For the past 12 days, Mr. Eegs has been experiencing some slight symptoms of disc problems again: some minor pain and stiffness, some reluctance to move around. This was something the vet and I thought could be treated conservatively, with very strict crate rest and steroid anti-inflammatories. He was doing pretty well on this regimen.

Today, however, he had to go back in to the neurologist and will be having a second surgery tomorrow. I’ll skip the blow-by-blow report of the day and just tell you that he woke up with more pain and less function and then he just rapidly deteriorated throughout the day. It was scary. He was obviously distressed and in a lot of pain. By the time his vet had seen him and gotten him a referral to the veterinary school’s hospital (best place to go for neurology), he had begun to lose deep pain sensation in his legs. By the time those neurologists examined him, it was gone.

His prognosis is worse this time for that reason and also because it’s his second episode in about six months. He may or may not regain the ability to walk. He may need a wheeled cart and may need to have his bladder expressed (by me) in order to pee.

This time around, the financial aspect is worse as well. I already took on thousands in debt for the first surgery, and will do so again this time.

Let me make a brief aside: it may seem foolish or ridiculous that I would spend this kind of money — money I don’t really have — just to help my dog. I’m sure to many of you, it’s inconceivable. It’s crazy to me, too, but when it comes down to it I don’t really have a choice. You guys, it’s Egon. The sweetest, dearest little dog in the world. My little guy. I have to.

I may not have enough credit available this time, though, because the estimate is significantly higher. He will also likely need physical therapy. If he needs a wheeled cart, that costs a large-ish amount, too. The timing of this, during a summer when I get to teach only one class (and thus only earn about one month’s salary) is not ideal.

I am already thinking of ways to slash my budget. I am canceling all of the following: Netflix, Hulu+, Birchbox, cable internet, my gym membership, and unlimited texting. I will not be spending any money on restaurants, booze, soda, coffee, makeup, clothes, or any other luxury item. I am buckling down. It may not be enough, though, especially if the surgery costs more than my available credit and must be covered from the rent money I have saved for July & August (which seems very likely).

What this means is that I’m doing something I absolutely hate doing: I am asking for help. Can you help sponsor his surgery?

Believe me I know it’s unbearably tacky to ask, but every little bit would really help. I would be immeasurably grateful. And a few folks have asked how they could help, and this is just one possible way.

If you feel moved to help sponsor his surgery, you can make a donation via PayPal by clicking here.

All money raised will go directly to his veterinary bills (and/or to buying his cart, if the need for one arises). Everyone who donates any amount — every dollar counts! — will not only receive my heartfelt gratitude, but also a tangible note of thanks from me and Eegs.

If you’d like to donate $10 or more, I would also like to send you a small print of one of my many adorable photos of the dog himself, Mr. Egon the Dachshund. This original artwork will not only be a lovely addition to any space, complementing any style of decor and making your friends positively green with envy, but will also show your proud status as a Team Eegs Sponsor — somebody who helped get him, hopefully, walking again.

If you don’t want to donate money or can’t, believe me, I completely understand. Times are tough on all of us financially and I know a lot of you are in the education field, too, which means you may not be getting paid in summers either. I really appreciate every kind thought or prayer you can spare. That helps, too. You also have the option to share this post with any dog lovers (or millionaires) who may be in your social network by using the social sharing buttons below.

Thanks for reading, and thanks for all the kind words you’ve already shared with me, online or otherwise. I really do appreciate every last bit of it.

What was I thinking saying that thing to that person?
What happened to that conversation I was supposed to have?
Why don’t people text back immediately?
Everyone should text back immediately.
Stop ignoring me.
What were we thinking?
What was I thinking?
Are we ever going to get our shit together?
What if this is a one-way street, too?

Is that a muscle in my hip twitching?
Or is that my pulse?
Did it just twitch again?
Why do my quads hurt?
Did I hurt my hip again?
Where is my psoas?
I can never find it.
Poke, poke, poke.
Is that it?
Or that.
What if this never goes away?

A student email at 2:00 AM?!
What the hell are they thinking I mean REALLY.
I will not respond to this at 2:00 AM.
I don’t care if I’m awake at 2:00 AM; I will absolutely not respond.
Maybe.
NO. Put down the phone. Do not respond.

Should I read a little more? It might put me to sleep.
What if it wakes me up more?
I don’t want to turn on the light.
I guess I’ll just stare into the darkness then.
Even the dog is asleep.
The neighbors are asleep.
The neighbors’ dogs are asleep.
The neighbors’ baby is asleep.
Am I tired?
I don’t feel tired.

How many foot bridges are there in Alton Baker Park?
There’s the one by the mall.
The one across the street from the art building.
The really tall one.
When would I have to start training, January?

Sugianto, one of whose older brothers was also, oddly, named Sugianto, was from a small village on the Western end of Java, a place where families had maybe ten kids and just as many chickens running around in the house as pets. He had come to live and study engineering in Germany. He’d been there for seven years and spoke the language fluently, though he didn’t speak a word of English.

I was in Germany on a study-abroad trip for the spring and summer after having taken a last-minute opportunity to go. My German wasn’t so great, at first, as I’d only taken two years of it in college before traveling. No matter: I’d have plenty of opportunity to learn by attending classes, meeting new friends, and having constant arguments with my German-speaking, Javanese boyfriend.

If you want to really learn a language, start dating someone who speaks it and then fight with him or her all the time. And I say this as someone who, after I returned to the US, spent two years teaching German at the college level. You learn a lot about a language through the process of argument, much more than you can learn or can be taught in a classroom. When you really want to hurl words at another person, you can find deep syntactic and semantic resources you never knew you had.

We had our good times, too, of course, or we wouldn’t ever have been involved. He drove me around on his Vespa, cooked incredible meals for me all the time, and brought home case after case of beer from his side job at the local brewery just because he knew I liked it. In the last month of my stay in Germany, when classes were long over, he decided to take me to Paris.

I’d always wanted to go, of course. French was the first foreign language I studied, starting in first grade, and I’d always had dreams of traveling there, but study abroad in France wasn’t an option in college. This trip would be perfect. It would be so romantic. The lights. The little bridges over the Seine. The art. The wine. The food. I could not wait.

Name any of the famous landmarks in the city of Paris (just name them! any of them!) and I can tell you in horrifying detail the ridiculous fight we had there. The Tour Eiffel and the Parc du Champ-de-Mars. The Arc de Triomphe. The Louvre. The flea market at the Porte de Clignancourt. The fucking Métro. And Versailles. Goddamned Versailles.

Language was an issue. We communicated in German very well by this point, but I was the only one of us who spoke English or French, and therefore any interaction with French people had to be done by me. I hate interacting with strangers. Loathe it. But I had to deal with the hotels and restaurants and ticket sellers and shopkeepers and boulangers and everything else. Which was fine. I just ordered whatever I wanted without bothering to consult Sugi. “ENCORE DU VIN, S’IL VOUS PLAÎT!” Easy enough.

But on top of that he wanted me to ask random strangers to take our picture together. For some reason this was the straw that broke the camel’s back. I had HAD IT with asking strange French people for things and refused to do it. He assumed I didn’t want any pictures of us together because I didn’t love him. Oh my god. It was ridiculous. This was the Jardins du Château de Versailles fight, the most epic of them all. I don’t think I can ever go back to Versailles again, if the fine people there would even consider having me back.

He was bossy and liked to correct my German grammar and vocabulary. He liked to inform me whenever I was breaking some unknown social code like lighting a cigarette without first offering the pack to everyone else in the room. It drove me crazy. We would fight about his bossiness, about whether it was because he was older than me or whether it was because he was a man or whether it was because he came from a more overtly patriarchal culture.

In the end it didn’t matter. I skipped merrily back to the US in time for the start of my senior year and he was left behind, with nothing to do but write me unbelievably long letters. Soon enough I was already involved with someone else back at school, and when I spoke to Sugi on the phone I told him to go ahead and drink the bottle of Bordeaux we’d bought in France; I’d soured on it anyway. I do have to thank the guy for one thing, though: my conversational German is really quite good.

Summer is almost here. As I’m sure you know, teachers have a three-month vacation in the summer. Oh, WAIT.

Sure, I could take a vacation all summer — if I didn’t mind not getting paid! No, I’ll be working. I have at least one five-week summer class from mid May to late June, and hopefully a second one that covers just June. Then, I will actually have some time off — a strange phenomenon, as it’s been years since I took any time off in the summer.

I obviously can’t afford to whisk myself away on a dream vacation in July, but I will likely have some truly free time, during which I plan to lie low and avoid spending money. In spite of the surely less-than-exciting sound of that, I am genuinely pleased. It means time for reading, writing, movies, bike rides, creative endeavors, late nights, afternoon naps, trail runs, leisurely dog walks, evenings spent floating in the pool, and whatever else I damned well please. All of that stuff? Completely free. Doesn’t cost a dime. I’ve got your dream vacation right here, y’all.

Today I packed up my teaching materials (normally left at the office) and brought them home so I can do a serious home-office set-up for the next four days, during which time I will grade 58 essays and write 8 different versions of the same final exam, all before finals week officially begins on Monday. Somehow, I don’t find this too terribly daunting. After all, I’ve already met my self-imposed grading quota for today. So I’m going to treat this afternoon and evening like a little dose of vacation time. Patio, sunshine, beverage, and dog snuggles are on the menu. Pants, on the other hand, are not.

I missed running. Three weeks ago my physical therapist gave me the go-ahead to try some short run intervals during my walks — about a minute at a time — and to build from there gradually. I would check in with her three weeks after that to see how I was doing. When I went back for the check-in, we found out that my hips were still in alignment (great), my right side was still stiffer than my left (not great but expected), though the joint had some better mobility (good), and I was cleared to go (fan-fucking-tastic).

This was convenient, see, because I had a 5K race on the schedule for Saturday morning. I was ready. I had some new shoes I’d just been fitted for (Brooks Ravennas!) and had gotten some tips on keeping my form in alignment better. I knew I could cover the distance doing short run/walk intervals, and had built up to running 3-4 minutes at a time. Most of all, though, I was happy to have the clearance from my physical therapist. If she’d found that I’d gotten myself out of alignment or had worsened my situation at all, I would’ve had to bail on the race.

Being injured and unable to run has not been fun for me. Running is my best stress reliever and my favorite form of cardio, and I was pretty darned stressed out for a while there and felt like I had no recourse (ahem, lying cheating dirtbag ex, cough cough).

More than that, there is the element of ego. I like being able to describe myself as a runner. An injured runner? A runner who doesn’t or can’t run? Not quite as satisfying, you know? Oh sure, I’m a runner. A runner who has to stop and walk every three minutes.

But at least I’m now a runner who gets to participate in organized races again! Becky and I signed up for the local “Finish on the 50″ 5K race, along with our friend Heather who was doing the 10K. They also had a 1-mile “fun run” as part of the event. It was pretty funny to me to see how many people would pay to register for a fun “run” just for the chance to walk a mile and finish on the 50-yard line of Jordan-Hare stadium. If you aren’t from the south, allow me to tell you that college football is, well, important here.

We met up near the start of the race at Toomer’s Corner (you may have heard about our oak trees) and milled around getting ready. As we split up so Heather could line up for the 10K start, we exchanged our good-luck wishes. “DOMINATE!” I told her, which, incidentally, she did, coming in first-place female in the 10K with a sub-40-minute time. Heather is a full-on running badass.

She chuckled, looked at me, and said, “You don’t do anything stupid.” I laughed, but I had to take the advice to heart. It would be so easy for me to do something stupid. Race-day adrenaline gets pumping through my system and I say, “HOT DAMN I’m feeling GREAT! I think I’m going to rip off a bunch of 8:00 miles and get myself a shiny new PR! And a newly re-injured hip!” I would so totally do something like that. Luckily I had two forms of backup: I had Becky to run with me for as long as we could stay together, and she had agreed to do run/walk intervals. To that end, I also had my Garmin watch set up with an interval workout programmed in so I’d be running about 0.4 miles and walking about 0.1 miles a total of six times. I would only know my distance remaining in that interval — no time, total distance, or pace information would display. I figured if I couldn’t see a slow pace on the screen, I wouldn’t feel like I had to speed up.

So Becky and I hung together for about the first half of the race. I accidentally got going too fast during the second interval, and the third interval involved a massive hill and we got separated. I hadn’t known how fast we were going, but the first three intervals were about 9:30, 8:30, and 10:00 pace (flat, downhill, uphill). This was significantly faster than my recent neighborhood run paces, but I felt completely normal.

After Becky and I split up, I just tried to truck along by myself, walking and running according to the relentless beeps of my watch, and not doing anything stupid.

It’s tough, though: the first time we had to take a walking break, about 0.4 miles into the 5K race, I muttered to Becky that this was the moment when I felt like a gigantic asshole. I mean, who stops to walk not even half a mile in to a three-mile race? Of course we both had our ear buds in, so I had to repeat myself at a shout, broadcasting to the entire group around us that “RIGHT NOW, WALKING, IS THE TIME WHEN I FEEL LIKE A TOTAL ASSHOLE.” Ai yi yi.

It is hard to let go of my ego at a time like this. People shouldn’t be passing me, I think. Just as soon as my watch beeps for me to run again, I’ll show them all righty! I will pass back every person who passed me! And I did, almost. I passed a lot of people in every run interval. And I had no idea how fast I was running. The last three run intervals were 8:57, 8:47, and 9:00. That’s a normal 10K race pace for me — not quite what I’d try to run in a 5K race if I were totally healthy, but not far off. Much faster than I’d planned to run. The walking intervals at about 14:00-15:00 pace made my average just over 10:00 for the distance, bringing me to the finish line at 30:43. I placed 34 out of 109 women in my age group; 217 out of 603 over all.

It’s funny, I haven’t seen a 5K time over 30 minutes in years, but to me it felt blazing fast on Saturday! I had expected something more like 34:00. I was immediately worried: had I gone and done something stupid? How was my hip feeling? It hadn’t bothered me during the race, but that’s the thing: it almost never hurts during the run, only afterward. I was worried about how I’d feel the next day.

Well, I’m writing this over 24 hours after the race and I’m feeling fine. I can tell the muscles in that area are fatigued, but that is sometimes the case after a workout these days. The right hip and quads just feel the fatigue more. Nothing is burning or throbbing or twitching, so I think I escaped unscathed. Success!

Being able to participate in a race again felt wonderful over all — even in spite of the moments when I had to slow to a walk while everyone around me continued running. I still got to feel the exhilaration of the start line, the satisfaction of the finish line, and the thrill of running with a crowd of hundreds of other like-minded people all coming together to do their individual sport.

My game plan for the future is to continue building back my running, using intervals and very short distances until I am able to run 2-3 miles without stopping, then I can cautiously resume a more normal schedule. Stretches, Jane-Fonda-style leg lifts, bridges, and planks will be here to stay. And now, to choose my next race.