'Oh my God! It's a dog! It's alive!'

     Maria Arsenijevich saw a flash of fur poking out of a yellow plastic tub. At first she thought it was a toy. There's was no sound, no movement. It couldn't be alive. It had to be a stuffed animal.
     She was sitting in the family room at the back of a "humongous" Lincoln Park home early last March. The crew of two workers from her company, Clearing Chaos — don't call them "cleaners," they are professional organizers who specialize in decluttering and dealing with hoarders — were separating the possessions of a tenant being kicked out of her rental home. Boxes and cartons were piled 6 feet tall. Piles of junk. They were two hours into a seven-day job.
     The tenant was a doctor, Anita Damodaran, 38, a pediatric physician with two young children.
     "Very charming," said Arsenijevich. "A very nice lady. Hoarders are usually extremely intelligent and very nice."
     Damodaran Damordaran was helpful, assisting the Clearing Chaos workers, pointing out which possessions were hers and should be shipped to Florida, where she was moving. What should be donated, what thrown away. Even doing some of the work herself.
     "She took this whole tower of crates and held on to a black and yellow one and was dragging it to the door to get it outside to the deck," said Arsenijevich. "I turned around to see what she was doing and saw a furry something poking out from below the yellow lid. I thought, 'It's a stuffed animal, bursting out. Because there are too many of them in the tub.' There was never any noise. No whimpering, no barking. She goes a little farther, and now I'm seeing three-quarters of a face. I wasn't sure it was a face — one side was matted with fur. The dog was popping its head out of the tub. The top was raising. I was fixated on the dog.
     "My brain was saying, 'That's a stuffed animal.' I'm staring at this thing, and my mind's going, 'Something's not right here.'"
     What was not right here was that Betty, a Portuguese water dog, had been confined to that plastic tub, a veterinarian later estimated, for about a month. Her weight had fallen from about 40 to 19 pounds. She was near death.
     Damodaran dragged the box away. That had to be a toy, Arsenijevich told herself, again.
     Then her assistant started to scream.
     "Oh my God, oh my God!" one of her crew yelled. "It's a dog! It's a dog! It's alive!"
     Arsenijevich raced over.
     "I thought it was a standard poodle. Just sitting in the crate, its legs in front, very rigid, like a statue," she said. "No movement."
     She started barking orders at her crew. One — who didn't want to use her name — was sent to the kitchen to get water. Arsenijevich called MedVet, the emergency animal hospital at Belmont and California. They told her to find a blanket and use it as a stretcher.
     And Damodaran?

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