It’s eleven-thirty. Only 30 minutes remain before the day turns over at  midnight.  Tonight is tranquil. I am sitting on my sofa writing on a wooden desk with Happy, Buffalo, and Mango sleeping around me.

Some 10 minutes earlier, I failed to get this note started due to a sudden demand from my stomach. I haven’t had dinner since taking a big bowl of rice coupled with a big bowl of shrimp and cabbage salad at 2:30 p.m. I had the feeling I could eat a horse after spending nearly 3 hours at the spa.

I stepped down and walked to the fridge, opened it and decided to make a bowl of warmed white rice with soya sauce instead to save time. My puppies had woken up, with Buffalo and Mango sharing some rice I put on my hands for them. They love jasmine rice but I don’t satisfy them often to keep them from diabetes. One of my eight previous puppies, which I had in the 2000s, passed away from this disease in 2014. The vets then told me rice, the main food of him and his family day in and day out, had put dogs at a higher risk of the disease.

I got startled when Happy just jumped to the sofa behind me by himself. My almost-8-kilo son always asked me to scoop him up whenever he saw me move to work on the sofa. With the jump, does he mean to tell me: “Mom, see I’m doing alright now!”?

This morning, Happy was unwell. He ate the breakfast – which comprised Royal Canin kibbles and boiled chicken, and his stomach failed to retain any food. After two hours, I gave him some formula milk for dogs made with warm water, and he drank it up. I thought his stomach would be doing fine.

But I was wrong. He vomited all the milk soon after he drank it.

Happy has been with me since two months old, exactly 61 days old. I adopted him one day before his two-month birthday on February 28, 2022. I chose to have a puppy with the hope the puppy’s presence would ease my depression, which recurred right after my dad passed away in late 2021. I had taken prescribed medicines and they didn’t work. Above all, I hated depression medication.

When Happy was about 1 year old, I noticed it was easy for his stomach to get upset whenever I failed to feed him on time. I wished I could do so but my work schedule in an office sometimes troubled me. I believed this morning’s vomit was resulted from the fact that Happy was fed breakfast around 8 a.m., or 12 hours since his last meal yesterday.

Today, I had a spa session scheduled at 10 this morning. I was running late for it. Before rushing to the spa across the street, I handed my cousin a vial of Enterogermina and asked him to squirt it into Happy’s mouth soon after I left home.  He nodded his head.

I asked him to call me if Happy vomited again. And he nodded his head.

Enterogermina was effective in soothing Happy’s troubling stomach. With no call from my cousin while I was at the spa, I assumed Happy had been alright after getting Enterogermina.

I returned home at nearly 14:00. My cousin greeted me by saying Happy had vomited for the third time. That stressed me out as Enterogermina seemingly hadn’t worked this time. I asked if he had given Happy the oral probiotics supplement as I had asked him. “I forgot it.” – he said.

I hated the way my cousin communicated. He always assured me he had understood my sayings or messages whenever I asked him to do something. And most of the time, he just forgot to do or did things differently from what I had asked him.

I almost scooped Happy up and called the trusted taxi driver to take him to the vet hospital. Three consecutive vomits in six hours signaled something serious inside. A week ago, I returned from a spa session and I had to take Mango to the hospital right away. Today, the history seemed repeating itself.

Another “storm” has arrived for a second round?

As the Enterogermina vial was still on the dining table, I squirted it into Happy’s mouth without a delay. I was nervously awaiting his stomach’s reaction. 5 minutes. 10 minutes. 15 minutes. 20 minutes and 30 minutes. It seemed like the probiotic had succeeded to settle his digestive system.

Ah, I had yogurt in the fridge. It is one of Happy’s favorite snacks. I ran upstairs to take yogurt and offered him one third of a serving. Happy licked all the yogurt on his plate. And no more vomit at all since then.  I could finally exhale a sign of relief.

I felt assured to offer him food about an hour later. I asked my cousin to help me watch him and let me know right away in case he would vomit again. Happy prefers to stay downstairs during the day while I am upstairs most of the time. I prefer not to share the living space with my cousin, whose living style is an ocean different from mine, to keep my soul calm as much as it can.

No reports from my cousin since Happy ate food I gave him and the subsequent meal in the early evening. I couldn’t believe I was able to stop the “storm” right in my doors thanks to using a combination of Enterogermina and yogurt. A repeated lesson learned for me!

I have learned that whenever a crisis, whether it’s little or giant, finds me,  if I stay calm enough, I could handle it, like the one tied to Happy’s stomach today, beautifully. Storms are an indispensable part of our lives. I don’t shy away from life storms at all as I believe they come and hit me for a reason, either teaching me something valuable or reminding me something I should have memorized.

Still, I have strived to face as fewer storms as I could by taking an abundance of caution, given I have been living on a tight budget for the last two years since I got kicked from my decade-long career. My depleting financial health was hit hard in April when I spent nearly two months of monthly expenses on saving my two puppies, Mango and her little sister Strawberry, from parvo – one of the fatal diseases in dogs.

Can you believe I hadn’t known of this disease until it attacked my puppies? What an awesome grandmother I was!

My April was so blue for I had to say the last goodbye to my Strawberry. The most expensive prescribed medicine did save her sister Mango but couldn’t save her. And the doctor, who said he would try his best to save her as he did to Mango, just left his clinic to a city on the day she needed him the most. I wished he and his wife, also a vet, had told me about their study trip in advance so that I could move Strawberry to the hospital for a better chance to save her life.

A week following Strawberry’s passing, they came to my home in the late afternoon after five calls I chose not to pick, and said apologies. Earlier that day I had requested them to give me the full truth of why Strawberry had died. His junior staff had told me when he handed Strawberry’s body that he had stayed up all night – on April 22 – to try to save her. That was one of the biggest lies I ever heard.

The doctor had told me from the start that his clinic staff couldn’t watch Strawberry all night because they had to stay fresh and sharp for a next working day. He could only check her status once at 10 p.m., another at midnight, and another one at 6 a.m. the following day. I had accepted that routine when I chose to leave Strawberry at the clinic for better care when she has developed non-stop seizures on the early third night that compelled me to rush her to the clinic and nervously awaited nearly 30 minutes for the doctor and his staff to show up.

Strawberry’s symptoms started worsening on the third day since the virus first struck. The symptoms displayed exactly on the day Mango was declared to be fully recovered from parvo. It was like a dramatic movie! At that time, she had received only one shot of 7-disease vaccine while her older sister Mango had received all three required shots since last October. It was my fault that I had absent-mindedly forgot to bring her to his clinic for the first shot exactly one week after she was dewormed.

Would things be different if four days were wasted? If only, I hadn’t missed Strawberry’s vaccination schedule. If only I hadn’t let the guard down. I had stayed up the entire week when Mango was being received parvo treatment to keep her from being dehydrated – I had Mango stay at the clinic during the day for IV infusions and picked her up in the late afternoon to take care of her during the nights. I had been so confident that I had gained enough experience in taking care of parvo-stricken puppies as Mango was fully recovered. I had  even thought of offering a service to take care of parvo puppies.

And life pulled me down from the cloud nine, didn’t it?

Until today, I haven’t known exactly how Mango had caught parvo, and ended up transmitting it to Strawberry. The doctor said Mango might have had the virus during one of the daily walks. He assumed that one of the dogs in my neighborhood had parvo and Mango happened to smell the waste from the sickened dog. But none of them have passed since then.

My best bet was Mango might have caught parvo on the day I brought her to the clinic to pick up Happy after his spa session. At that time, as I remembered, the doctor was examining a sick-looking dog on the table when I placed Mango nearby. For whatever reason, I have come to accept the painful truth that I had lost my angel-like puppy, the one who inherited most of the traits from her dad, especially the pink nose. Now I come to understand why Strawberry was braver and smarter than her parents and sister are. 

It took Happy more than three months to be able to climb the stairs. It took Buffalo, his mother, over two years to do that. And her 9-month-old Mango hasn’t dared to climb the stairs until today.

I couldn’t forget the night when I was climbing and mopping the stairs before midnight. When I was in the middle of the stairs, I sensed something behind me. I turned my back and saw my Strawberry was standing just two steps behind me as if she wanted to say: “Look Grandma, I made it. Let me join you now!”

 I wasn’t aware she had managed to climb that high – 10 steps after just one day I had trained her how to climb the first three steps from the foot of the stairs.

It took Happy, Buffalo and Mango more than 10 attempts to get through the mosquito door, which sits between the bedroom and the kitchen. Strawberry had patiently watched her dad a few times. After two days, she just needed one attempt to crawl through the door smoothly.

Every midnight, Strawberry always stood in front of the mosquito door, scratching on the door as to call me to open the wooden door behind it for her to get in and sleep with us. Her bedtime routine was to walk to my study where her mum stayed at night and latched eagerly onto her mother’s teats.

Since Buffalo gave birth to Strawberry, she has preferred to sleep alone under my 1.8-meter desk – similar to what she had experienced in her first birth to Mango and Papaya (who died at birth).

I had thought, at first, that Strawberry would stay with her mom after the nursing session for the rest of the night. Still, she proved her grandma had got her wrong. For little Strawberry, the more, the merrier.

During the first week since we buried Strawberry in my brother’s river-facing orchard – I chose that over cremating her as that junior suggested his clinic service -,  I woke up in the middle of the night as I had heard her gentle scratching repeated on the mosquito door. One night, I opened my eyes and saw her sleeping right above my head as she usually did when she was sleeping with us. To stay close to her, I had chosen to sleep on the floor since the first night. And peace gradually found its way back to me.

It was almost 2 a.m. of Wednesday June 10. I am feeling greatly better now when I have been able to  pour out eventually what had stayed in my heart since Strawberry passed. And I managed to make it through the second day of my daily writing challenge across 9 days. The more I have written, the more serene I have felt.  

Thank you for giving me your like to my first entry yesterday. That first like came as a real milestone to my journey. It meant that my writing did reach someone on the other end of the screen, and you connected with my story.

Many thanks to you, those who have read through this line, for being with me on this journey. I’ll see you in my third entry, written on Wednesday, June 10.

Have a wonderful day wherever you are!