Our dog Sadie has been suffering increasingly from debilitating pain in her right front shoulder during the past few months. We’ve had her on several increasingly strong arthritis medications with no obvious beneficial effect.

Irene took Sadie in to the vet on Thursday. We had already talked about the possibility of cancer and decided that, if she was diagnosed with it, we wouldn’t prolong her pain unnecessarily. Unfortunately, the examination showed a large growth in Sadie’s shoulder joint which hadn’t been there two months ago. The vet diagnosed bone cancer with a poor prognosis- it was growing quite rapidly. Irene was there at the vet alone- I was at work. She made the decision we had already agreed to,
and had Sadie euthanized.

I wasn’t as close to Sadie as Irene was, but the dog was definitely part of our family. I miss the hand-lick ritual- every time I let Sadie in to the house or came home from work, she would bump her head on my hand and lick it. It was like she was saying thank you for bringing her in to the house. I’ll miss that.

Farewell, Sadie- you run freely and without pain forever in our hearts.

Susu, one of our cats, has been very ill the last few weeks. It started with sneezing and runny eyes, and progressed to her curled in a corner and refusing to eat and drink. This is an emergency situation for cats, and so the vet was called in. A bit over two weeks ago the vet diagnosed Susu as having a severe upper respiratory infection (sinuses and a touch of pneumonia) and gave us antibiotics and subcutaneous fluids to give her. I was taught how to wield a needle to insert the IV, and we spent a few days nursing her at home.

We had to force-feed Susu, and she’s extremely adept at not being fed. We ended up wearing the food, along with the majority of the liquid antibiotic. She was a perfect angel for the sub-cu fluids, but that wasn’t enough for her. So after a couple of days we took her to the vet again and this time put her under full time vet care.

The vet took over force feeding and IV fluids, along with injected antibiotics. Susu rallied for a few days, getting a bit of energy back, but then collapsed. According to her daily blood workup, her kidneys were shutting down. She stopped meowing (a big deal for a very talkative cat), and stopped taking interest in her surroundings. After a week of full time care, she looked at food and water as if it sickened her, and curled around herself as if in constant pain. At the end of that week, last Saturday, the vet advised us (tearfully) that Susu wasn’t likely to survive more than a day or two. Her breathing had become laboured, possibly from vascular leakage related to her kidney problems. We asked if we could take her home, to make her last couple of days comfortable. The vet thought this was a great idea, but reminded us that she really didn’t have much hope. They left an IV catheter in her so that it would be easy to administer the euthanasia drugs for that nearly-inevitable decision. We made an appointment to bring her back on Monday evening, to end her life and release her from her discomfort. The vet told us to stop forcing anything on Susu, to just enjoy our last few days with her: the only thing we were to do was to continue the IV fluids, and that was not stressful for her at all.

Susu was a sorry sight indeed when she came home. It was a warm day last Saturday, so we took her out in the back yard for a closely supervised outing. I took dozens of pictures, almost certain that these would be the last pictures I took of her. I picked out a tiny handful of the best of those- the ones where she was looking engaged in the world, at least a little bit. Irene and I went through our old picture albums and I digitized a couple of Susu’s kitten pictures from 14 years ago, so we could build a little memory album here on the website gallery.

But she fooled us all. Monday morning she went to her water bowl and drank…all by her self…and drank. She went back a little while later, and drank again. She took a few licks of yogurt from our fingers. And a bit later, a few licks more. This was the first food and drink she had taken willingly in something like ten days. Her breathing became less laboured. We delayed our vet appointment…

Here we are, on Friday. Susu is eating and drinking more or less normally. She jumps up on the counter to get her meals, and meows to demand her share. She’s trotting around the house, wobbly for sure, but with purpose. She’s meowing at my wife and I, curling up on our laps, purring. The vet is amazed: she calls every day to make sure Susu is still progressing.  The vets and staff at Central Langley Petcare have been fantastic…they really gave Susu a lot of love while she was there.  Maybe Susu was just ready to get better…or maybe coming home gave her something to fight for.

Susu wasn’t supposed to be alive today- maybe she’ll regress in a few more days, maybe she’ll continue to improve. We don’t know- maybe in a few weeks we’ll have some tests done to see how her kidneys are doing. Frankly, I almost don’t want to know- its just good to have her still with us.

Cats are creatures that usually have egos that extend significantly beyond their usually diminutive size. But they are also generally equipped with a strong sense of self-preservation that comes from being a predator that often ends up on the wrong side of the food chain (I.E.: on someone else’s dinner plate). We have one cat in our house who possesses more than the usual helping of cattitude…Rommel is his name.

Our 70 pound Rottweiler-cross, Sadie, is scared of Rommel. There have been numerous occasions when I’ve found Sadie whining upstairs, with Rommel sitting on the landing preventing her from going past. And we’ve had several visitors to our house who have ended up squished into a corner of the couch as Rommel quietly, with not much more then a mild growl, took over his favorite spot.

But even Rommel would probably think twice before doing what a cat named Jack in New Jersey did. Jack apparently took offense to a black bear that wandered into his yard…so he chased it up a tree. When the bear tried to escape, Jack chased him up another tree. The bear was finally freed from this embarrassing predicament when Jack’s human called him back to the house. The bear escaped unharmed…and Jack’s ego probably grew three or four sizes larger.

I just hope Rommel doesn’t read this posting…

I was reading one of my news feeds the other day and came across this gem about a woman who beat a dog breeder with a dead chihuahua. Apparently, the dog breeder sold the puppy when it was too young. The purchaser took the puppy to a vet who told her it needed to be returned to its mother, but the puppy died while in transit. The puppy’s purchaser then proceeded to assault the dog breeder using the dead chihuahua as a weapon.

I suppose the woman who bought the puppy was distraught. But I find it really, really hard to believe that she gave a rats ass about the poor little dog, and was more concerned about getting her money’s worth. And using the dead dog as a weapon does nothing to build up my sympathy for her. WHat the heck is wrong with people?

That said…am I some sort of disgusting freak for finding it hard not to laugh at the image of a woman using a chihuahua to smack around another woman? For some reason, all I can see in my mind’s eye is a strange combination of Paris Hilton and her weird looking rat dog with Monty Python and the dead parrot sketch.

My wife Irene called me on the phone at about 7:00 am on Friday morning. This confused me: I was working from home and thus sleeping in until around 7:30, and Irene doesn’t normally leave for work until about 8:00 am. The morning brain-fog cleared a bit, though, when Irene explained that she was out walking our dog and calling from her cell. She had found a lost dog, and was bringing it home so we could call the SPCA, and could I please get the cats into the house?

Our cats aren’t supposed to be outside, but often a couple, usually Tux and Rommel, sneak out. This morning, however, four had made it out the door. I managed to get three back in, but Bilbo was no where to be found.

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Our cat Sasha died Wednesday just after 11:00 pm. It was pretty sudden- she was fine Wednesday morning, a little off around dinner time, and in shock by bedtime. We rushed her to the emergency vet, but they couldn’t save her. It looks like she was sick and respirated some vomit, and this was complicated by her heart and kidney problems.

Sasha came into our life as something of a lost soul…
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My wife and I have a lot of animal companions. Seven cats and a dog share our house, and a horse is stabled a few minutes away. Most of the critters are healthy and easy to get along with. But there are exceptions.

Rommel is basically a thug.

But he’s a lovable thug, within limits. When he was a kitten, he survived a series of unfortunate events: a broken kneecap, a tumour in his mouth, a bladder infection, an abcess in his foot. Later in life, he had FUS…feline urinary syndrome- basically, crystals forming in the urine and causing blockages. You can imagine how happy that made him- ever since then, he’s been on special food.

All of these problems had costs associated with them. So far, in his ten years with us, I’d imagine Rommel has probably generated a couple thousand dollars of “extraordinary” expenses, above and beyond your basic food and shots.

A lot of people look at a pet as a neat accessory for their furniture. Or maybe a cuddlesome stuffed toy. When reality hits, and they discover that animals are people and need care, sometimes costly care, the pet goes out the door.

The real cost of a pet can add up over time, and its a lifetime commitment. A pet doesn’t come into your house on trial- you are committing to care for him or her.

I’m not one of these people who believes in keeping a pet alive at all costs. I can understand that sometimes the cost to keep an animal alive, especially when compared against the quality of life they might live after a given procedure, sometimes isn’t viable. But I do believe that people should go into pet custodianship well informed. Maybe being informed would make people more prone to get the spaying and neutering done early when it should be. Maybe it would stop people from buying pets as a gift.

Rommel is about to cost us another thousand dollars or so. The tumour in his mouth is back and, assuming its benign like it was before, hes going to have it removed. He’s 10 years old- another 10 good years ahead of him, and to me that and the love he’s given us in the past years makes a thousand dollars seem quite reasonable.

But he’s still a thug

Earlier this year we had to have our dog, Sheena, euthanized. It was a tough decision. But I was pretty clear that Sheena was our first and last dog: I loved her, but dogs are a lot of work.

Irene has been working on me ever since. She wanted another dog. But we have a household of seven cats, and that’s busy enough. Up until this weekend, logic prevailed: despite several near misses, we remained dog free.

I finally broke down this weekend. Meet Sadie…

Sadie is another SPCA puppy. We figured Sheena gave us 11 years of love, so this seemed like the best choice. Irene had been a volunteer dogwalker for the past couple of weeks. I knew this was risky, but I hoped it might get the “dog bug” out of her. She brought home a few “bugs”, but never actually shook her interest in having another dog.

Sadie is five years old, a Rottweiler something cross. She’s fairly quiet, seems mellow, and is a lot less timid than Sheena. So far, she is acting more scared of the cats than the other way around. We’ll have to see how that works…

Irene and I love our animals. Seven cats, a horse…

…and until yesterday, a dog. We made the decision On July 3rd to have Sheena euthanized.

Goodbye, old girl…

It was a tough choice. Sheena was still alert and wasn’t screaming out in pain. Up until year ago, Sheena was still pretty active: she was at least 13 years old, which is pretty old for a dog her size.

Last year, though, she had a setback. She had what seemed to me to be a stroke: the vet thought it might have been a tumour or nerve damage of some kind. For over a week she couldn’t walk at all, and afterwards she was very weak. She recovered some of her mobility, though she stopped going on walks of more than a hundred yards or so. She never recovered her balance, really: a light bump would tip her over. And her hearing was mostly gone afterwards…cataracts took away most of her vision a few years ago.

The last few months we watched Sheena getting more and more feeble. Recently, she reached the point where she often couldn’t stand up without help, and she was barely eating.

I don’t know how Sheena felt about it, but I kept thinking that her quality of life had gotten pretty meager. Irene and I had talked several times about what it would take for us to decide it was “time” for Sheena. Ultimately, Irene called me up in tears and told me she felt that time had arrived.

I am an agnostic. I don’t really believe in an afterlife, but then again I don’t disbelieve. I’d like to think that we made the right choice, and somewhere Sheena’s spirit is alive and healthy, enjoying a run through a grassy field with Irene’s horse Brandy like she did years ago. Maybe one day I’ll be there too, and Sheena will run over and let me scratch her ears the way she liked. I’d like that…

Irene was brushing our dog Sheena today and discovered that Sheena had a cut on her neck. I took a look, thinking it was a little nick or something…but instead it was a huge, 3″ long slash going quite deep into the flesh.

We got called the vet right away and got the dog in within about 30 minutes. The vet says the cut was very close to opening the trachea and, if it had been on the other side, severing the main artery in the neck. He said it looked fairly fresh, probably within a day. Sheena stayed at the vet for stitches.

So, here’s the question- Sheena is an old dog, who spends maybe 10 minutes a day outside. She can barely walk, so its not like she roughhouses or anything. How the heck did she get a 3″ long gash in her throat?

I suppose it will be one of those mysteries…probably Sheen can’t even remember how it happened, and even if she did remember she isn’t talking.