Cutting Down the Kudzu

A funny thing started happening to one of our dogs a couple of months after moving into our current home.  Maple began to have episodes of what we could only describe as convulsions, though it was obvious – even to our untrained eyes – that they were not true seizures, as she never lost consciousness or control of her bodily functions.  But just because she didn’t pee on herself, did not mean something terrible and out of our control was not going on.

We noticed these episodes only seemed to happen on the weekends – well, at first anyway.  We’d all be in the backyard and after a little while, Maple appeared to be walking funny, kind of like she was drunk.  Her back side would sort of tip over and her eyes looked all weird and faraway.  Her expression (her face is very expressive for a dog) became one of fear.  She would amble over to me and lean in for support.  She could not lie down on her own without falling over, so we would help her onto a blanket and hold her while her body jerked and twitched.  We tried to soothe her with our words and gentle stroking while she would look up at us as if to say, “What the hell is happening to me?”  It was a sad and terrifying thing to witness….still is.

Since these attacks began in the summer time, coinciding with the onslaught of cicada bugs and their customary shedding of their entire bodies, littering our backyard with heinous looking sheathes, we assumed Maple had been snacking on them and this *had* to be the cause of her bizarre episodes.  This was the only thing that was new, as both of our dogs had roamed freely in this very backyard for the entire six months it took us to get the house into livable condition.  Of course, we took her to the vet after the second attack happened.  Blood work and exam revealed nothing out of the ordinary, except that for a dog of 11 years, her body was in fantastic shape!  Our vet referred us to a vet-neurologist for further (and much more expensive) testing.  My husband and I discussed this at great length and ultimately decided that *if* these tests, which would include CT scans and MRI’s of her brain, both of which would have to be done under general anesthesia, were to tell us that our poor old gal had a (God forbid!) brain tumor or something equally life threatening, then what the hell would we do with that info?  She’s eleven!  Why make her golden years miserable with tests and treatments that may just cut her life that much shorter?  Especially since she seems fine, like her old puppy self, in between these episodes….so, we just watch for any other signs of illness while we try to solve the mystery of “why”.

Once the cool fall weather moved in, if our cicada theory held, there should not have been any more attacks and for several weeks there weren’t any.  Then she had one on a weekday; it was her fifth attack.  The only thing these attacks had in common was the backyard.  Now, I do try to watch them in the backyard, but sometimes I have other things to do and I was not watching to see if Maple was eating anything in the backyard that particular day.  After the episode, I went out to the backyard to look around.  What I was looking for, I couldn’t say exactly – just *something*.  I did see that one of the dogs had thrown up and there were some green leaves in it.  For those of you who have dogs, you know it is not unusual for your dog to once in a while eat “salad greens” and make themselves hurl.  It’s just part of a dog’s life to clear out their system once in a while.  “A-ha!” I thought, spying a whole leaf still in tact in the pile of vomit.  (Sorry for the graphic visuals).  It occurred to me that perhaps one of the many vines and shrubs that grow like weeds in our backyard may be the culprit.  There was a berry bush, which, as we are all told in childhood not to eat decorative berries because they are poison, that I zoomed in on.  It also had all kinds of nasty, spiky thorns on it.  Who would plant such a thing?  I donned my gardening gloves, along with a pair of puncture resistant (ha!) latex gloves beneath, and cut that sucker down with my handy dandy gardening saw.  Perhaps with proper care, this thing would have looked more like the bush it was meant to be but I tell you the thing was well over seven feet tall by the time I got to thinking it could possibly be the poison behind poor Maple’s convulsive episodes.  Down it went.  That was almost two weeks ago.  I thought we were safe until this past Sunday.

We were out walking in the early afternoon sunshine when all of a sudden, Maple started to list sideways.  “Uh-oh, here we go again.”  My husband had to carry her the rest of the way home.  This is why I don’t walk my dogs solo.  Maple is almost as big as me and at a gangly sixty pounds, really hard for me to lift without causing us both extreme discomfort.  “Dammit!” I said angrily.  It hadn’t been the spiky berry bush thingy after all.

I decided everything growing in the backyard must go.  Now, those of you who know what kudzu   is, know that it is a rampantly growing ground covering weed which can quite easily get out of control and suffocate pretty much anything else that has the misfortune of being anywhere near it.  I read a horror story about kudzu just this past summer in which the kudzu actually murdered people and pets.  Kudzu is not known to grow in the Northeastern United States, so I’m pretty sure it is not growing in my backyard.  But there are all kinds of unidentifiable (to me) things growing back there and any one of them could be causing my dog to periodically convulse and generally scare the crap out of us.  It’s all kudzu to me.

As I do my solitary back breaking work of cutting down all the kudzu, I ponder all the other ‘kudzu’ in my life – all those thoughts and feelings that seem to grow rampant inside of me, suffocating the ‘real’ me; the kudzu that prevents my own growth and I know that just as it is time to cut down the kudzu in my yard, it is also a good time to cut out all of the kudzu in my life.  May the coming New Year be kudzu-free for us all…