As Binda walked, I moved in behind him and gently held his belly in my hands where he had been shaved and cut from what my father would have called 'arse-end to breakfast'. He was so doped up that he remained peaceful the whole time and the vet had sent us home with myriad medications. Then something odd and disturbing occurred. I brought both dogs inside and closed the double glass sliding doors that bordered the mangroves. The three of us then sat on the floor in the living area. Then we moved into the bedroom. After five minutes or so, I went back out into the kitchen to put the kettle on and in the same section of the empty room, on the clean white tiled floor where the three of us had been sitting, was another stone.
As I saw it I was told, if the first stone doesn't get him, then the second stone will. There was now a sense of dread in my heart that I may have been dealing with 'negative forces' greater than myself. Up until moving into Giuseppe Court the 'phenomena' had been gentle and positive. I picked up the stone and looked at it. There was no way that it had been there five minutes before. The dogs had not brought it in and neither had it stuck to my masseur sandals or between their pads. It was too big for that. I didn't like the situation. It seemed as though a second 'attempt' was being been made on Binda's life, because he might have eaten that stone. Also, Kindi would have most likely eaten it during her nightly scavenging in the kitchen.
The next morning it was straight back to the Parap Veterinary Hospital so Binda could be put on the drip for the day. The vet said that Binda seemed to improve in spirits each time I took him home. The last night Binda was in the unit, I had wrapped him in a quilt so that his face looked at me and I spent time wiping his leaking nostril with the quilt. The next morning, when I took him out the front to pee, I noticed that his belly where he had been shaved had turned a yellow colour and that his urine was orange. After finding out online that it was probably a liver problem, I drove him straight back into the vet.
They told me to leave him there for the day on the drip again, so that they could do further tests and monitor him. The stone that had been removed from Binda's small intestine during the operation was kept in a plastic pill cylinder near his cage. When I took it out and compared it to the stone that had appeared on the tiles, I saw that the two stones were exactly the same shape, but the second one was bigger and darker. That day I tried to find another stone of similar shape in the backyard. But it was impossible. The second stone had materialised out of thin air.
After spending the day with Kindi and on the phone to my mother, I drove back to the vet in the evening to pick up Binda and bring him home for the night. When I arrived, the senior vet, who was a young French woman, called me into the same room where I had seen the flash of golden white light. She told me that Binda was suffering from liver failure and that if I took him home he would die, but if I left him on the drip in the surgery that night, there would be a thirty percent chance of survival. I made the decision to leave him in the vet hospital with a chance. I left Binda staring up at me from the floor like a puppy, ready to come home for the night. Once he knew I had left him behind, he dropped his head and closed his eyes.
It took every part of my will to walk out of there leaving him alone for the night. I was not allowed to stay at the vet after closing hours, but it didn't fully register that I might have left him alone to die. Once back at Giuseppe Court with Kindi, I became a mindless vehicle of pain. During the night I drove back to the vet to sit outside in the carpark. I felt desperate knowing he could be dying in there alone. I made several calls but no one had the keys. I had thoughts of smashing my way in, but I did not want to scare any of the other animals. Later on the vet told me that when he had checked in on the animals at 10.30pm, Binda had been all right and was sleeping. He added, "I was there around that time. I must have just missed you."
I was let into the Parap Veterinary Hospital at 7.30am by a nurse and went straight to Binda in the cage. When I got there he was lying on his side arching his back. His eyes were wide with distress. The nurse looked concerned and got him out of the cage and laid him on the floor. I looked to her and she nodded. I told her to ring the vet. She said the vet was at the gym but that he knew the situation and would be there as soon as possible. I went into automatic mode where I did everything I could to comfort him. Binda immediately became calm upon my touch and stopped arching his back. He stared into my eyes and looked around, but he was also elsewhere. The vet arrived fifteen minutes later. He made sure I understood that Binda had to go, or he would die a very painful death from liver failure. The vet told me that while he appeared calm now, soon the arching would start again. I told the vet, "Yep. Do it."
