I have a dog, her name is Millie. She is my loyal sidekick, my guard, my pal. She was rescued from the Texas coast during Hurricane Harvey along with six puppies and fostered through Austin Pets Alive!, an organization for which I now do volunteer work. She needed to be spayed when I got her, and she was heartworm positive. I also learned she had a luxating patella, which means her kneecap sort of slides left and right, rather than nestling properly in whatever the part is underneath it. They said she would need to be evaluated for surgery (that they would pay for).
As luck would have it, APA! was so overwhelmed with Harvey dogs that she couldn’t get in to see the orthopedic vet there, and I arranged to just take her to my vet. Dr. Simmons, who has since retired, was not from Texas, but he sure sounded like he was. He famously said in his thick accent, when I asked if he thought her estimated age was correct, “Well, it’s hard to say. She’s been out there hustlin’ on her own….” Indeed she had been, carrying on for 5 years by herself, having who knows how many litters, and scrounging for food for herself and all those puppies. Who has time to think about a luxating patella with all that going on?
Suddenly, here she was, approaching middle age with a bum knee and someone who was ready to help her take care of it. Sometimes it pops out and you can see it (yeah, I know). Sometimes she favors that leg. And sometimes our walks are very short, because she looks at me with a look I have come to understand means, “Not today, lady.” We turn around and go home.
After consulting with Dr. Simmons, then his successor after a flare up, and finally an orthopedic vet they referred me to for good measure, Millie doesn’t need surgery. She might be in pain sometimes, but mostly not. This particular surgery has a mixed success rate and a 6-week crate recovery, which would probably result, for a dog like Millie, in never healing properly, because she hates the crate with the fire of a thousand suns. When I asked Dr. Simmons initially what he thought about getting the surgery done, he said (with the same accent), “Well, Frances, there are a lot of people out there who will let you give them money for all kinds of things.” And you know what? He’s right.
There are a lot of people out there who are happy to take your money because they want to fix you. And they are probably really good at making you feel like you need fixing, even if getting fixed isn’t what you need. They probably have a laundry list of things you “just” need to do, and all your problems will melt away. Ah, imagine! If lack of information about what to do was the only barrier to success (hello, internet), we should surely all be skyrocketing to unlimited heights, right? If only the right expert was around the corner with the magic (proprietary, can only be bought from them) solution, we would all be killing it!
For Millie, she absolutely needed to eradicate the heartworms, and she did need to be fixed, as in spayed. (Bob Barker was right about that one.) At the same time, she does not need her knee fixed. Sure it hurts sometimes. But every single time I get the leash out, she gets excited. She jumps around like a lunatic, forgetting that she is now basically in her 70s. And we go for the walk for as long as her knee lets her. I get The Look, and we go home. She doesn’t care if other dogs know she didn’t do a longer walk. She doesn’t wonder if she can still eat dinner because she took a shorter walk. She doesn’t tell herself she will walk twice as long tomorrow to “make up” for the shorter walk. She just lives her life the best way she knows how, one moment at a time.
I might be a coach for a living, but I don’t think you need to be fixed, either. You might have some issues that actually need attention from a medical professional, and that might include a trick knee or clinical depression or vicious night sweats and so on. For decades, though, we have had so many people willing to take our money to tell us how to fix ourselves that we have gotten those messages stuck on repeat in our heads. How to be thinner, how to be in better shape, how to be less stressed, how to follow x number of easy steps to how to-how to-how to. And some (most) of it probably hasn’t worked, and you might blame yourself for it. What if the common denominator isn’t you? What if the common denominator is all these people telling you something is wrong with you? Nothing is wrong with you. You are absolutely 100% you. If you’re tired of being told you need to be fixed, let’s talk. Let’s find out how you can listen to yourself, because you, like Millie, already know all the answers. I am just here to help you hear them.