Part 2: A 94-Year-Old Woman Survived 3 Days Without Heat in a New Hampshire Blizzard — When the Vet Looked at Her Pit Bull’s Temperature, He Stopped Writing
I want to tell you what was happening inside that farmhouse while we were trying to reach her.
I called my grandmother on Wednesday at 7 p.m. The line was busy. I called again at 9 p.m. The line rang and went to her old answering machine, which still had Ed’s voice on the outgoing message — you have reached Ed and Maggie, please leave a message and we will call you back.
I left a message.
I called again Thursday morning. The line was dead.
I called my mother in Concord. The phone company told her there were lines down across all of northern Grafton County. They could not say which ones. They told her crews were working on it. They could not give a timeline.
The interstate was closed. The state highway out of Concord was closed. My mother could not drive up.
I could not drive over from Burlington — Vermont State Police had closed I-91 north of St. Johnsbury.
We sat in our separate houses and called every neighbor we had a number for. Two of them had no signal. One of them had a tree on his roof. One of them — a woman named Beverly who lived a mile north of my grandmother — said she would walk up the road on snowshoes as soon as it was light enough on Friday and she could see the road.
Beverly tried. She turned back at her own driveway. The snow was past her hips and the wind was coming sideways.
This was Friday morning, hour thirty-six of the outage.
My mother and I sat on the phone with each other and did not speak for long stretches. We were each, separately, picturing my grandmother on her couch.
We were correct.
She was on her couch.
She was wearing a wool sweater over flannel pajamas over thermal underwear. She had three quilts piled on top of her. The quilt against her body was the wedding-ring-pattern quilt her own mother had made for her in 1948 as a wedding gift.
Captain was lying on her chest.
He had been lying on her chest since Wednesday at 11 p.m.
He had not eaten. She had not eaten. There was a glass of water on the floor next to the couch she could reach with her right hand. She had been sipping from it.
He had been licking her hand for moisture.
She had not been able to stand up. Her legs would not work after the first night. The temperature inside the farmhouse had reached forty-one degrees by Thursday afternoon and was still dropping.
Captain did not move.
He breathed warm air into the top of her sweater.
She breathed it back.
That is how they spent three days.
A three-truck snowplow convoy from the town of Lyman cleared Tenney Hill Road at 11:14 a.m. on Saturday morning, hour sixty of the outage.
The lead operator was a fifty-eight-year-old man named Russell Frenette. He had plowed Tenney Hill Road for nineteen winters. He knew my grandmother’s farmhouse the way you know a house you have plowed past a thousand times.
The driveway had not been shoveled. There were no fresh tracks. The kitchen window was dark. The chimney was not smoking.
Russell stopped his truck at the bottom of the driveway. He cracked his window and listened.
He told me later that he almost did not hear it.
A bark.
One. Then a long pause. Then another. Weak. Slow. The kind of bark a dog makes when he has been making the same bark for hours and his throat is going.
It was coming from inside the house.
Russell radioed his crew. Two of them got out of their trucks with shovels and they cleared the driveway in fifteen minutes. They reached the front door. They pounded on it. They called my grandmother’s name.
Nothing.
They tried the door. It was locked.
Russell told the other two men to step back, and he kicked in my grandmother’s front door — which he later apologized to her for, three days running, until she told him to shut up about it.
The smell that came out of the door was the smell of forty-one-degree air.
They went inside.
My grandmother was on the couch under three quilts.
Her eyes were open.
Captain was on top of her.
His eyes were also open. He lifted his head. He looked at the men. He did not get up. He did not bark. He had used what was left of his voice for them already.
Russell knelt down next to the couch.
He said, “Mrs. Donovan. We’re gonna get you out of here.”
My grandmother said, very quietly, “Russell. Don’t move the dog yet.”
Russell told me later that this was the sentence he kept hearing for a week afterwards in his sleep.
He said, “Yes, ma’am.”
He waited.
He did not know what he was waiting for. He did not know that what he was waiting for was Captain to decide it was safe to let go.
After about forty-five seconds, Captain — slowly, stiffly — stood up off her chest.
He took one step backwards onto the couch cushion.
He sat down.
He looked at Russell.
Russell understood.
He scooped my grandmother up in her quilts and carried her out to the cab of his truck.
Captain followed under his own power.
He made it to the front porch before his back legs gave out.
One of the other plow operators, a man named Jim, picked him up like a fifty-pound bag of grain and carried him to the truck.
My grandmother arrived at Littleton Regional Hospital at 12:21 p.m. Her core body temperature was 94.0 degrees Fahrenheit — moderately hypothermic, alarming in a 94-year-old, but survivable.
Captain went to a country veterinary clinic in Littleton run by Dr. Hollis Beaumont. He was sixty-three years old, had been practicing rural large-and-small in the White Mountains for thirty-six years, and was the kind of vet who sometimes accepted firewood as partial payment.
I drove up from Burlington as soon as I-91 reopened and got to the clinic at 4 p.m. that Saturday afternoon. I introduced myself as a vet tech. I asked Dr. Beaumont how he was.
Dr. Beaumont was sitting on a stool next to Captain’s recovery kennel. Captain had two IV lines running. His ears were inside an electric warming wrap. His chest was rising and falling in slow careful pulls.
Dr. Beaumont said, “Maeve. Sit down a second.”
I sat down on the floor.
He said, “Your grandmother’s dog has a core body temperature right now of ninety-six point one. Up from a reading of ninety-four point eight when he came in two hours ago.”
I said, “Okay.”
He said, “You know what a healthy adult dog runs at.”
I said, “One-oh-one to one-oh-two.”
He said, “Right.”
He said, “He came in seven degrees below his normal baseline. Your grandmother came in seven degrees below hers. They were almost the exact same temperature when the plow crew found them.”
I did not say anything.
Dr. Beaumont said, “Maeve. A dog his size and his coat in a forty-one-degree house with someone wrapped around him — he should have been at minimum five degrees warmer than your grandmother. He should have been holding his core. He’s a sixty-pound brindle Pit Bull mix with a thick double coat. He had every metabolic advantage.”
He said, “He gave it to her.”
I said, “Hollis.”
He said, “I don’t know how else to put this. I have been doing this thirty-six years. I have seen hypothermic dogs. I have seen dogs that froze with their owners. I have not seen this. He shed five degrees of his own warmth into her body over three days. He did not have a mechanism to do that on purpose. His body did it because she was colder and he kept moving closer.”
He said, “There is no protocol for that. There is no instinct in the literature for it. He just kept getting nearer to her until there was no air between them anymore.”
He stood up.
He said, “Excuse me a second, Maeve.”
He walked out of the exam room.
I heard him in the hallway. He was not crying — he was just standing in the hallway with his back against the wall, breathing.
He came back in after about four minutes.
He sat down on the stool again.
He said, “He’s going to be okay. I want him here for two more days on fluids.”
I said, “Okay.”
He said, “I want you to know what he did, though. I needed to say it out loud once.”
He said, “That dog didn’t keep her warm, Maeve.”
He said, “He lent her his life.”
I drove to the hospital that evening.
My grandmother was sitting up in bed. She had soup in front of her she had not started eating. Her hair was down. She looked like a child.
She said, “Maeve. Where is he.”
I said, “Gram. He’s at Dr. Beaumont’s. He’s going to be okay.”
She said, “I want him here.”
I said, “Gram, they can’t bring a dog into a hospital room.”
She said, “Maeve. I am ninety-four years old. I will not be alive forever. I want him here.”
I went and talked to a nurse, who talked to a charge nurse, who talked to a hospital administrator, who told me very kindly that the answer was not no but it was not yes today.
By Monday afternoon, the answer was yes.
A volunteer drove Captain over from Dr. Beaumont’s clinic in the back of a heated SUV with a fleece blanket around him. He walked into my grandmother’s hospital room on stiff legs and a leash.
My grandmother saw him.
She did not cry.
She put her hand out.
He walked to the bed. He pressed the top of his blocky head into her open palm. She held him there for about thirty seconds.
She said, “Captain. I know what you did.”
He looked at her with his weak-tea eyes.
She said, “I am going to make it up to you.”
She has been.
It has been ten months.
My grandmother left the hospital after eight days. She came home to the farmhouse. We have, finally, set her up properly. I drove down with my husband and we installed a generator that runs on propane. My uncle Paul drove down from Bangor and replaced the wood stove with one that lights on a battery starter. My mother bought her a cell phone and made her practice using it. The phone company restrung the line into the house.
Captain came home from Dr. Beaumont’s after four days. He has fully recovered. There is a small patch of fur on his chest where they shaved him for an IV that has grown back in lighter than the rest of his coat.
He sleeps on the foot of my grandmother’s bed every night.
She has changed one habit.
Every night before bed, she sits on the edge of her mattress, places both of her thin papery hands on either side of Captain’s blocky head, and presses her forehead against his.
She holds it there for one full minute.
She does not say anything.
He closes his eyes.
I came down for Thanksgiving and watched her do it. I stood in the hallway and did not interrupt.
Afterwards I asked her about it. I said, “Gram. What are you doing when you do that?”
She looked up at me from the side of the bed.
She said, “Maeve. I’m giving him back what’s mine.”
I said, “You can’t, Gram. It doesn’t work that way.”
She said, “Maybe not. But I am sixty-five years older than that dog. I have warmth I don’t need anymore. I am giving it to him. One minute every night. Until I run out.”
I sat down on the floor.
I did not say anything for a while.
She scratched the white blaze on Captain’s chest.
She said, “He gave it to me first. I’m just paying it back.”
Last week I took Captain in to Dr. Beaumont for a senior wellness check.
He weighed in at sixty-three pounds. His heart was strong. His joints were good. His core body temperature was 101.6.
Dr. Beaumont sat on his stool. He looked at me over his reading glasses.
He said, “Maeve. He’s back where he should be.”
I said, “I know.”
Dr. Beaumont said, “How is your grandmother.”
I said, “She’s still here, Hollis. She’s still here.”
He said, “Yeah.”
He said, “He’s still working.”
I said, “Yes, sir. Every night.”
If somebody once gave you warmth they couldn’t afford to lose — say their name below.
