The Dog Who Chose Me

The day Squeaker chose me, I was in pain.

It was 2015. My mom was riding with the mother of one of her friends when they saw a tiny puppy walking down the middle of the road, trailing a broken leash with a duct-taped collar. My mom didn’t want to stop. Her friend’s mother insisted. They picked him up.

The other woman already had little dogs. We didn’t have many animals and didn’t want more, so my mom assumed the woman would take him home. Instead, when they got to our house, her friend’s mother brought him inside and left him there. She was done with the story after that.

My mom told me not to get attached. She said we weren’t keeping him.

But one day she came out into the living room where I was curled up in the recliner on a bad pain day, and he was in my lap. He’d claimed me. And between that and the smile she saw on my face, she couldn’t say no.

She was wrong about not keeping him.

He was wrong about very few things in his life. He was wrong about the possum being a horse. He was wrong about Peep the chicken being a threat to his existence. He was wrong about closed doors being a personal attack.

He was not wrong about me.

My First Dog #

We had dogs growing up, but I have three able-bodied younger sisters, so you can guess who those dogs gravitated toward. Which basically meant I never really had one. I was the one who liked dogs but wasn’t chosen by dogs. I accepted it the way you accept any pattern that repeats often enough to feel like a rule.

Squeaker was my first.

I’m autistic. I’m blind. I have low energy. I’m chronically ill. I’m not the person dogs pick. I’m not the person who runs and plays and throws things. I’m the person lying in the recliner on a bad pain day, and that’s the person he walked over to and chose.

He didn’t know he was supposed to prefer someone else. He didn’t know the pattern. He didn’t know the rule. He just walked in, looked at me, and decided.

That was eleven years ago. He’s never changed his mind.

How He Got His Name #

He wasn’t fixed, which meant he went around humping everything. He flipped a teddy bear over and tried it on that. He even got my arm once.

My mom asked me to name him, but I’m horrible with names and couldn’t come up with one. She jokingly suggested “Chester the Molester.” I said no.

Then we heard his high-pitched squeaky bark and his sneezes, and that’s how we got Squeaker.

He was all ears back then. This tiny puppy with big bat ears. Black fur, tan markings, and now that he’s old, white and grey coming in around his muzzle and eyebrows. He’s a miniature pinscher. Twelve pounds of opinion.

What He Is Like #

Squeaker is sweet, dramatic, stubborn, brave, clingy, bossy, and deeply loyal. He is a tiny roadside goblin-angel dog, and I mean that with total affection.

He burrows. Under blankets, under laundry, into any soft dark space he can find. If there’s a pile of laundry or blankets on the floor, on a couch or bed, or in a basket, and he can get to it, that’s where he’ll be. He tunnels in until only his nose is exposed. He doesn’t like being fully covered. He needs to see out, or at least smell out.

My mom has nearly thrown him in the washer several times. Once, we couldn’t find him. We were in and out of the house calling him, getting worried. My mom had been getting ready to go to the laundromat because our washer wasn’t working, and she’d put clothes in the car. She opened the car door, and guess who popped his head out?

He hunts. He used to watch for fleas, then bite at and eat them. He liked going outside and hunting for things. Once I heard him up under our trailer. He had something cornered, or it had him. You could tell from his bark he was terrified, but did he back down? No. Someone had to go get him.

He rode a possum. This was back in Santa Fe, Texas. Someone opened the front door to check on something outside, and there was a big possum near the steps. Squeaker jumped on its back like he was trying to ride it. Freaked it out and it ran off. He was maybe eight pounds. The possum was significantly larger. None of this mattered to him.

He’s afraid of exactly two animals that I know of. One is Peep, a chicken. They got into it several times. Peep trying to peck him, him growling and snapping, and my mom having to rescue him. The other is Pudge, my mom’s old miniature pinscher. Pudge was old and blind but didn’t put up with anything. Pudge secretly loved him, but Squeaker was afraid of her anyway. I can’t explain this. Squeaker has his reasons and he’s not sharing them.

He refuses dog stairs. We tried some of those stairs for dogs so he could get on the bed without jumping. He won’t use them. He jumps. When he was little, he was very clumsy, often landing badly, and you could hear that it was a bad landing. He does better now, but I often wish he wouldn’t jump. He still won’t use the stairs. He will jump. He will make it. He will look at you as if to say the stairs were an insult.

When you hold him, he often wants to stand on your arms or hands so he can have control and jump down when he wants. When you try to hold onto him, he doesn’t like it. I’ve tried to hug him or hold onto him, and he always squirms and tries to get out or stand on me. He’s not a cuddle-in-your-arms dog. He’s a burrow-next-to-you dog. There’s a difference.

He considers closed doors a personal attack. A closed door isn’t a boundary to Squeaker. It’s an injustice. For inside doors, he’ll paw at it, sometimes hitting it harder and harder, even jumping and slamming it. When he’s locked outside or gets himself locked in somewhere like a bathroom, he paws at the door and barks his demanding “let me out” bark until someone opens it or until he decides the door has won this round and leaves to find something else to be offended by.

Squeaker and My Mom #

My mom and Squeaker are both stubborn, and they had a complicated relationship.

He had this bad habit of peeing on things, almost always her stuff or something new in the house. It happened enough that my family coined a verb: to “squeaker” someone. It means to choke them. Because my mom had to stop herself several times from choking him over the peeing.

Back when I was Mormon, I used to worry when I’d leave for church that she’d kill him while I was gone. I once asked her, before I left, not to kill my dog. She didn’t. She just had to stop herself a few times. They survived each other.

The Job He Gave Himself #

Squeaker was never trained as a service dog. Nobody taught him to alert. Nobody asked him to do anything. He decided.

He often senses my flares before I do, and he’ll go and try to tell my mom when he does. This last time, before one of my recent hospital stays, he was looking at her scared, like he was begging her to help me.

When I’m not well, he gets clingier and won’t leave my side. The worse it is, the clingier he gets. He’s so loving and sweet with me, and he uses his paws like little hands. When he needs or wants my attention, he paws at me, climbs at me, or, I swear, deliberately steps on my keyboard.

He appointed himself my medical alert dog. He gave himself a job I never asked him to do, and he’s done it for years. He’s better at noticing when something’s wrong than most humans I’ve met.

The Night He Died and Came Back #

At one point I was living in a travel trailer outside the house. I think it had something to do with severe black mold my mom was trying to get rid of and how it was affecting me.

Squeaker got outside and was hit by a car. My mom heard it, and I think she heard him cry. I didn’t. She came to get me, saying he was dying. She wanted to give me a chance to say goodbye.

When she put him in my lap, he was very still, bleeding from the mouth. We thought he was dying.

I had to leave because I wasn’t feeling too well. I think I needed food but was too upset to eat. My mom laid him down in an open kennel. After a while, she tried to give him some ham.

He perked up. He ate the ham. He left the kennel. He went potty.

My mom says he came back for me. She’s called him “Angel dog” ever since.

The Day He Went Missing #

Once, when my mom was unable to care for me for a while, Squeaker went missing. We looked but couldn’t find him anywhere.

It was the same day as the Santa Fe school shooting, and we lived in Santa Fe then. I put posts on Facebook, hoping someone would find him. A woman found him, took him to the vet, and got him his shots and a new collar. I was able to get him back.

He has no attention span, and we weren’t far from the school. I think he got outside, saw something interesting happening, and went off to investigate, maybe not intending to wander so far.

The relief I felt when we found him was the kind of relief that tells you something about how much you’ve already lost and how much you can’t afford to lose again.

The Dead Cat #

We had a cat, Scratch, who died. I can’t remember why exactly, though I do remember him hurting a lot of the other cats because he was aggressive and trying to get to the females all the time.

My mom, for some reason I also can’t remember, tried to burn or cremate him rather than bury him. The remains didn’t burn fully the first time, and there was still some left in the burn pile. Mom caught Squeaker eating it.

For a long time after that, he’d growl at the cats, and they’d just move, parting like the Red Sea, as my mom said. We joked that he was telling them to get out of his way, that he ate cat.

I’m not saying there’s a lesson here. I’m saying it happened.

The Separation #

Squeaker is twelve now. He has bad teeth, sore joints, a heart murmur, and hyper-attachment issues. He’s elderly. He’s still sweet, still stubborn, still opinionated, still afraid of chickens and blind min pins. He still burrows under blankets and leaves his nose out. He still won’t use the dog stairs.

I’m in a nursing home.

He’s with my mom.

The separation isn’t something I chose. It isn’t something he understands. It’s the shape of what happens when you’re multiply disabled and the care system doesn’t have a place for you that includes the creature who’s been yours for eleven years.

My mom manages the communication between us. She tells me how he’s doing. She sends me updates. He’s getting his vaccinations now, shots underway so that he can come visit me. The visits are the thing I’m holding onto.

But the day-to-day reality is that I’m here and he’s there. He’s with my mom, who’s also going through a lot. He’s old and confused and attached to me and I’m not there. I’m in a facility that wasn’t designed for someone my age, and he’s in a house that doesn’t have me in it.

I think about him under the blankets with just his nose showing. I think about him making the squeaker sound at a closed door. I think about him sitting near my mom and looking at her with that fear-look, the one that means something’s wrong with me, except now something’s wrong with me all the time and I’m not even in the same building.

What It Costs #

People talk about what disability costs you in terms of independence, privacy, career, community, dignity. All of that is real. I’ve written about all of that.

But there’s another cost that doesn’t get talked about as much. The cost of being separated from the living being who knew you before the nursing home. The one who chose you when you were curled up in pain and never un-chose you. The one who gave himself a job because he decided you were worth alerting for.

Squeaker never needed me to perform independence. He never needed me to be less disabled. He never needed me to explain my support needs or justify my care setting or fill out paperwork. He needed me to be there. That’s all. Just there. In the room. So he could burrow under the blanket next to me and leave his nose out and know I was close.

I’m not close right now.

The nursing home is the safest option available to me. I’ve written about that too, about how the safest option can still be wrong in other ways, about how safety and belonging aren’t the same thing.

This is another way it’s wrong. I’m safe. I’m separated from my dog.

He’s twelve. He has a heart murmur. He has bad teeth and sore joints. He doesn’t have unlimited time. I know this. I think about it more than I say.

The shots are underway. The visits are coming. I’m holding onto that the way he holds onto a blanket, with everything he has, nose out, breathing, waiting.

What I Want People to Understand #

When we talk about long-term care, we talk about medical needs, safety, staffing, and facility quality. Those things matter. I’m not dismissing them.

But we also need to talk about what gets left behind. The dog. The cat. The creature who chose you and who doesn’t understand why you left. The relationship that doesn’t fit into a care plan but is part of what keeps you alive.

I want a future where my dog can be with me. I want a group home that has room for a twelve-year-old miniature pinscher with a heart murmur and bad teeth and a habit of peeing on people’s belongings. I want the care system to understand that Squeaker isn’t just a pet. He’s my medical alert dog, my companion, and the one living being who’s never required me to be anyone other than who I am.

He chose me. I want to be able to choose to be with him.

That shouldn’t be too much to ask.

But right now, it is.

He’s still there. My mom’s still there. I’m here.

The door is closed. And somewhere on the other side of it, a small dog is making the sound he was named for, waiting for someone to open it.

I know how he feels.