This was meant to open a bunch of tabs
I’ve got a growing pile of things that I keep meaning to write about, but unfortunately they’re going to wait a bit longer as something much more important came up today. It had been a pretty good day-work wasn’t terrible, plus a package I’d been waiting on and my tax refund showed up in the mail-when I got home from work. My parents weren’t far behind me, I didn’t realize they’d been out with the dogs until then. My father picked a little fight with me about where I’d parked in the driveway then gave me a him-apology. Then he told me that Sasha, my younger girl-dog, had terminal cancer; the doctor today only gave her two to three months. It cut my knees out from under me.
We didn’t get her from a puppy, we found her by chance a few years later in a no-kill shelter, one of those fate things. Because we already owned her older brother, not even a year older, just from a different litter (their parents were the same, owned by a friend of my mothers). She’d gotten pregnant before she was a full year old, which screwed up her own growth development, and those people kept the puppies and shipped her off. I’m a little fuzzy on all the details after that, I think she had at least one other owner before the shelter but I’m not sure. She had, still has, abandonment issues. But she decided that I the human in the house that belonged to her, and she claimed me. Lexi too.
She hasn’t been feeling well the last week or so, since my parents returned from out of state (they take the dogs with them). She’d been throwing up a little and hadn’t eaten in five days-my parents were worried that she might have eaten grass with a chemical on them, or that a bone she’d eaten was hurting her insides, so they took her to our regular vet and then a super specialist. The super specialist found a sizable tumor/ulcer in her stomach, and that the cancer had spread throughout her organ systems, at least to her liver and her lymph nodes. None of this ever showed up on the outside of her body, she never had any lumps. And any sign that might have been feeling bad until now…probably looked like an arthritis attack (which she has) was making her lay down more. But even now she still wants to go for walks, and wags for you when you look at her or pet her, and still seems like a happy puppy. Just, if she lays down she doesn’t want to get up again for a while and she doesn’t want to eat.
When my dad told me what the vet said I wanted to cry right away, I could feel it, but I didn’t actually until I told Lexi a little while later. Two to three months if she starts eating again, as soon as starvation if she doesn’t was the full prognosis, with meds to hopefully help with the eating; she’s at least been keeping herself well-hydrated. I cried again when we finally did get her to eat something for the first time in five days-a few small spoons of vanilla ice cream. My parents are looking for a second opinion from another canine oncologist, half so they’ll know if it really is untreatable and half hoping that he’ll say he’d try treating it with puppy-chemo. (It saved my neighbor’s dog.) She’ll be ten in June, which would be the youngest we’ve ever lost a dog; the current youngest is thirteen.
I take pet related health problems so much worse than people and, yes, this is hitting me harder than my grandmother’s ailing health hit me senior year in university. I worry about how bad she might feel in the tiny amount of time currently predicted for her, and I worry about how her brother Dief will take it when he hasn’t even fully recovered from us putting down Laddie close to two years ago. And I worry about having to go to the vet with her if we need to put her down because I’ve never managed to do that before but I’ll need to this time, because she made me her person.
So right now I’m mostly trying to drown myself in things that can distract me; things that make me laugh, hobbies I enjoy, exercising, helping friends do research when they ask. It’s how I spent most of my night after work today already. I don’t know how long I’ll be coping like this, but I imagine it’s going to be a while, so I might be missing for a while again.
We didn’t get her from a puppy, we found her by chance a few years later in a no-kill shelter, one of those fate things. Because we already owned her older brother, not even a year older, just from a different litter (their parents were the same, owned by a friend of my mothers). She’d gotten pregnant before she was a full year old, which screwed up her own growth development, and those people kept the puppies and shipped her off. I’m a little fuzzy on all the details after that, I think she had at least one other owner before the shelter but I’m not sure. She had, still has, abandonment issues. But she decided that I the human in the house that belonged to her, and she claimed me. Lexi too.
She hasn’t been feeling well the last week or so, since my parents returned from out of state (they take the dogs with them). She’d been throwing up a little and hadn’t eaten in five days-my parents were worried that she might have eaten grass with a chemical on them, or that a bone she’d eaten was hurting her insides, so they took her to our regular vet and then a super specialist. The super specialist found a sizable tumor/ulcer in her stomach, and that the cancer had spread throughout her organ systems, at least to her liver and her lymph nodes. None of this ever showed up on the outside of her body, she never had any lumps. And any sign that might have been feeling bad until now…probably looked like an arthritis attack (which she has) was making her lay down more. But even now she still wants to go for walks, and wags for you when you look at her or pet her, and still seems like a happy puppy. Just, if she lays down she doesn’t want to get up again for a while and she doesn’t want to eat.
When my dad told me what the vet said I wanted to cry right away, I could feel it, but I didn’t actually until I told Lexi a little while later. Two to three months if she starts eating again, as soon as starvation if she doesn’t was the full prognosis, with meds to hopefully help with the eating; she’s at least been keeping herself well-hydrated. I cried again when we finally did get her to eat something for the first time in five days-a few small spoons of vanilla ice cream. My parents are looking for a second opinion from another canine oncologist, half so they’ll know if it really is untreatable and half hoping that he’ll say he’d try treating it with puppy-chemo. (It saved my neighbor’s dog.) She’ll be ten in June, which would be the youngest we’ve ever lost a dog; the current youngest is thirteen.
I take pet related health problems so much worse than people and, yes, this is hitting me harder than my grandmother’s ailing health hit me senior year in university. I worry about how bad she might feel in the tiny amount of time currently predicted for her, and I worry about how her brother Dief will take it when he hasn’t even fully recovered from us putting down Laddie close to two years ago. And I worry about having to go to the vet with her if we need to put her down because I’ve never managed to do that before but I’ll need to this time, because she made me her person.
So right now I’m mostly trying to drown myself in things that can distract me; things that make me laugh, hobbies I enjoy, exercising, helping friends do research when they ask. It’s how I spent most of my night after work today already. I don’t know how long I’ll be coping like this, but I imagine it’s going to be a while, so I might be missing for a while again.