One hot day in July, Nicole Espina took her Husky, Vasily, out for a walk in Mar Vista. “It was really, really hot,” she said. “Normally we would walk for half an hour to an hour. But I didn’t want him to get heat stroke so we went back home early.
“Usually, when I get to to my front door, I unleash him and he goes in. But this time, he pulled a little Houdini on me and he ran out toward the street.”
A taxi was speeding down Venice Blvd. near her home at the time. “The driver was looking down at his phone, one of my neighbors said, and he didn’t see my dog,” Nicole said. Vasily lost what was a terrible mismatch with the cab. The major physical problem was a broken leg, she said, “but the encounter also has had a heavy mental toll, too.
“He’s crying every day,” she said in in a recent interview. “The first few days Vasily was home, you could tell that he wasn’t the same anymore. When I would take him out, he was traumatized by what had happened there [in the street near her front door].
She said that Vasily “has been shaking, quivering and crying and he’s in pain. He’s suffering. A lot of my friends are like, what are you going to do? and I honestly don’t know what I can do.”
Nicole has been staying at home most of the time because of her dog’s trauma. She said that he also has had sores from an infection, although Dr. Wendy Brooks, who treated Vasily at Mar Vista Animal Hospital, told Nicole that she expected him to recover soon.
Nicole who is not working full time, was short of cash and the hospital suggested applying for help to Angel Fund. Nicole did so and received a grant matched by the hospital. That was a huge help.
“I’m so grateful for Angel Fund,” she said. “Without it, I don’t know what I would’ve done to get the money to properly have my dog’s medical needs taken care of. Angel Fund took a lot of stress off me and was a huge relief.”
Dr. Brooks, who is owner of the Mar Vista hospital, was concerned about air in Vasily’s chest cavity but after hours of observation concluded that it would subside on its own and didn’t need what would have been expensive treatment, Nicole said.
She was given Vasily – now four years old – by a friend she made while visiting in Russia a couple of years ago.
Nicole had been studying at UC Davis but decided to take some time off in 2016 after two years because of the pressure she felt to maintain her 4.0 grade-point average. “The pressure of maintaining it just got to me. I was very devastated and my Mom suggested I take time off and travel,” she said. She decided to do that – something she could afford because of a settlement she had received after a traffic accident several years ago.
After spending time in the South Pacific and Asia (she is a native of the Philippines), she said, “I found myself in Russia.” A scuba diver, she lived nearly two years in Irkutsk, Siberia, but found a real highlight of her time there when she went to Lake Baikal.
“They have this tradition that they go in the water, usually in January. It’s sort of a cultural or religious thing. Baikal is one of the clearest, largest lakes in the world. I was so stoked to go ice diving!” She regards her time in Russia as “the best time of my life.”
She returned to the United States with Vasily in 2018 and tried living in New York City for a short time but then returned to California. Although she had grown up in the Bay Area, she decided to come to Los Angeles. She now teaches some free-lance Yoga via Zoom and is hoping to sell some of her paintings and pottery online to supplement her finances.
She’s also thinking about going back to college, perhaps online. “It’s been a long time since I’ve been in school and I would need a refresher course,” she said.
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