Houdini had the run of our hearts

By David Horst  sandhill7@gmail.com

There's a lot of joy missing from our house.

Nearly two years to the day after I wrote about the loss of our dog Molly, we are experiencing the heartbreak of the death of a pet again.

Houdini, our yellow Lab, was only 6 years old, but cancer is no respecter of birthdays.

We took Houdini to the vet last spring because he seemed to have something stuck in a nostril. He was sneezing and breathing uncomfortably. An examination didn't find anything at first, then in June, A CT scan found a nasal tumor. It was cancerous.

It’s a common story for this unfamiliar cancer. Nasal tumors make up only 1 percent of tumors in dogs, but 80 percent are cancerous. Nasal cancer is more common in larger breeds and older dogs.

We were referred to the University of Wisconsin Veterinary School. The tumor was inoperable, the cancer incurable.


UW is a national leader in CT scan and precise radiation technology to map and treat cancerous tumors.  We went through a course of six radiation treatments for Houdini, and it succeeded in shrinking the tumor, relieving the symptoms with minimal side effects and buying him another season of romping in the snow, which he did with pure exuberance.

Houdini was a dog who wore his emotions on his paw. He would greet us with a whipping tail and low, excited moan that earned him the nickname Chewbacca, after the Star Wars character. Reach for the leash and he would explode with excitement.

He was all Lab and could barely tolerate a minute without something in his mouth. Normally that something was a shoe.  He would carry them around the house, leaving the two halves of the pair in different rooms. But he never chewed them up.

A scarf signed by the UW staff that treated him calls him the “sweetest lapdog ever.” That’s right, sit on the floor and our 80-pound dog would sit on your lap.

Most of all, he was an unrelenting runner. He earned his name. If he pulled loose of the leash or slipped through a door, a wild-eyed realization would flash onto his face and he was off. Early in our adoptive relationship, that might mean that I was running down our road in sport coat and tie, or my wife was wandering the woods in 10-degree temperatures calling for Houdini.

We would let him run in a fenced-in pasture.  He had improved greatly. "Houdini, here," finally meant something to him. He would come to us and stand while we reattached the leash. But never did we get to the point of detaching it outside of the fences.

He loved running more than any toy, more than any treat. He ran right up to his last day. That's when the tumor suddenly began pressing on his brain and bulged out his right eye. The vet suspected internal bleeding behind the eye made it happen so fast. At least we were spared the weeks of nasal bleeding normally associated with this cancer and the difficult decision of when to decide "enough."

As with Molly, Houdini was able to die at home. We sat on the floor comforting him through two endless hours of his increasingly shallow breathing, thinking he was about to leave on his own. In the end, we called the vet to end his suffering. This time there was no doubt about whether the time was  right.

The house is so quiet now. No Chewbacca calls. No cardboard snatched stealthily from the recycling and torn to bits on the living room rug. No banging of dining room chairs as he scratched his backside on the table. No pure joy at our return home.

Shoes are disappointedly where we left them. The pasture snow is unmarked by wide-spaced tracks from leaps of joy. And there’s the quiet.

As one friend said, dogs take so little and give so much. And leave such a big void behind.