There was a guy if front of my house the other morning dancing to what I believe was a circa 1979 Queen song. He had long frizzy hair tied up in a pony tail, and a red plaid bathrobe that matches a lumberjack blanket on my bed. He was dancing around in his bathrobe in front of the vacant house across the way, his music coming from some small yet loud enough for me to hear device I believe was riding around in his bathrobe pocket, stretched across his amble stomach. Weirdo jazzercise, bare feet, not yet 7am.



I’ve never seen this guy before in my life. And I assume that I’ll never see him again. A non scientific assumption. But if I do, now I know what he looks like and I may have to work harder on being neighborly. And not chase him off with a big stick.



Neurologists are scientists, this is what she said, the Dog Neurologist with the Not Quiet Voice. Science can’t always prove all thing things, sometimes you’re left with weirdo. I wrote that quote down. The Dog Neurologist talked fast so I paraphrase. I kept writing down weirdo. Cerebrovascular stuff is weird. Dogs can have weirdo physiology. Weirdo. Weirdo. Weirdo.



Weirdo. Too hot. Weirdo. Blood clot. Weirdo. Flip not.



I think weirdo in the brain is better than weirdo of the spine. Had the Neurologist thought the flippy foot was caused by necrotic lesions or wayward discs in Banksy’s spine, we would not have been able to do a short there and back through the forest this morning. But since it was her brain that had some weirdo occur within, the flippy feet have a good chance to go away and Banksy can return to some of the fun things in her life when the flippy becomes less floppy.



I thought Banksy’s left hind wasn’t flippy, that it was just a foot, but the Neurologist found a flip. The right hind is certainly flippier. If you were wanting to have a contest of this, the right foot totally wins. But since the flippy has slowly been getting better, a grand fact I think about constantly, measuring the lessening toe drag I hear with her steps, the Neurologist said wait for the MRI, wait so long that hopefully she won’t need it.



If it doesn’t go away, if it starts to drag worse again, drive back there, to a strip mall with a Chinese restaurant and a burrito place and a giant magnet to put your dog in, to take a detailed photo of her brain. Cerebrovascular weirdo that it may be.



A guy walked in with a dying dog when I was waiting for our turn in the lounge. A tiny dog, wrapped in a blanket, the guy in old, dirty clothes. He asked if they could save his dog. I’m not sure if they could. I told him lo siento, I wish they saved his dog, but I think it wasn’t saveable. En espanol, conversations about bloody diarrhea and no vaccines and bleach baths for feet appearing in the halls.



I am lucky Banksy didn’t die. Maybe she had a stroke, the Neurologist said emphatically, but still with a question mark in her voice, a blood clot stuck somewhere in her brain. Maybe something’s off with her internal thermometer that causes her to run too hot. Maybe she has epilepsy and had a seizure. Maybe struck down by sudden onset Border Collie Collapse, a different kind of seizure. Maybe we’ll never know. Maybe we will if it happens again.



There is a long list of the things the neurologist says it isn’t, and some of these are real doozies so I love this list. I took notes and at the top here, in the swirling scrawl which is my hand writing, it says NOT THIS. Not Not Not Not Not. I didn’t write what it was not but I know all the things. NOT them.



What it is, weirdo and unexplained, where it came from we don’t know, and if it’s coming back. There is something weirdo, maybe in her brain, maybe in her thermostat. That’s cool. I will assume, however, like the bathrobe guy, padding around with his chubby jazz hands, that it won’t. That it was just for that one time, an event, then is gone. And we go back to our regularly scheduled life, like how it used to be.