RIP Sadie

Sorry I haven’t posted in a while.  My cable went out, and having no internet throws a serious wrench into my life.  I ended up pulling signals out of the air with my satellite laptop, which is hardly a reliable way to work.  At present I am using my cell phone as a modem, but that drains the batteries very quickly.  So, thanks for bearing with me.

Many thanks to those of you who took time out of your very busy lives to inquire about my beagle Li’l Bit.  She is doing much, much better.  In fact, she seems healthier than she has ever been since we have had her, so it was for the best that we had the tumor removed, benign or not.  She is actually running up and down the stairs now, whereas before she never ran anywhere!  She acts like she is a much younger dog, and for that we are very grateful. 

We do have some very sad news, though.  Our beloved Cocker Spaniel, Sadie, succumbed to failure of her kidneys and pancreas this past Tuesday.  Sadie was 18 years old, so she was hardly a young dog, but you’re never really ready for your longtime companions to leave, even if they are dogs instead of people.  Tom had her since she was only four weeks old, he could hold her in one hand.  They had never been apart.  She followed me around so intently that we started calling her my “shadow”.  I think she adopted me as much as I adopted her.

Sadie got sick over 4th of July weekend, but the vet was closed so we couldn’t get her seen until Monday.  By then, she was so weak that she was unable to even stand on her own, so we were carrying her everywhere; while normally she would struggle against being carried, this time she did not.  She was eating and drinking normal amounts though, but of course we had to administer nourishment by hand. 

The vet did blood work and said, “this is not good”, but said perhaps it could be reversed because it had been reversed before, and put her in the ICU.  She was far, far sicker this time than she had ever been before, though.  They did tell us that even if it reversed, it might buy her a week, a month, or a year, but that it would eventually kill her no matter what they did.  She was just so old that there was no way to stop nature.

Tuesday we received a call from the vet in the morning, saying her blood values were a little better, but not by much, and that she had a seizure at 5am but it was resolved by the time they got the medication to stop it.  Tuesday afternoon they called and said she still was not better, and was so weak she couldn’t even hold her head up, but that perhaps if we visited with some of her favorite things from home, including the canned food she loved so much, she would rally.  We were getting ready to go when I received two calls on my cell phone in rapid succession, and Tom received a call on his.  I was returning the call when they called again.  They said Sadie had a major seizure, and that we needed to get there immediately.  We left right then.

When we got there, Sadie was going in and out of a coma.  We petted her and kissed her nose and talked to her and told her how much we loved her.  She didn’t seem to be in any pain at all (they had given her both valium and hydromorphone through her IV) for which we are forever grateful.  Her breathing was extremely labored, though, and every ten minutes or so she would stop breathing, and we would think she was gone.  She always started breathing again, though.  At one point she unexpectedly even tried to get up, but she was so weak that she couldn’t.  Eventually she started whining this sad, sad whine, as if to say “please help me”.  Obviously the medication had worn off and she was in a lot of pain, and obviously she was not going to recover this time, so we did the only thing we could do to help her at that point, which was to euthanize her.  We were holding her when she took her last breath.

Seeing Sadie in that condition broke our hearts.  I don’t think we will ever get over seeing her like that, but I do know we did the right thing.  It was like she was trying not to die because we were there with her, though death was the only way to end her suffering.  I still tear up when I think about it, and probably always will.

We are having her cremated, so we can always have her with us no matter where we go.  We expect to get her ashes back this coming week.  In the meantime Napoleon (our Rottweiler mix) and Li’l Bit are smelling around her bedding and other areas where Sadie was usually found, looking for her.  It is all very, very sad.