BELLE

Belle has been with me for 5 years. She's my life and I can only hope to love her half as unconditionally as she loves our whole family.

She's a beautiful black lab, with a bit of golden in her blood. When we got her from a kennel in Sta. Rita, Bulacan back in 2005, she was a wee baby of about 1.5 months. I only saw her mom once, on the day we took Belle home, and Belle's mom is a gorgeous retriever. She's the real split of a black lab and a golden retriever. Long, curly hair all over a huge black dog.

Belle, I remember, wasn't the most rambunctious in her litter. Her siblings were a mix of yellow and black puppies, and there were a few other cutie pies who were more energetic and lively in the cage they were housed in, but there was something about Belle that made me fall in love at first sight.

Belle is a strange, silly baby. She's super paranoid and does not like loud noises. Unfortunately we live on one of the loudest streets of Metro Manila. With every truck that passes by the house, she goes on the alert. She loves her toys more than food. She gets separation anxiety when we're away, so she takes every opportunity to be with us. Like, riding in the car whenever she can just so she's not away from Mommy too long. Riding in the car gets her dizzy, and she farts when she's dizzy. Her fart smells like fish. My mom loves her so much, she calls Belle "anak." She has this real bad habit of hiding her toys from us, which forced me to hunt every single toy down and keep them all together in one place. She's very sweet and careful. My pamangkin, Miguelito, was once her bestest friend in the world, and he would put her tail and her hair and feed her "toxic" chocolate, but she'd still love him. They slept beside each other when he was here for an overnighter. It was an adorable sight.

She sleeps right under my bed, too. She's there every night except tonight.

Belle had to go thru a semi-emergency operation a few hours ago. We went to her vet because the lump on her tummy suddenly got engorged and I didn't know what to do anymore. She's had that lump for about a year now. Her doctor said it was caused by an infection she got from flea and tick bites. I would drain the lump by massaging her tummy and extracting blood thru her nipple with a hot compress. She hates our little massage sessions but she knows it good for her.

But this week, no amount of massaging could make the lump smaller, it just kept getting bigger. We brought her to Animal House where Dra. Luy, the best vet in the world, looked her over and said she needs to be operated on.

Belle went under the knife at 3:30 pm, Sunday afternoon. I waited in the clinic for the procedure to finish, crying my eyes out practically the entire time. She was brought out at 6:00 pm, groggy, tongue lolled out, tummy bandaged up, but lump-free. The procedure went well. Belle was fighting the anesthesia though, so she wasn't really asleep during the whole thing, but she didn't feel any pain. There were a lot of vessels in the way so she lot quite a bit of blood, according to Doktora, so Belle will be needing iron supplements, but other than that, she's fine.

Doktora suggested though, that we let her stay the night in the clinic. So she's there right now, sleeping for the first time away from home and in a cage, with a swero attached to her left front leg. Now we both have scars on our tummies: mine because of my appendectomy, her for her mastectomy. We have twin scars.

I swear I wouldn't know what to do if anything bad happened to her. Just glad the whole thing went well and that she'll be home tomorrow.