Nurse Aggie

I am blessed with relatively good health, so it is the rare occasion that I have to call off work. Quiet and rest do wonders when I have enough sense to respond to an illness early on. Sometimes the quiet and rest thing is elusive at the Eastman house, due to the bedside manner of Nurse Aggie.

Aggie is a beagle/Australian cattle dog mix. She has a soft coat (think upscale teddy bear) that is mostly white with black markings. Her coat looks more cow than canine. She is a friendly little dog with a devil-may-care approach to life. I suspect she is powered by a nuclear engine that doesn’t have an off switch.

Aggie somehow senses when I am staying home and responds as if it’s Mardi Gras, New Year’s Eve, and the Superbowl all rolled into one. It’s as if her little dog brain is going, “Hey, the big goofy human is in his pajamas and robe during the daytime. Party! Party!” The concept that the big goofy human wants to rest is lost on her as she drops a tennis ball at my feet while I down cold-n-flu remedy.

Several years ago I threw my back out something awful. Almost had to have surgery. I was in misery, flat on the couch. Aggie approached and made it clearly known that she wanted me to take her outside to our backyard, or as she thinks of it, her toilet. I slowly and painfully lumbered, as if I were Boris Karloff in the Mummy, from the living room at the front of our house to the back door. Back then, Aggie had this bad habit of jumping up and standing against me as I put the lead on her collar, which I had tried for ages to break her to no avail. But in this circumstance, every movement a nightmare of pain, Aggie’s stubbornness to change would actually benefit me and save me from bending. I pulled the lead off the shelf and beckoned the dog. What did she do? Aggie chose that moment, of all moments, to finally get the message. She immediately sat down at attention like she was in some sort of doggie military formation. She refused to move a muscle and stared straight ahead. I couldn’t coax her to stand up for anything. I don’t know how, but somehow I ended up bending down and affixing the lead. It may have taken me the better part of the afternoon.

Last month I was hit hard with strep throat. My whole head felt like it was on fire. I felt like I had a dead battery and wanted nothing more than to sleep it off. My wife kindly arranged everything I needed on the night stand next to me: crackers, tissues, ginger ale. I got under the covers and closed my eyes. I was abruptly awakened by Nurse Aggie, who apparently thought the best way to observe her patient was to lay across my chest with her bony elbows stuck into my ribcage. I rolled her off of me and told her to get down. She compromised and laid down a foot away from me on the bed. Too tired to argue, I closed my eyes and went back to dreamland. The next time I awoke I was on my side precariously on the edge of my bed. The dog was sideways in the bed with her paws pressing on my back. Apparently she was slowly pushing me out of the bed so she could have the whole thing to herself. Enough was enough, and I commanded her to get down. She obeyed and found a comfortable place on the floor. I assume it was comfortable for her, because unlike me, she had no problem immediately falling into a deep sleep. So deep in fact, that she started to loudly snore, making a noise not unlike someone playing a trumpet, badly.

Eventually I did get to sleep that day. I woke up to discover the crackers mysteriously vanished, tissues spread around the room as if the box exploded, and Aggie precariously standing on the night stand with her snout deep in my mug of ginger ale. The dog jumped down as my wife, back from work, came into the room. She put her hand on my forehead.

“You’re burning up,” she said. “Glad you stayed home and let Nurse Aggie take care of you.”

“Just the same,” I said, “I think next time I’ll seek a second opinion before calling in.”

Ian Eastman, M.A. is the Conference Youth Coordinator for the Southwestern New York Conference of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, the Coordinator of the Shared Lutheran Youth Ministry in Jamestown NY, and a Youth Minister in the Pastoral Care Department at Gustavus Adolphus Family Services. He is a student at the Institute for Youth Ministry at Princeton Theological Seminary.