On the 10th of May, a routine walk through Cubbon Dog Park changed the shape of our house - and, four months later, the shape of a puppy's legs.
His name was Archie. Four months old, golden-eyed, with
front legs that bowed outward in a way that made him look like he was
permanently bracing for a fall. A bout of parvovirus a couple of months earlier
had left more than a memory - it had left his bones bent, still soft enough
from puppyhood to have curved under the weight of illness. Below: picture of Siddhu with Archie the day he sauntered into our lives.
We didn't plan to foster him. We just couldn't leave.
The Ordinary Miracles First
Fostering, in the beginning, looks a lot like parenting a
small, furry, extremely opinionated toddler. Archie learned to wait for his
food. He learned the furniture was off-limits, mostly. He learned the invisible
boundary lines of the house. And our two five-year-olds, Ollie and Maggie, who
had never had to share their humans with a wobbly-legged interloper, learned
patience in a way that quietly rearranged the pack.
Then came the unglamorous part of fostering that nobody
photographs for Instagram: the vet visits. Dr. Harshitha at Charlie's Pet
Clinic and Dr. Lohith at Bangalore Pet Hospital became fixtures in our week.
X-rays. Blood panels. A Vitamin D deficiency, corrected over three weeks of
injections that Archie forgave us for almost immediately, because that's the
thing about puppies: they forgive fast.
And then, the harder question: could his legs be fixed?
Dr. Lohith thought so. Archie was still growing, which meant
his bones still had room to be told a new shape. Surgery, done now, could
correct 75 to 80 percent of the curve. Done later, it might not be possible at
all.
The Part Where Strangers Show Up
We didn't have the money sitting around for orthopedic
surgery. So we did what foster parents increasingly do - we asked the internet
for help.
I did not expect to cry over a crowdfunding page. But within
a couple of days, strangers - people who would never meet Archie, never feel
his ridiculous ears, never watch him fail spectacularly at sitting - had funded
his pre-surgery tests, the surgery itself, medicines, and the therapy that
would follow. Both clinics quietly reduced their fees where they could. My
friend Aparna and her family took him in for a weekend so we could travel,
folding him into her own life without hesitation. Below: picture of Archie chilling at Aparna's, with her cat.
It stopped feeling like my project. It felt like
Archie belonged, in some small way, to everyone who had chipped in.
Three Hours, and Then the Real Work
The surgery took three hours. They were the longest three
hours I've had in recent memory - the kind where you check your phone every
four minutes and reread the same sentence in a book without absorbing a word of
it. When Dr. Lohith called to say it was successful, I remember the exhale more
than the words.
What I hadn't braced for was what came after.
Archie couldn't walk. He had to be carried for everything - outside, back in, every single time. For the first couple of days, he didn't
poop, and I will say without embarrassment that when he finally did, we
celebrated like it was Diwali. That is what recovery from surgery on a small,
healing body looks like: not a triumphant montage, but a household reorganizing
itself around one tiny, immobile creature's bathroom schedule and cautiously
waiting.
Two weeks in, the staples came off. The bandages came off.
And slowly, almost cell by cell, the puppy came back - running, tumbling, being
generally ridiculous, legs straighter than they'd ever been. Below: picture of Archie post surgery with much straighter legs.
The Bittersweet Part Nobody Warns You About
Here is the part of fostering that people don't talk about
enough: you do all of this - the injections, the 3 a.m. worry, the crowdfunded
surgery, the poop celebrations - knowing that if you do it right, he leaves.
A lovely lady named Padma reached out, she wants to foster Archie with the possibility of adopting him. We visited her home, met her family, and watched Archie and her senior dog Pedro take to each other cautiously at first and then settled down and even napped, the way dogs sometimes just know. If all goes well, Archie will walk out of our house on his newly straight legs and into hers. Below: picture from Archie and Pedro's first meeting
It will feel like losing something. It will also mean we did
our job.
That is fostering, in full: you love a creature back to
health with the express intention of handing that health to someone else. It is
not a smaller kind of love because it has an ending built in - if anything, it
asks more of you, because you show up fully for a story you know isn't yours to
keep.
Somewhere out there is a puppy or kitten who needs exactly
this - a temporary home willing to become, for a little while, an unconditional
one. If you have room, even for a season, foster one. You will not regret the
poop parties. I promise.
