I walked my dog!

I know I promised to start my Bond series this week, but that is getting pushed to next week. A couple of things happened this past week plus I saw “Evil Dead Burn” this weekend, and I know none of you are going to see it. The first thing that happened was that getting all of Connery’s Bond movies was a little more challenging than I anticipated. He is in five (well, six if you count the one he came back for, but we will get to that later), and while I could have easily watched five movies in a few days, I wanted to get some stuff done, so I didn’t marathon those. The second thing that happened was, as the title suggests, I walked my dog for the first time since October 24, 2025.

Before my surgery, I had arranged to have my aunt and uncle take care of Rory while I was in the hospital. My parents and I met my uncle at this park in Pennsylvania. I walked him around a bit before we made the handoff. If everything had gone as I had hoped, I would have been walking him in no time, but as many of you know, my femoral nerve in my right leg had to be cut, and my leg was severely weakened. If Rory were like my sister’s dog, Callaway, I would probably have been fine, but he is very much not. There is some kind of hound in his genes, and he has this hypervigilance that makes walking with him tough with two good legs. I knew that I would not be walking him anytime soon, if ever. In my lowest moments, my only desire was to walk my dog again. If that day ever came, it would be a sign that things were truly on track.

When I started back to work, I was taking rideshares or the bus, which eventually became a bus to work and walking home (I live about a mile from work), and finally, in the last few months of school, I was walking both ways. This was my first sign that I might be ready to throw the harness on Rory and take him for a walk. The problem was, I did not want to risk a solo walk right out of the gate. I waited until the 4th of July weekend, when we would be at our family’s lake house. There, I would have plenty of people ready to walk the dog with me. I  would have someone to hand him off to if there was a situation where he, well, Roryed. At the lake, the road is narrow, and there are no “exit ramps” like in the city. If I see a dog or something that gets Rory excited, I can turn down the closest block or cross the street and avoid the issue. At the lake, those are not options. Anyone or anything approaches close, and there are no blocks to turn down. On the first attempt, such a situation occurred even before I took the leash. Another dog came from the other direction, and he went nuts because it was super close. Sorry you had to deal with that, Will! Once that dog passed, I took the leash, and the rest of the walk was not so eventful.

I returned to Buffalo on Monday evening, and our first solo walk was on Wednesday. I wake up at about 5:30 anyway, but I usually roll over and go back to sleep. Since it was early enough that no one else would be out, we went for our first walk together. We ended up doing a little over a mile, and he didn’t try to kill me. We had one close call when he saw a rabbit a few feet away, but I was able to avoid other dogs, and we made it home without an incident. There were only a few close calls over the next few days. One was when he saw something in a yard (I could not see what he saw, so I assume he saw something that wasn’t there), and the other was when a woman was putting her dog in the car, and we didn’t see her soon enough because there was a fence in the way: we turned around and went the other way.  

Things are not back to normal by any stretch: he and I used to do over three miles on the weekend mornings, and we haven’t done any of our old loops (I miss the zoo loop, which took us past the Buffalo Zoo to see the bison and the Darwin Martian House), but those are goals for later. These walks are doing nothing for my pace (I am up to 19-ish minute miles without him and 24-minute miles with him), but it’s all about doing it safely, not fast. After months and months of having other people take care of my dog, I can finally feel like I'm doing something.