What My Dog Taught Me About Resilience

The most resilient creature I’ve ever known weighed eleven pounds.

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What My Dog Taught Me About Resilience

When my son Max was a freshman in high school, I did the math and realized our black lab, Babe, would be about twelve when he graduated. As he headed off to college, the house would feel empty. I decided to get another dog. I found a mellow yellow lab we named Dodger. Sure enough, Babe passed away during Max’s senior year.

By then we had moved to Portland. I rented an office two blocks from our condo and took the dogs to work with me every day. They were the best stress relief I ever had — I’d find myself smiling or talking to them just to break up the afternoon.

When John decided condo life meant smaller dogs, someone mentioned the Bichon Frise. Without doing much research, I bought one. We named her Pearl. For the first three years she drove Dodger and my office staff crazy. But eventually settled into the lap dog she was always meant to be.

Pearl’s fluffy white looks were deeply misleading.

At four months old she was diagnosed with a heart valve defect — a patent ductus arteriosis that hadn’t closed at birth. Without surgery, she would not live to see her first birthday. She had the surgery. She lived.

At two and a half, she hiked nine miles with John and friends up to Green Lakes in the Three Sisters Wilderness. At four, she tore her cruciate ligament running in the snow at our forest service cabin and had to have surgery again.

Our vet shook his head and told me Pearl was simply in the wrong body in this lifetime.

Pearl never got that memo.

She carried on from each setback with the same unselfconscious determination — heart valve, torn knee, nine-mile hike — as if the question of giving up or becoming Nervous Nelly had simply never occurred to her.

Then came three bullmastiffs.

One weekend when Pearl was almost five, I was out of town. John was walking the dogs home from the office when a woman opened the back doors of a van to show someone her four bullmastiffs. Three of them jumped out and went straight for Pearl.

John is a retired emergency physician. He knew to stay away from the dogs' front ends and started kicking their hindquarters to pull them off her. Somehow Pearl escaped and ran under a parked car. She was alive but in shock, with puncture wounds across her small body. John rushed her to the emergency vet.

When I got home and heard what happened, I was sick with worry. We brought her home a few days later. She had five drain tubes coming out of five bite wounds.

She had survived because the dogs hadn’t crushed or bitten any internal organs or shaken her violently.

The vet called it luck. I called it Pearl.

That night, I leaned over to check on her as she lay on her dog bed beside ours. I asked John quietly whether he thought she’d be mentally unstable after something like that.

Before he could answer, Pearl flipped onto her back so I could scratch her belly between the drain tubes.

I couldn’t speak. It was as if she were looking up at me and saying, "See?" I’ll be fine.

We started calling her the Trooper after that. In Pearl’s case, adversity didn’t break her. It showed us what she was made of.

I thought about Pearl constantly in the spring of 2017, when I was lying in a hospital bed at Sharp Memorial in San Diego for six weeks with eight drain tubes running in and out of my own body after a near-fatal car accident in Baja California. I had survived five surgeries in fifteen days. I was afraid, exhausted, and not sure what came next.

John had taped a photo of Pearl and our other dog Lilly to the whiteboard across from my bed. Every morning I’d look at it through the bars of the bed rail and cry — not from despair, but from something harder to name. Recognition, maybe.

Pearl had five drain tubes, and she flipped over for a belly scratch.

If she could do that, I could do this.

I had never thought of myself as someone who learned resilience from a dog. But lying there, I understood that Pearl had been showing me something for years — that the body can be broken and the spirit doesn’t have to follow. It’s what you make it mean that matters. You can carry your wounds and still turn toward love. That showing up, even in agony, even in a body battered or broken, is its own form of courage.

She was a Trooper.

I decided I would be one too.

Pearl lived to eighteen years old — a remarkable life for a dog who was never supposed to see her first birthday.

She was put to sleep during a pause between my seven outpatient procedures after I came home from Sharp Memorial. I was still healing from surgeries when I lost her. The grief was its own kind of surgery.

She didn’t get to see me recover. But she had already given me everything I needed.