Despite long odds, Roland keeps on rollin’
Her name is Luna, and she is an English bulldog who just went under the knife for a skin tumor.
She lies on her left side, tongue lolling from her mouth. The veterinary technicians at Gahanna Animal Hospital keep close tabs on her as she comes out of anesthesia.
It is Roland, though, who pays Luna the most attention.
Roland is an 8-year-old pit bull owned by one of the techs, Carly Ciancetta. Ciancetta works three days a week at the hospital, and Roland spends every one of them with her.
On Mondays and Tuesdays, Roland’s schedule is fluid. He mingles with employees and snoozes in his crate, although he will surrender it without complaint to one of the hospital’s house cats, Missy.
On Fridays, like this one, Roland really earns his keep. He has taken it upon himself to comfort pets such as Luna as they come out of surgery.
He circles behind Luna, licks her gingerly. He rests his chin on her side, nuzzling her until the anesthesia wears off. Every so often he paws gently at the blankets covering her, almost as though he were trying to pull them up.
Usually this has the opposite effect, prompting the techs to tuck Luna back in and remind him, “Not too much, Roly.”
But really, Roland’s bedside manner is remarkable. Maybe we see in our animals what we want to see, but it would be hard not to read Roland’s expression in this moment as one of deep concern. He moves quietly, deliberately, slowly. His eyes harbor a world-weariness usually reserved for basset hounds.
There is the sense that he is standing sentry, watching over a close friend’s hospital bedside.
In reality, Roland and Luna are perfect strangers.
“These guys have never met each other,” Ciancetta says.
So Roland doesn’t “know” Luna, in the personal
sense at least. But watching him move about, you quickly come to believe that he understands her fully, and empathizes with her current plight.
And who knows? Maybe that is the case. Because Roland can relate to these ailing pets in a very real and immediate way.
Roland, it turns out, is deep into his own quiet fight to survive.
A disclosure: my wife works at Gahanna Animal Hospital, and it is from her that I first learned about Roland.
She came home one day with a Tshirt depicting a smiling pit bull. It read: “ROLAND WITH MY HOMIES.” Obviously, I had questions.
The Veterinary Information Network surveyed 1,700 of its members and found that 60% had a “clinic cat” or dog that called their offices home. Some reported having both.
On the network’s blog, Vetzinsight, veterinarian Teri Ann Oursler waxed rhapsodic on the phenomenon, recalling a career’s worth of her own clinic cats and sharing tales of other like-minded vets.
“I am absolutely certain that all clinic cats believe their title to be God or Goddess and that the clinic could NOT function without them and their feline guidance,” the Wyoming vet wrote. “They greeted clients at the front desk, making them feel welcome. They helped them write checks by biting on the pen as they wrote (maybe not so helpful as the cats thought). And more than one snuggled up to a client who was grieving the loss of their pet.”
So Roland is not so much a wonderful outlier as one in a long line of valued animal ambassadors.
But back to the T-shirts.
They were, my wife explained, a show of solidarity among the staff at Gahanna Animal Hospital. They were a way to say to Ciancetta, “We are with you, as you and Roland go through this.”
The bad news came this past spring, but did little to slow Roland down. He kept coming to work with Ciancetta. He kept up his rounds. He kept doing what Roland does: comfort visitors to the hospital, both human and non.
The only difference now? He is dying of cancer.
Ciancetta, 35, was a teenager when she started at Gahanna Animal Hospital.
“This was my very first job,” she said. “I was in the kennel at first.”
She has always loved animals, and there are horses, goats, pigs, cats and dogs on her Groveport farm.
Roland came into her life when he was 17 weeks old. He was owned by a pair of clients who decided to give him up for adoption. Their professional lives were keeping him crated much more than they had anticipated. They were good people, Ciancetta said, and they wanted better for him.
As luck would have it, almost everyone at the hospital that day had gathered elsewhere in the building to hear a presentation by a renowned veterinary expert.
“I happened to be downstairs,” Ciancetta said.
She knew right away that opportunity had come licking.
Just like that, he was all hers.
He is as far from the stereotyped pit bull as you can get.
“He’s a quiet dude,” she said. “Not much of a guard dog, I’ll add that.
“He has his little weird idiosyncrasies,” she said. For instance, Roland is not a fan of doorways. He treads lightly through them, lest they sneak up and trap him somehow.
He is a big fan, though, of the stairs that lead to the upstairs lunch room.
“He gets really excited,” Ciancetta said. “Sometimes he trips.”
The lockdown that came with the COVID-19 pandemic increased his range. Pit bulls still get a bad rap in some quarters, and likely not every visitor to the hospital would be comfortable if a pit the size of Roland strolled up to them and plonked his paw down on their foot, thereby claiming them as his own.
With clients staying outside during the height of COVID, though, Roland suddenly had the run of the place.
“He went a little rogue,” Ciancetta said.
At first, they figured it was a urinary tract infection. He had to go outside more often.
The reality was far worse than Ciancetta could have imagined; Roland was still in his prime, after all.
The cancer was inoperable, and the doctors said it was only a matter of time before Roland succumbed to it. Ciancetta began chemotherapy, checking off his appointments with relief as the weeks, amazingly, stretched into months.
Dr. Joy Harkins, the veterinarian with whom Ciancetta works during Fridays’ surgeries, said chemotherapy is undertaken with a different philosophy for pets. Their lives are short by nature, and the goal is not to eradicate the cancer so much as keep the pet comfortable. That approach means chemo for Roland is not as brutal as it can be for people.
Some days Ciancetta can tell Roland feels lousy, but on those days he responds well to their treatment plan.
On good days, only the frequent bathroom trips hint that something is wrong.
But Ciancetta knows those days are dwindling. Earlier this month, a checkup revealed that the tumor had grown and the cancer spread. She made the decision to discontinue chemo.
The harder choice looms.
“We try not to think about the end,”
Ciancetta said.
“Isn’t that all of us?” Harkins said. There have been times when Ciancetta went looking for Roland and found him in some quiet nook of the hospital, comforting a coworker going through a rough patch.
“He makes you feel a lot better about life,” said Amy Morton, the hospital’s client care representative manager.
Roland’s style is so relaxed that he’s been known to cozy up to recovering cats, but Ciancetta is careful to keep an eye on him and limit his interactions with pets that, for one reason or another, aren’t a good fit for “Roland’s canoodling upon recovery.”
“If I tell him not to interact with a dog, he won’t,” she said.
Thus relieved of duty, he is free to visit staff elsewhere or track down that particularly bewitching odor of recently reheated Bahama Mama sausage.
Lianne Pittro, a technician assistant, brings Roland a peanut butter sandwich for lunch and two marshmallows for dessert on every day he works. She acknowledges that she doesn’t do this for her own dogs.
“He no longer likes crust so I bought shape cutters so he can have fun shapes,” Pittro said.
Such is Roland’s quiet power to win over pets and people.
“He helped bring us together,” Ciancetta said.
Harkins cracked a smile.
“He’s going to do it for America next,” she said.
Ciancetta doesn’t like to think about making those 20-mile commutes alone, but she knows they are coming.
“I will be the one that has to make the call, ultimately,” Ciancetta said. But she knows too that she will not have to make the decision alone.
“Roland will tell me,” she said. tdecker@dispatch.com @Theodore_decker