There seemed to be no way out of my post-viral illness. Then I got a dog

Twelve years ago, I was in America on business and spent eight hours in a car with a nice man who, with his nose buried in a handkerchief, told me that he had just recovered from bird flu that had “come from Mexico.” It was, he assured me, “the worst flu of my life – I almost died.” (Bird flu is very contagious and spreads mainly among birds, but can also infect humans.)

I dutifully expressed my condolences, opened the window to get some fresh air, and thought nothing more about it. Until two days later, as I was about to board a plane home, the floor of Los Angeles airport suddenly appeared in front of me at an unusual angle. I was drenched in sweat and felt an urgent need to lie down.

I suffered with it for a month, sometimes silently, sometimes with perhaps a typically male sense of melodrama, while my wife was on hand with dry toast and a cold compress. When it finally wore off, I was exhausted and half full again, although I had been boiling over before. But then again, I thought, I had just turned 40; perhaps it was an age thing? In any case, I did what anyone in my position would have done: I ignored it and got on with my life.

But the flu came back several times over the next 18 months, and the last time, to exaggerate like my American friend, I “almost died.” I was told the virus had damaged my mitochondrial cells, and it took Google to explain to me that these control energy levels in my body. I was now a battery that was constantly running out of power. My doctors, plural, shrugged. You never want to see a doctor shrug.

Anyway, the dog. As far as I was concerned, we got her because our daughters wanted one. And so Missy came to the family a few years later, when—with floundering self-confidence and a knee-jerk urge to change the subject—I mentioned my “poor health,” a never-clearly diagnosed post-viral “thing” that left me exhausted after physical exertion.

Although I am a self-professed cat person, I quickly took a liking to her, this radiant beauty, whose breed apparently does not shed, but whose hair we found everywhere anyway. It was not long before we were all about her, and we could only spoil her accordingly. At previous family meetings it had been decided that we would share the responsibility, but when our daughters remembered that they had to look after their phones, we took over, my wife on the morning shift, me on the afternoon shift.

When my wife ran miles with her, I could only manage the local park. I took a ball with me so at least one of us could run. But gradually, and very much at her insistence, we started running longer distances each day and built up a fitness I thought was lost forever.

But it wasn't just about endurance. Slowly, Missy opened up the world to me again. A long illness can have a terrible effect on a person's social life, and mine had shrunk accordingly. I stopped going out as often, stopped keeping in touch, and turned out to be a bad friend. I feared that whatever social skills I had left had probably atrophied along with my muscles. But I used to be good at talking to people. And here, at the dog park, that ability was mercifully returning.

I learned that the dog park can be a strangely intimate place, where our unassuming animals facilitate a kind of conversation between strangers that probably wouldn't happen anywhere else. As our respective charges sniffed each other, their owners quickly dispensed with small talk—the weather is the weather, after all—and instead talked about things I normally only discuss with the people nearest and dearest to me.

Over the next few years, I had increasingly intimate conversations with a diverse group of lovely and sometimes strange people who became friends and motley confidantes of sorts. I chatted about existential crises, but also about our favorite sitcom, with an ageing Russian dissident, a friendly octogenarian, and an ambitious actress in her twenties who didn't like hearing the words “Florence” and “Pugh” in her presence. We talked about Brexit and where we go after we die. I learned about their love lives and their losses. Occasionally, we helped each other out in times of need. The Russian recommended Tolstoy to me, while someone else implored me to invest in Bitcoin.

And of course I got to meet her dogs: a three-legged Staffordshire Terrier, an elegant Labradoodle, a very melancholy Basset Hound whose bark was like the sigh of a clarinet. I came home from these walks refreshed in many ways: a little fitter, a little healthier and undeniably more stimulated.

Over the previous many months, I had become accustomed to cocooning myself at home, like one of those pigeons that flies into a mall and can't find its way out. For several years, I was in and out of the hospital, undergoing blood tests, endoscopies and, worse, colonoscopies, a barium test and an MRI scan, all in an attempt to find a likely diagnosis for my escalating symptoms, which in turn might point me to the best course of treatment.

But that didn't happen. “Do yoga,” I was told. “Take vitamins.” At one of my later oscopies, two nurses held me in the fetal position. They had warned me that this was a particularly uncomfortable procedure and that I might get “cramps.” As they chatted about the previous night's football scores, I noticed that tears were constantly streaming from my eyes. It wasn't crying, it was just pent-up sadness seeping out.

So how, I always feared, could I bring a dog into all this? But my wife was convinced that Missy would change me in ways that yoga and vitamins might not. She could give me a new perspective, or at least help me regain some confidence. And she was right. I'm not “cured,” but my health – physical and mental – has been slowly and insidiously improving.

We've been together for nearly a decade now. Missy is headstrong and stubborn, has terrible breath, and I love her unconditionally. She showed me that the world never stopped being interesting; I just stopped being interested in it for a moment. But now I'm fully present again every afternoon. Is that mindfulness? Maybe. All I know is that I feel something that looks suspiciously like joy when I see how much joy she gets from being in a suburban park littered with last night's takeout cartons.

I would be grateful, but she doesn't seem to need it, because the dog is so wonderfully uncomplicated, in a way that I obviously am not. She just longs for routine and regular bursts of freedom. And when she tilts her head towards me every day at 4 p.m., I grab the leash and off we go.
People who like dogs like people who like dogs by Nick Duerden (John Murray £14.99). To order a copy, go to timesbookshop.co.uk. Free UK delivery on orders over £25. Special discount available for Times+ members