Love Is the Best Medicine: What Two Dogs Taught One Veterinarian About Hope, Humility, and Everyday Miracles
By: Dr. Nick Trout / Narrated By: Jonathan Cowley
Length: 8 hrs and 30 mins
Awesome—fielding the hard cases, paying the price, then paying it forward!
I gotta admit, my first introduction to Dr. Nick Trout was a bit of a romance that featured animals as matchmakers (kinda sorta), a novel that was fairly predictable and not even remotely memorable. I’ll get around to re-listening to it someday, giving it a review, cuz I MUST have an Animals pick Each! And every! Week! And with Trout, there’s aaaaalways an animal in there somewhere.
I’m already feeling bad about the review I’ll write then because I gotta tell ya: I reeeeeally reeeeeeally liked Love is the Best Medicine, and I’m afraid said review will be lacking as this one will have such a mighty HUZZAH! attached to it.
I’ve looked at the Publisher’s Summary (Noooo! NOT to see whether I’d purchase it; nope bought it straight out based on liking Ever By My Side)—mostly because I wanna see just how much I can say about this book without giving too much away.
And dang it! Wouldn’t you know that the P. Summary tells you eeeeeeeverything about one of the dogs featured, cocker spaniel Helen, and just an eeeensy bit about the real heroine of the book, min pin Cleo? So I’ve gotta tread really carefully here as I try to tell you what you’re in for.
A stinky street dog, used to begging for her food, is looking for an easy mark on a verrrry cold and miserable night. She finds a couple coming out of the restaurant she targets and is shivering and lonely, oh so desperate for a bit of human kindness. Well, it just so happens that she couldn’t find any two humans more loving or kind. After a halfhearted search for an owner, the duo take her home, attempt to clean the unholy mess of greasy matted fur and bad breath up, and discover that this grateful gal of a dog, now named Helen, is just wonderful. An exam to see if she’s a candidate for anesthesia, however (Those rotten teeth!), turns up a mass. Not just any kind of mass, but one that may full well be malignant, may full well be inoperable given its placement.
Did I mention just how awesome her new owners are? They’re not thinking of themselves when they decide to try to save her life, give her a few more months. No, they just want to give her a summer, a single summer by the sea so she can enjoy surf and sand and the comfort of knowing she was a loved and owned dog.
Okay, now here we go to Cleo’s story, and I’ll try not to give any spoilers. Sandi is a woman who grew up with an unloving, undemonstrative mother who could be somewhat cruel. Sandi’s childhood and sense of love was saved by her devotion and care of all of the animals she found who needed a helping hand. Now way beyond grown, with a somewhat distant relationship with her own daughter, Sandi has found herself in an unusual predicament: Nary an animal has come to her to be rescued. After a couple of years of this, she seeks her own animal (Which I can attest is a very odd thing to do, having done it only once with all the animals I’ve been blessed to share my life with: There’s just always SOMEone who neeeeds help!), and she finds and instantly bonds with a min pin they name Cleo.
After Cleo’s third broken bone in 14-months of life, she’s sent to Dr. Nick Trout.
And oh who’m I kidding?!? You’ve GOT to know what happens!!!! It ain’t a Spoiler; it’s the entire danged idea of the whole book:
Whilst getting ready for surgery, Cleo just up and DIES while receiving anesthesia. It DEVastates everyone involved, and Trout has the unenviable duty to tell Cleo’s family about it all. Sandi’s daughter Sonja jauntily comes to pick Cleo up only to find that the much-adored pup has died. If Sonja’s devastated, oh how much more so will Sandi be. Soon, Sandi is flying to Boston, and Trout gives her the dignity of a face to face meeting, his heartfelt sorrow, and he allows her all the time she needs to share just how wonderful Cleo made life for everyone who knew her. On her way out, Sandi kinda sorta gives Trout a challenge—to keep Cleo in his heart, to pay all the love that little dog had in her heart to someone else.
And that’s where Helen comes in, cuz if ever there was a dog who needed someone to go to bat for her, it’s that loving little cocker spaniel. And Trout describes in exacting detail every part of the process of his attempt at removing that tumor of hers, of trying to save her life, of attempting to give a good dog a single fine summer.
Through it all are meditations on life and death, on the mysteries of healing, and the accidents of those cases that just didn’t make it (There’s also a rather startling interlude with a rabbit who dies under the knife… only to wake from the dead….!). Trout makes it clear that he doesn’t support believing in wu wu medicine as the main way to go, buuuuuut he’s gotta admit it: He’s seen some interesting happenings, some (Dare he say it?) Miracles. And tho’ he’s about as cool and as professional as they come, what I like about him is the almost apologetic way he goes about defending the lives and souls of animals, as tho’ he’s arguing a supremely tricky case to a hard-nosed jury (Dude! You’re totally preaching to the choir with me!).
Sometimes this all gets a bit technical, but at no point is it boring or detached. Trout knows what it’s like to have to love with an open hand (A daughter with cystic fibrosis), and he knows how to let go (I appreciated the difference he made between trying to give quality of life before going for simple lifesaving measures which could be quite drastic and cause pain. And I reeeeally liked how we should look at all treatments from an animal’s perspective: That single year of life? Well, what is THAT in Dog years?!). One reviewer said it’d be a good read for any young person thinking about becoming a veterinarian in the big city.
Oh c’mon now, let’s not limit the audience for Love is the Best Medicine to just prospective vets! This book is for anyone who’s loved an animal enough to seek extra care for them, for pushing the envelope, for having hope. As someone who’s regularly gone for the UltraSounds (Missy!), and the CAT scans (Wootie!), I know how hard it is to hand a much-loved fuzzy to an expert, paying the extra money in order to buy an extra dose of PleasePleasePleaseLetHimBeOkay. When they come home, bandaged and woozy, but with a little more time? Hats off to the experts, and who needs the retirement funds if there’s no beautiful fuzzy to share the days with?
This audiobook does NOT have the AWEsome Simon Vance as narrator, but danged if narrator Jonathan Cowley didn’t do an excellent job. He kinda didn’t bother with differentiating voices, accents, none of the above, and while I don’t find that to be particularly honorable, at least in his hands, nothing was execrable (I know I know: Is that fanTASTic praise, or what?!? Nothing was execrable!). I mean, there were a wiiiiide variety of accents that could’ve been used, to go with many women being major parts of the story—it could’ve been wildly uneven. But Cowley did just fine, and I was able to distinguish between characters easily. Further, he brought warmth and sorrow to Trout in a fine way, never making him sappy, but keeping him from being too precise and professional as our hero.
All in all, lovely story. And tho’ it can end in only one way, as anyone who’s ever loved an animal knows: They ALL die waaaaaaay tooooo soon, it ends in quite an uplifting manner. Naw, I didn’t cry for this one, but I did choke up when Helen’s owners are considering how far to go to help her, and all they want is to give her one good summer. What an awesome thing to do!
Some people are just made for animals. Some animals are just made for people.
And God bless the healers! Can’t have enough of them scrubbing up…!
As an Amazon Associate, I earn from qualifying purchases.