Behind the Book
The Dog and the Cheese
Six years ago, I left a veterinarian's office crying.
My dog had been diagnosed with a heart murmur. She was six years old. I didn't know yet that heart murmurs are relatively common in chihuahua mixes, or that many dogs live long, full lives with them unmedicated. I just knew that a vet had told me something was wrong with her heart and I had walked out into the parking lot and fallen apart.
I called friends who happened to be veterinarians. I read everything I could find. The picture that emerged was more reassuring than the moment in the office had been: she didn't need medication yet, possibly ever. She would need to be monitored. Her heart would need to be listened to, regularly and carefully, for the rest of her life.
That was the beginning of the rabbit hole.
I didn't go looking for longevity research for myself. I went looking for it for her. There is something clarifying about that — about searching not for your own mortality but for the mortality of something you love that has no say in the matter and no concept of what you're trying to do for it. I wanted more time with her. I wanted to know if science had anything useful to offer.
It did, tentatively.
Fisetin is a flavonoid found in strawberries, apples, persimmons, and several other fruits and vegetables. It is also a senolytic — a compound that selectively clears senescent cells, the so-called "zombie cells" that accumulate with age, stop functioning properly, and release inflammatory signals that accelerate the aging of surrounding tissue. The research is early and mostly in mice, but the mouse trials have been striking enough that the Mayo Clinic began testing fisetin in humans. When something is being tested at the Mayo Clinic, I decided, it is probably safe enough to give to a dog not much larger than a mouse.
So I started giving it to her. Once a month, wrapped in cheese. She has no idea what she's taking. She just knows there is cheese.
She is twelve now. The heart murmur is stable. She runs around like a puppy. She is only slightly gray in the face, otherwise entirely herself — opinionated about her vest, convinced that the chipmunks in the yard require her personal supervision, unaware that she is the unwitting protagonist of a trilogy about what happens when the thing I do for her every month goes catastrophically, accidentally, civilizationally wrong.
The premise of Becoming More of Less is not science fiction in the way I originally intended it. It is, in some small and very specific way, my actual life. The woman in the novel who starts it all — who researches herbs on the internet, who feeds her dog something that works, who has no idea what she has just begun — is doing what I do. Except her version crosses to wildlife and humans and doubles the lifespan of every living thing on Earth, and mine, as far as I can tell, is just keeping a small dog healthier a little longer.
As far as I can tell.
She is asleep next to me as I write this. Her heart is beating steadily. Outside, a chipmunk is doing something she will need to address in the morning.
I keep giving her the fisetin. Wrapped in cheese, once a month. Just in case.