My Body’s “Service Engine Soon” Light Is On

My Venerable Road Warrior SUV’s “SERVICE ENGINE SOON” warning lit up about a month ago, a couple days after the guys at Zimbrick had just given it a little more than fifteen hundred bucks’ worth of TLC. The Road Warrior is just shy of turning a hundred thousand miles on the odometer and in a few months it will be 12 model years old.

The Venerable Road Warrior is as old as our wonderful purebred collie Shadow. Both were “born” in 2006. Our old gal Shadow was born at our breeder’s home in suburban Franklin, WI and we took her home when she was six months old. The Venerable Road Warrior was born at an assembly plant in Ramos Arzipe, Mexico, a couple hundred miles southwest of Laredo, TX and began life as a Hertz rent-a-car at the San Francisco airport.

It’s amazing how easy it is these days to find out things about your car’s history. I have no idea how it wound up on the lot at Zimbrick in Madison, where I bought it in ’08. At that time, it had only about 20K on the odometer.

As usual, I digress.

The idea for this post came when, the other day, I was helping my buddy Shadow navigate the seven stairs between my office and the next level of our quad-level home, where our kitchen, dining room, and “living room” are located. We found out in April that Shadow has degenerative myelopathy, a disease of the spinal cord that develops in some dogs. The spinal cord degeneration causes the dog to gradually lose control of the hindquarters, which makes going up stairs a challenge.

Eventually, and our vet tells us it’s likely a matter of months, perhaps weeks, Shadow will completely lose control of her back legs. She won’t be able to stand, much less navigate stairs. So – we’ll have to help her across the Rainbow Bridge, as pet-owners say, at that time.  Our vet assures us there’s no pain to the animal as the disease progresses, but it’s irreversible and untreatable.

Here's Shadow, In Her First Summer in '07

As I gently lifted Shadow’s butt a bit to help her ascend the stairs, I thought “you know, Shadow, we’ve got three things around here that have the ‘SERVICE ENGINE SOON’ light on: you, me, and the Venerable Road Warrior”.

About the same time our vet had made the diagnosis of degenerative myelopathy on Shadow, I was diagnosed with peripheral neuropathy. Usually it affects people with diabetes, which I do not have, but it’s pretty common, with about 3 million new cases every year. It’s a degeneration of the nerves in the hands and or feet that causes numbness and tingling. In my case, it’s the feet more than the hands. This whole thing started out for me when I told my primary care doc that I was having trouble keeping my balance. Long story short, I wound up sitting in front of a podiatrist who told me what was going on, and made the diagnosis.

The podiatrist explained that the balance issues come from the inability of the damaged nerves in my feet to communicate vital information to my brain – information that’s necessary to maintain your balance when standing. You can have surgery on your lower spinal cord to help mitigate the effects, but it’s risky, not at all a guaranteed fix, and has a long rehab.

Oh – and the reason for the “SERVICE ENGINE SOON” warning light on the Venerable Road Warrior? It could be a bad oxygen sensor. Or a bad catalytic converter. So, for right now, until I decide whether it’s worth it to stick another grand or so into the ’06 SUV, the warning light will be a permanent feature.

So I guess the three of us….me, Shadow, and the Venerable Road Warrior….will just wait to see what happens.