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This is us at the vet this morning. I am mostly typing this for my own ability to purge the experience from my system but here it goes.
On Monday at 4 PM while I was at work I got a call from the leasing office at my apartment complex. I listened in utter shock and horror as I was told that maintenance had entered my apartment to assess a broken air conditioning unit and allowed Tango to escape. Tango has never run away before in his 10 years on Earth, but he does have a lot of anxiety and loud noises especially freak him out so I knew they must have scared the shit out of him for him to run away. They then chased him which totally terrified him and he ran into the woods and disappeared (he is really fast). I told my boss I had to leave and rushed home.
There is a trail behind the apartment T loves to walk on and that is the direction he ran. My mom beat me home and she had already started at one end of the trail, so I drove a few miles away to the other end and we started working in. The dog was nowhere to be found so we went home and my mom began making flyers and online postings while I started searching by car. Pretty soon it was dark and I was totally panicking, but I drove EVERYWHERE I could think of in a few mile radius. My mom called me after a few hours and said a guy on a community board had reported a dog matching Tango's general description running down a busy road by the far end of the trail several hours earlier. I raced back over there (this is several miles from home) and started searching the neighborhoods by car knowing very well it was highly unlikely I would see him from the car in the dark. I started panicking worse and worse and went back to the trailhead and sat on a bench I always sit at with him. I called to him gently, said familiar words and phrases, even tried a little Hebrew because I baby talk him like that sometimes. I was just staring out into the dark woods and it started to sink in that he could be dead. He could still be running and be miles and miles away by now. I cried and cried on this park bench in the dark like I have cried very few times in my life. I called my Dad (who lives 1.5 hours away) and told him what happened. He was also extremely distraught and drove down immediately. He arrived at about 11 PM and we started searching again. I took the flyers we had printed and ran around putting one in every building in our complex while my dad canvassed the neighborhood farther up the road. We met up at a certain point and took to the car again, going back to where the sighting was. The trail is totally wooded and dark, but my dad and I drove my car into the park and down the entire path. I had seen cops drive on the path before but it's definitely a path for walking and biking and portions are like raised wooden overpass things over a wetland, barely wide enough for a little car to pass. We probably would have been arrested if we had encountered a cop back there. Still no dog when we came out the other end. After driving around a bit more we came back to the apartment at around 2:30 AM and just kind of sat in shocked silence in the dark in the living room. My dad slept for a few hours and then went straight into work. I could barely sleep. I tried but I kept waking up every 15 minutes in a cold, profuse sweat. I slept maybe 2 broken hours the whole night.
At 6 AM I was up and coordinating the next steps. After driving around and looking some more, I went to Staples and was waiting at the door when they opened to make more flyers. I split them with my mom and we set out in different neighborhoods hunting for Tango again. I had made a list of all the animal shelters in the county, all the vets and animal hospitals within a 10 mile radius, and other places which I thought might be able to help or create a listing or anything. I went back to the road he was sighted on the day before (although that was now over 12 hours in the past) and began putting up the flyers. Hundreds and hundreds of flyers. And as I did so I was on my phone the whole time leaving messages, creating lost dog listings, checking to see if he had gone to a vet or had been picked up. But no one had seen him. I was about 2 miles from my car when I got a call from my mom that TWO people had called and reported Tango on the street we live on. So I was in the totally wrong place. I ran the two miles back to the car and raced back over to my complex. He had been spotted out on the street twice, going in different directions each time. I went up and down the street and looked in every nook and crevice imaginable, forcing flyers into everyone's hands. Then I hit the trail again and did the same, tacking flyers to benches, trees, guard rails, literally anything. Most people were sympathetic and eager to keep their eyes out but I encountered a few who were extremely rude when I tried to give them the flyer. I called one lady a bitch to her face. Sorry not sorry I know it was wrong but I can't understand being so heartless as to refuse to take a flyer in case you see the dog. Anyway I went up and down the few miles of the trail a bunch of times and I talked to two people who thought they had seen Tango there the day before. Then I met a guy back near my apartment who told me he was sure he had seen Tango get hit by a car. I totally freaked out and demanded he show me where. He took me a short distance and pointed at a cross walk. His English was not good and my Spanish is not good so there may have been some kind of miscommunication, but he kept drawing his finger across his neck clearly implying he had seen my dog get killed. But there was no blood anywhere and no dog. He kind of pointed off towards the woods again when I asked where he went after he got hit, but he wasn't very useful and in hindsight was either just being a cruel piece of shit or was mentally ill/very confused somehow. I panicked and started checking under bushes, behind AC units, anywhere an injured animal might hide but to no avail. I didn't pass this info on to my mom because I knew she would die inside. I couldn't say anything until I knew for sure he had been injured or killed. So I just kept looking.
I saw one of the maintenance guys who told me that he had seen Tango twice on our street that morning and had tried to catch him but couldn't. I said please don't approach him or chase him, just call me IMMEDIATELY if he saw him again. Then I went home and started searching for more resources. I called a non-profit which helps people search for missing pets (apparently over 4000 recovered since they were founded in 2002) and the woman on the phone really helped calm me down and encouraged me that it was very possible I could still recover the pup. She gave me some interesting ideas that sounded strange but she said they have quite a high success rate, so I went home and followed her instructions which were as follows: take something that smells like me, e.g. a bedsheet or recently worn clothes, and cut them into 1''x1'' squares and drop them 3-5 feet apart making a trail from the nearest water source back to home (she even looked up my address and identified the nearest creek). Then she told me to put a can of cat food into a 1 gallon jug and fill it with water, shake it up to create a "slurry," and then dribble it along the same path. So I did all this and actually made multiple paths leading from the woods and from the street to in front of the apartment, where I set down a big piece of cardboard with a feeding station in the center and covered it with flour to capture footprints. As I was getting ready to set up the station, maintenance banged on my door and said they had JUST seen my dog dash down the sidewalk by the apartment and into the woods. My mom and I went out and quietly walked around (the non-profit said to walk softly, do not call to him, just stay on paths and baby talk him with familiar phrases) but he was gone. I wasn't even sure whether to believe they had seen him at this point. I kept telling myself it could have been a little fawn (he's sort of deer colored).
Anyway I made my paths and a cop confronted me about dropping the trail of cut up clothes. I told him about the scent trail and he clearly didn't believe me so I explained this was advice from a non-profit and they even employ police dogs to search for animals in extreme situations and hadn't he heard of this organization etc etc. Eventually he let me go when I showed him a photo of my dog and he saw how cute he is. I sat on the front stoop with my parents until my Dad had to go home. Then it was just my mom and me. We just sat and watched and waited. We were even prepared to sleep in the living room with the door propped open. At this point I had slept 2 hours in 2 days, walked an unbelievable distance, eaten nothing... I mean I was at the point of delirium. At midnight my mom got up and said she had a funny feeling and had to take a walk. I stayed to watch the food station. She was gone a curious amount of time and half hour later crested the hill with Tango in her arms. Some intuitive force told her to walk to a very specific place by the woods, and the dog was there licking dew off the grass. When he saw her he ran into the trees. She followed slowly but she couldn't see anything. She got down on the ground and gently spoke to him. She did this for several minutes and suddenly Tango came up behind her and gently tugged on her pant leg, then started crying and leaned into her and she brought him home.
I cried vicious ugly choking tears when I saw him. I wasn't even sure if I was awake or dreaming or losing my mind. Probably I have never experienced a happier moment. His collar was missing and he was covered in burs. He had severe road rash on all his pads and one was torn partially away from his paw. He was shocked and starving and dehydrated but he seemed to know he was home and he was happy. He slept by me the whole night and this morning I took him right to the vet. They chipped him and gave him a clean bill of health other than exhaustion and his torn up feet for which they recommended soaking his paws in an epsom salt bath once a day for a week.
There really are no words for the kind of happiness I feel with him here by my side right now. I know he is not young anymore but I'm not ready for him to be gone. I still need him, and he is kind of like my emotional support dog. When I am freaking out or really sad he puts his paws on my chest and licks my face. Man I just don't know what I would have done if he was gone. 28if lost a dog in a snow storm a few years ago and she almost certainly died... I feel like I experienced a miracle by things turning out like this.