of a disease in the same family as mine. His own immune system, confused, attacking his own nervous system — the signal from his brain to his back legs arriving garbled, or late, or not at all.

The same disease. The same betrayal. The same body turning on its own wiring.

She was quiet for a second, and then she said the thing that I have repeated to people a dozen times because I still can’t believe a sentence like that got said out loud about my life. She said, “Cora — forgive me for asking, but. What’s your diagnosis? Because his presentation looks an awful lot like —”

And I told her. Multiple sclerosis. Autoimmune. Demyelinating. My immune system attacking the insulation on my own nerves.

There was a long silence on the line.

And then she said, gently, “You two have the same kind of disease.”

I sat in my apartment holding the phone, and across the room Strength was lying on his bed, watching me with his ears soft, his back legs splayed out behind him in a way they never used to splay, and I understood the thing that has organized my life ever since.

We were not a healthy dog and a sick woman.

We were two creatures with the same broken thing inside us, who had found each other, and one of us had been hauling the other up a hill every morning while the exact same disease quietly took apart his legs the way it had already taken apart mine.

Part 6

Once I understood that, the whole two years turned over in my hands.

The change in the pull — the hitch, the catch, the recovery I’d felt through the line for weeks. That wasn’t the cold. That wasn’t age. That was the disease, the same disease, sending garbled signals to his back legs, and I had felt it through four feet of nylon and explained it away with the exact excuses I’d once made for my own body. I, of all people. I had heard those excuses in my own mouth years before and I still hadn’t recognized them coming up the line from him.

The morning nose-check. The way he’d learned to tell, before I did, whether it was a good-legs day or a no-legs day. I’d thought it was just sensitivity, a smart dog reading my body. Now I wonder if part of what he understood about bad-legs days was that he knew, in his own body, what bad legs were. Whether he checked on me each morning because he was beginning to learn the same uncertainty himself — waking up never knowing which legs he was getting.

And the hill. The Tuesday his legs buckled and he stood up and pulled anyway, tearing his nails, dragging his own failing hindquarters up into the light. I’d thought it was loyalty, and it was. But I think now it was also recognition. He knew what it was to have a body stop answering. And he had spent two years being the thing that got me up the hill anyway, the thing that finished the climb when the body said no — and when his own body said no, on that hill, he did for himself exactly what he’d been doing for me. He finished the climb anyway.

He had been teaching me, that whole time, how to live in a body that betrays you. I just didn’t know he’d be the one to demonstrate the final lesson.

The vet asked me, gently, on a later visit, whether I wanted to talk about “options,” and I knew what she meant, and I said no. I said Strength had never once looked at my failing body and decided I wasn’t worth the climb. I was not about to look at his.

So we made a different plan.

Part 7

We do physiotherapy together now.

There is a rehab clinic across town that has an underwater treadmill for dogs and a separate program for human neuro patients, and through a piece of luck and a kind administrator, our appointments are on the same afternoon, in adjacent rooms, every Thursday.

I do my hour of trying to make my legs remember what legs are for. Strength does his hour — the underwater treadmill, the balance work, the slow careful exercises to keep the back legs moving while the disease tries to take them. We can hear each other through the wall. I have learned to recognize the splash of his treadmill. He has learned to recognize my voice doing the counting my therapist makes me do, and the techs tell me he works harder when he can hear me.

Two patients with the same disease, in two rooms, on the same afternoon, both of us learning to keep moving legs that don’t want to move.

He is weaker than I am now. That is the hard truth of it. His disease moves faster than mine; the vet warned me it might. There are mornings his back legs don’t work at all, and I have a little cart now, wheels for his hindquarters, the canine version of my chair, and on those mornings we are two wheeled creatures in one small apartment, and I would not trade it for two healthy legs apiece if it meant not having had this.

And here is the thing that undoes everyone I tell it to.

He still tries to pull me up the hill.

I have a power-assist on the chair now; he doesn’t need to. The vet would prefer he didn’t. But on his good-legs mornings, Strength still goes to the harness and stands and waits for me to clip the line, and he still leans into it, and he pulls — slower now, with a hitch, his back legs in their brace — and I let the power-assist carry most of it, and we climb the hill together, both of us limping in our own ways, up into the cottonwood light.

Somebody asked me, at the clinic, how I do it. How I keep climbing that hill with a dog who can barely climb it himself.

I said: “We’re both limping. But we go up together.”

Part 8

The old man on the porch still salutes us. Strength still gives him the one tail-wag, slower than he used to, at the exact same spot, and the old man still laughs like it’s the first time, and I have started to suspect the old man knows exactly what is happening to my dog and salutes harder because of it.

We crest the hill most mornings. Some mornings we don’t make it and we turn around, and that’s a kind of day too, and I’m learning to let it be one.

But on the mornings we make it, we stop at the top, in the gold, and Strength presses his head into my lap, and I put my hands in his fur, and we sit there, the two of us, in the light that was always the whole point.

He was a throwaway dog with scars and a closed-off heart, and they told me he’d never bond.

He pulled me up a hill for two years.

Now I pull him.

We are both limping. We go up together.

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