It's taken six months for me to be able to write this. But now that gratitude can speak louder than grief, I want to publicly thank the veterinarian who gave our dog, Tofu, nearly five years that she almost certainly would not have had otherwise. Naturally, there is a story ...

I'll begin at the end, the night after Christmas 2007 when Tofu and I made our last trip to a vet together. For all the planning that my wife, Barbara, and I had done, for all our good intentions, for all our conviction that Tofu should be able to die at home, I'd postponed the inevitable one too many times. Suddenly the pain was just too great for the painkillers and it had gotten too late to call Tofu's vet, so the all-night emergency clinic on U.S. 15-501 was where I sat while Tofu was given her final examination.

As I waited, I couldn't help but think back almost five years, to the day Tofu had been diagnosed with a crippling genetic spinal condition. I was told she might have, at most, six months before the pain would be too great to block. Two of her littermates (we'd heard from the breeder) already were limping badly, and Tofu was no longer able to make it up the stairs on her own. Painkillers were prescribed. Sympathy was expressed. I began rehearsing the way I would break the news to Barbara.

"There is one thing you might want to try," said the kindly young vet who had examined Tofu and read her x-rays. "There's a veterinarian who does acupuncture on dogs and even on horses, Dr. Elaine Gregg. She calls her practice Horsefeathers. She's gotten some pretty good results, or so I hear."

I called as soon as I got home. Got an answering machine. Liked her voice. Got a call back that evening. And told her the truth: I didn't have much faith in acupuncture. It seemed like a lot of hoodoo to me.

Dr. Gregg was unperturbed. "It's up to you," she said, "but the painkiller you're planning on giving Tofu has been shown to cause some pretty nasty gastrointestinal effects. You've got a choice between hoodoo and bleeding ulcers. And if the hoodoo doesn't work, there's still those painkillers. Oh, and don't forget that, in dogs, there's no such thing as a placebo effect."

"Where's your office?" I asked.

"Oh, no," she said. "I come to you. Where's your house?"

At the end of that first session, I went upstairs to Barbara's office to tell her how it had gone.

"I don't know if it's going to do any good," I told Barbara, "but I know Tofu seemed to like it. She fell asleep."

Barbara wasn't looking at me. She was looking at the floor.

"Did you carry Tofu upstairs?" she asked.

"No," I started to say, and I realized I could feel Tofu lying on my foot. For the first time in months, she had come upstairs with me on her own.

During one session, maybe three years into the treatment, Elaine looked up at me and said, "You understand that this is a road with no turns. We are doing everything we can to keep the pain away. But here is the objective. We want Tofu to stay at an even level for as long as possible, not have a slow, miserable decline. But what that means is that when it does happen, it will happen fast. Are you prepared for that?"

I said I was prepared, and I guess I was. In theory. A year and a half later, what Elaine predicted was just what happened. In reality.

As I walked out into the night, alone, from that last visit to the emergency vet, I realized that Tofu had lived through 16 Christmases with our family. Her life had been extended almost half again by a loving vet who practiced a healing discipline in which I had once not even believed. Our time with Tofu, as precious as it was uncertain, was genuinely blessed. And though I felt it then, I can say it now. "Thank you, Elaine Gregg." You gave Tofu and her family almost five more happy years. What more could we have asked?