She's Gone

It was awful. Even though I knew how bad her condition was I kept hoping we'd get there and she'd perk up, maybe eat something, decide to fight it. She stresses out so much when she's away from home we were really hoping that our presence would calm her down enough for the meds to help her out.

She looked terrified. It was gut-wrenching to see her gasping for every breath. She hasn't slept in a couple of days now because it's been so hard to breath that's all she can do. She calmed down a little bit for us and for hours just laid her head on our laps, but every single breath was a horrible struggle for her. It was painful to see, and selfish to even think about keeping her that way for one minute longer than she had to be. My vet, after talking to the vet there about her status (her oxygenation was at an OMG level of 38), told me that it was the right thing to do, and if we were going to do it then we should make the decision right away, because she was the point that it wasn't right to let her keep getting more anxious, wondering where her next breath was coming from. That helped me a lot, because I felt like it was time to let her go but Scott wanted to wait a little, give her a little more time to fight. I guess I accepted before he did that she couldn't fight any more.

One small consolation is that the doctor made a point of having us wait to make sure she was able to review the labs before we let her go. The thing that has made this so hard is that she has been, as my regular doctor put it this morning, "off the books," Her body was not doing anything it should - her white count was barely elevated and she never even got a fever, yet she tested positive for a serious bacterial infection. They were baffled.

They hadn't had time to send out the slide from the trans-tracheal wash last night (because her condition deteriorated so quickly) so the doctors looked at it in-house. Just to be sure, several doctors looked at it.

They found lymphocytes. At that, six vets went "oooooooooh.". There was some kind of cancer happening, probably lymphoma. Honestly, even though we had to wait an hour or so to find that out before we let her go, it was absolutely worth it to me. Aside from having a little extra time to get used to the idea and say good-bye to her, it made the difference between wondering if I should have done more and knowing I was doing the right thing. Even though the only next step available to us was a $10,000 attempt at putting her on a ventilator she probably would never have come off of, I still needed reassurance that it was time to let her go and I will always be grateful to that doctor for getting me that information.

Even though this bites hard, if it had to happen (which, as we now know, it was going to) then I'm glad it was a quick 2 week acute thing and not a long drawn-out painful chemotherapy wasting away thing.

But I still want my dog back.