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t was a few months after Galen's treatment that I finally talked to Dr. Sears for this story. He hadn't returned earlier phone calls. I called again.
   ``Get me out of this,'' he said to his wife, Ruth, when he heard I was on the line.
   It took some convincing on my part before she let me talk to him. ``I just don't want to go out there again,'' he told her.
   I wasn't trying to make him out to be more than he was, I said. I just wanted to write this story. With the understanding that Sears was not attempting to sell himself as a savior of dogs, Ruth put me on the phone with him.
   The problem was that the treatment has not been published, except once in the 1970s, and that was a treatment for cats, for a different disease, Sears said. As a treatment for canine distemper, it had not been published.
   At a 1974 convention in front of about 2,000 colleagues, Sears brought up his treatment during a seminar.
   The lead doctor at the seminar, thought about it, and then said, ``Sit down, that's impossible.''
       ``I was so mad I was spitting nails,'' Sears said.
   Forget about getting acceptance, Sears said. He decided to shun publicity because of the continued resistance he expected to see by trying to promote the treatment. ``I'll just keep saving animals.''
       Al and Ruth Sears had met at the University of Pennsylvania in the 1950s.  She was a nursing student and he was in vet school. She was from the East Coast, and Al had grown up in the Panama Canal Zone. The moved to California to finish his veterinary training and in the 1960s, Sears started working in the Antelope Valley.
   ``When I came here, distemper was as common as fleas,'' Sears said.
   As today, there was no treatment for distemper. And, vaccines were not as strong or reliable. When an outbreak occurred, all that could be done was to make an announcement and ask people to bring in their dogs, line them up and give them shots.
   Sears agreed to meet with me. I drove up and had lunch with both of them at a country club. Ruth acts as an office manager. They work in a small, one story building, with a clean, white lobby sometimes visited by Mitchell, a grey and white cat. He had been dropped off one day, never picked up, and eventually became the office cat.
   ``Call me Al,'' Sears said as we shook hands. He was a big man with white hair.
   As he drove us to the country club, I told him about the dogs that we lost.  ``There must have been something I missed,'' I said, talking about how Tug's symptoms had not tipped us off.
   ``You can't tell the difference between a real bad case of kennel cough and a mild case of distemper,'' Sears said.
   During distemper outbreaks in the 1960s, ``we were losing ten dogs a week,'' Sears said.
   They tried a variety of experimental treatments, including massive doses of vitamin C, another using ether. But no such treatments worked.
   ``The key to the whole thing is to turn the virus off,'' Sears said. By accident, he somehow found a way.
   In the 1970s, a paper was released on developing an interferon for dogs.  Essentially, it was a method to stimulate the disease fighting macrophage cells and T-cells to get into a dog's system in force.
   Sears followed a procedure he had heard of for triggering the interferon, and withdrawing a material from the animal at a key time. He did so without the full written report and made a mistake in the timing for withdrawing the material.
   But he didn't know that when he tried the serum on one dog with distemper.
   ``Literally, the next day, the dog was better,'' Sears said.
   He mailed a sample of the material to Cornell University. A report returned to him said the levels of interferon were insignificant.
   ``In the meantime, we were saving dogs,'' Sears said. ``So we didn't care.''
        But how did it work?
       ``I don't know,'' Sears said. ``What we don't know to this day is what the material is.''
       To find the answer requires intensive research. That requires money and support that Sears does not have and is not willing to seek out because of the strong criticism he received in the 1970s that prompted him to keep his discovery mostly to himself.
   Fortunately, our vet had heard of him.
   ``I'll probably publish, but it will be when I'm ready to get out of the firing line,'' said Sears, who is still at least a couple of years away from retirement, when he wanted to publish.
   ``I've been burned a couple of times by the big guns before,'' he continued.  ``I finally said, `I don't care.''
       He chose to wait until retiring because of the examples of Copernicus, who believed the Earth revolved around the sun, but fearing the wrath of the church, did not publish until the year of his death, and Galileo, who proved Copernicus right, but had to recant under threat of excommunication and torture from the church.
   ``These are milestones in science,'' said Sears, as he explained why he was so reluctant at first to talk to me. ``And everybody remembers them.''
       Sears expects that when he publishes his treatment, it will create a similar uproar in the veterinary community. ``Everybody will yell and scream,'' Sears said. ``But then, I'll be saying, `Fine, yell and scream, but this is what I found.''
       In recent years, distemper became less the problem. Parvo, a powerful virus that can survive outside a dog for a long time, which causes severe dehydration, diarrhea and death, became the issue.
   Thanks to the stronger and commonplace vaccinations of today, distemper is more rare.
   Galen had been the first case Sears had seen in at least six years.
   He had a fever when Karen brought Galen in. He was treated with fluids, and antibiotics. He was clearly sick. ``He wasn't fighting anyone,'' Sears said.
Sears keeps the material _ the color of weak honey beer _ what he calls "goofy serum" but Ruth prefers the more respectable name of "Serum X" in a refrigerator near the back door. Ten CCs of the serum was taken from a simple vial and injected into the rump.
   Further shots were required. Galen had to stay over the weekend.
   The fever was under control in 18 hours.