My Dog Kept Pressing His Nose to the Same Spot on My Side

This is not a dramatic story. Nobody died. I am writing it because I nearly did, and because a dog is the reason I did not, and I think that is worth saying out loud even if it makes people roll their eyes.

Bruno is a nine-year-old lurcher, all legs and worry, the softest dog I have ever owned. He is not usually a fusser. He has his routines and he keeps to them and he does not much like being handled. So it was strange when, one evening on the sofa, he climbed half onto my lap and started pushing his nose hard into my left side, just under the arm, into the ribs. I laughed and pushed him off. He came back and did it again.

He did it the next night, and the night after. Over the following weeks it became a thing he did, this insistent nosing at one exact spot, sometimes with a little whine, sometimes just the cold press of his nose held there like he was listening to me through it. If I moved his head he would put it straight back. Always the same place. My partner started calling it Bruno's button.

I did not think anything of it in a medical way. Why would I. I felt fine. I was forty-four and healthy and busy and a dog nosing your ribs is just a dog being odd. But it went on, and it got more urgent, and one night he did it and then lay across me and would not settle and looked up at me with his ears back, and something about it got under my skin. I mentioned it to my sister, half as a joke, and she is a nurse and she did not laugh. She told me to go and get the spot looked at, mostly to shut Bruno up.

I did, feeling a fool, and the doctor felt around and found nothing obvious but sent me for a scan because I mentioned the weight I had lost without trying, which I had put down to being busy. The scan found a mass. Lower left, up under the ribs where a dog had been pressing his nose for months. It was early. Early enough that the word they used afterwards was cured, which is a word they do not give out lightly.

I have read everything there is to read about this now. Dogs can smell disease. There are dogs trained to do it in hospitals, sniffing out cancers on the breath, and they are frighteningly good. So the sensible explanation is that Bruno smelled it, some faint new wrongness coming off me, and being a dog he did the only thing a dog can do, which is push his nose at it and whine. He had no idea what it was. He just knew it did not belong, and he told me the only way he could, over and over, while I told him to stop.

That is the part that stays with me. He told me for months and I told him to stop. He kept telling me anyway. Dogs do not give up on a thing they know to be true just because we ignore them. If he had been a giver-upper I would not be writing this.

Bruno is grey around the muzzle now and he sleeps a lot and he still does not much like being handled. But every so often, less often now, he climbs up and puts his nose to that same spot on my side and just holds it there, breathing, checking. And I let him. I sit very still and I let him check for as long as he wants. It is the least I can do for the animal that read my body better than I could, and would not shut up until I listened.