Ummmmmmm, sooooooo…
A third dog was never in the plans, right? Two was my pretty solid limit. Plus, I just got one literally one week ago.
… But then a rural vet clinic called about a dog who was thrown from a car and later found in a ditch. He has what looks like birth defects in both back legs. On one, he has a clearly deformed paw. On the other, it looks strangely like a clean cut (not a surgical cut- just a flat slice) and he has no lower leg or foot. He had road rash from trying to drag himself out of the ditch. If they didn’t find rescue, they were going to put him to sleep.
The shelter isn’t set up for a dog who needs a wheelchair. The dog boss said no way.
So anyway… guess who’s curled up in a dog bed at my feet right now? We called him Beacon. Marvin tolerates him. Ariadne wants to be friends, but is pushy. He’s exhausted, but doing well with the others. He’s pretty dauntless- goes down stairs without a second thought! I’m going to pick up a will-work-for-now wheelchair from another organization that works closely with the shelter tomorrow and we’ll see how he does in it while we work on next steps. He will likely need at least part of at least one of those back legs amputated, which may complicate things.
This was a joint decision between all of us in my section. He’ll be an “office dog” and may go home with someone else on other nights. We decided together that we’d make it work.
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again. @SurrenderDorothy really is the person her dogs think she is. Not a whole lot of people are, thank you for being such a great person Dorothy!
I love the short legged dawgs, they are always so adorable. Even when they are eating pinecones, LOL!
I’m posting my sig pic because it is often hard for folks to see them.
This was our Very Bad Cat aka MissybabySweetiekins and her pig. She had three toys she would bring me on a daily basis, piggy was the hardest one for her to get onto the bed.
I noticed that there was a problem with her breathing back in August and she went to the vet several times (with blood draws and x-rays). Nothing showed up and everyone appeared to think that I was overreacting to something minor. We went out of town for 10 days and she crashed hard.
It turns out that she had a growth on the outside of her larynx that was pressing on her heart.
She was a very good kitty and we will miss her always.
Moral of this story is: if you think something is wrong with your pet, always take your gut seriously. As fast as this moved, I doubt anything could have been done to save her, but if we had known, she wouldn’t have spent half a day being tested by the ER vet before being sent to the Bridge. She must have been so frightened during those hours, but the techs all said what a sweet little girl she was.
Such a splendid pic of her! Thank you for posting it in the large size.
My heart hurts for your loss. I know how special darling VBC was to you and your whole family, including GG. The day will come when your memories will be only cherished and they won’t hurt so much. You loved her better than anyone else ever could have, and I know she understood that in her kitty way.
Biggest hugs to you and Hubs and gentle skritches for GG.
Thank you so much for your kind words. VBC came to us as a stray and despite all of our stray cat rules about not putting food out, one of us broke them so the other one felt free to do so as well. I found a place at a no-kill shelter for her because we didn’t need any more cats and Hubs was supposed to take her while I was at work.
Somehow, she instead ended up going to the vet and getting tested for FIV and FelV and put in his bathroom so we could introduce her to the family. She paid him back by bonding to me and would do such sweet things as walk across his face to get to me in bed.
She was a very good kitty, despite being a total PITA all of her life and then managing to get a fast acting growth right in the area that nobody would look.
Sigh. My late Schooner developed lymphoma in his neck, which i never would have noticed were it not for his habit of plopping onto my chest in the morning and shoving his whiskery face into my nose to make me get up and provide breakfast. I was skritching his jowls one morning and thought, hey, what are these lumps on both sides just under his jaw? Turned out to be lymphoma, and for a number of reasons, including primarily his overall wellbeing, my vet and I decided to just do palliative steroids till his quality of life deteriorated. We sent him over the bridge while he was still his happy self.
No, it doesn’t, and I’ve had over 20 cats in my long lifetime. It was even harder putting down three horses – one after three years, at age 23; one at age 23 I’d had since he was ten; and the last, I owned from age ten to age 30.
I’ve made it a point to be with every one of my animals when it was time.
