Rest

If You Don’t Rest, You Might Die

As I mentioned in What Now -Revisited, I’m reprinting some classic Dog Lover’s Guide articles about self-care through the end of January. I hope they help you find your center, but don’t stop there. Find your center, and use that balance and groundedness to steady someone else. Take care of each other. Be brave.

With love,

Pants and Chloe

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If a hammer will do the job, Pants is bringing a jack hammer. Once she understood that she would get a treat if she laid on the floor when I said down, she’d body slam herself onto the ground, front paws splayed wide, eyes wild, somehow scratching the bejezus out of my legs on the way, and then bounce up again for a treat. Jack hammer.

It’s the same with on: she doesn’t just jump on the couch when I say, “On!” Oh no. She leaps straight into the air (sometimes several feet from the couch), flails herself through time and space to land in some approximation towards the couch, and then immediately catapults off again in anticipation of me saying, “Off!” This is where she got the nickname Disaster Pants.

This is her trying to catch a treat. She failed.

Two days after her first annual exam, Pants lived up to her nickname in a new way. “We got Pants’ test results back,” our vet said. You know that voice medical providers get when bad news is coming? Yeah... “Pants has heart worm.”

If you’re a dog lover, a chill probably just ran down your spine. If you’re not familiar, don’t look it up. I don’t want to be responsible for your nightmares. Let me just give you the lite version. Heart worm is a parasite that lives in a dog’s heart valves and feeds off its blood. It will kill the dog through heart failure, lung disease, and embolisms. It’s often asymptomatic until irreparable damage is done.

This photo is a coping tool.

We were devastated. The rescue said she had a negative test. We’d been diligent about her preventative. How did this happen? We were thankful we’d caught it, but heart worm is a nightmare both because of the illness, and because of the treatment to cure it. It involves excruciating injections to kill the worms, and strict bed rest while the parasites die and disintegrate. (See why you shouldn’t look it up? Ghastly.)

Our three-year-old jet-fueled chaos mutt was going to have to be completely calm for six months.

Six. MONTHS.

This dog does not chill out.

No more play dates with her best friend. No more dog parks. No more walks or window fighting with the mailman or even tug of war at home. Pants had to sleep for six months, or she might die.

Maybe you’re in the same boat. Not that you have heart worm. People can’t get heart worm. (Wait, I just looked it up. We can. Don’t think about it.) Your body is telling you that if you don’t rest, you’ll experience some catastrophic system failure, but you can’t make yourself slow down. You might be in a position where if you don’t take care of all those tasks, no one will. Or you feel guilty every time you sit down. Your mind just won’t stop, and so neither does your body.

Resting is a hard thing to do. We gave Pants so many drugs to calm her down and she still managed to splat her body into the front window when she saw a fly. She went full battle mode at the front door when the FedEx lady delivered a package next door (it wasn’t even our house, Pants!). And once, at 10pm, when she was supposed to be concentrating on peeing, she saw a rabbit run across the street and stood up on her back legs to yodel at it.

Pants, in short, was not good at resting. And sometimes, neither are you.

To be fair, the world doesn’t really make space for you to rest. The demands from work, home, family, your phone, and on and on never end. A language has sprung up around rest and recovery as though it’s an indulgence, “I deserve this day off,” or, “I earned that extra hour of sleep.”

Rest is not a luxury item. It’s a necessity. Chronic lack of sleep, defined as less than seven hours a night, has been linked to heart disease, diabetes, depression, increased pain experience, alcohol misuse, dementia, and some cancers. Lack of sleep isn’t a badge of grit; it’s deadly.

You are entitled to rest.

Pictured: how to sleep with Pants on

It’s okay to slow down, to say no more often and yes more strategically. Seven to nine hours sleep are your right (dogs sleep up to fourteen). Feeling refreshed when you wake up in the morning is normal. Still feeling tired is not.

Pants is okay now. After six months of treatment, she was cleared to play again. A year later, she got a clean bill of health. These days, she’s learning to jump into my arms and do figure eights around my wife’s legs. She’s still Disaster Pants.

If you hear yourself in this article, it’s time to slow down. Consider setting some boundaries with the time thieves. My favorite book on this topic is The Book of Boundaries by Melissa Urban. If you’d like to learn more about why it’s so hard for women in particular to rest, pick up Burnout by Emily and Amelia Nagoski. Look at your sleep habits and see if you can make little changes that will give you big wins. And as always, take a page out of your four-legged friend’s playbook and sleep more. (Seriously. FOURTEEN HOURS.)