Try as I might, I can't stop reliving what happened a year ago. It started on St. Patrick's day and ended on what, this year, will be Easter.There was a brief glimmer of hope on this day halfway through the ordeal - the 20th, when I brought her home from the pet hospital in anticipation of at least a partial recovery.
That hope was short-lived; it began to fade shortly after we got home. She immediately went outside and lay on the cold ground, wanting to nap on a bare patch of dirt in the shade. I practically had to drag her back into the house.
The vet had told me that it'd get better after she had something to eat and a long drink of water. I couldn't get her to take anything, though; chicken, cheese, and even a squirt of water from a turkey-baster were all vigorously rejected. I tried for hours, then reluctantly went to my room for the night.
She was too sick to follow me up the stairs and didn't try; I wanted to stay downstairs with her, but I knew that if I did, I would just continue to hover over her all night harassing her as I had all day, desperately trying to get her to eat or drink something. She needed a break from me.
If I had known that that was going to be the last night she spent at my house, you bet your ass I would have stayed up with her. It's only one of many regrets I have about that week. I certainly didn't get any sleep; I watched old telenovelas all night, not even knowing what the hell I was watching, and went down every few hours to check on her. She'd look at me curiously each time, wondering what I wanted.
Things continued to deteriorate the next morning, and I knew that I would have to take her back to the animal hospital. I told her we were going for a ride, and for the first time since I brought her home, she reacted with something like enthusiasm. I got the leash and warned her that we were only going to the vet. She didn't care. She wagged her tail feebly, struggled to her feet, and even tried to climb into the car without my help. Even when we arrived at the hospital - a place she knew well by this time - she didn't balk. Ever the little trouper.
They did the best they could, but soon discovered that her kidneys were completely shot. They hadn't thought to look at the kidneys before; she had OD'ed on her pain pills, so they had been focusing on her heart and liver. Evidently, however, the kidneys had already been in bad shape, and the OD finished them off.It took a few weeks to get to a point where I no longer expected her to greet me at the door each night when I came home; it took longer to deal with all the little pieces of kibble she'd hidden all over the house.
Her noseprints are still on the car window. It would have taken thirty seconds to wipe that window clean, but I've kept coming up with great ways to get out of doing it. I'll take care of it this Sunday. I'd be willing to keep those sloppy noseprints forever, but I think a year is long enough.
I'm glad you post the pictures. Very difficult, I know. It's almost cruel they have shorter lives than us. Cruel to us, I mean.
ReplyDeleteOh, to live in the moment like a dog.
We always remember the furry ones who have left us too soon.
ReplyDeleteOMG! Cynthia!! Hi!
ReplyDeleteShe's so cute in those pictures. A year is not too long for nose prints.
ReplyDeleteI remember when my cat died, I was 14. He went out and never came back. I searched for him and cried for days. I never had the closure of finding his body.
ReplyDeletePolly had a good life and you were lucky to have each other. Consider that if you had stayed downstairs with her, knowing it was her last night, she might not have had the comfort of believing everything was status quo. Clearly she was still herself when you told her you were going for a ride. She didn't know how sick she was.
It's awful to miss someone, but it's worse (I think) if you think they suffered for a long time. It doesn't sound like she suffered a lot. That is a luxury that our pets have that we don't grant each other, the luxury to die before the suffering is great, but when we know there's nothing medical science can do.
Thanks. It's true that it could have been a lot worse, but I'm still second-guessing a lot of what happened, wondering if there was something I could have done to produce a better outcome, or some lesson I should have learned as a result. I know that doesn't really accomplish anything, but I guess it's part of the grieving process.
ReplyDeleteI'm sure that she already knew that it wasn't status quo, since it was abnormal for her to sleep downstairs instead of on my bed.
I didn't wipe the nose prints off yesterday because I was in a hurry when I left, and it was after dark when I got home.
I'm not feeling a great sense of urgency over it, but it seems silly to keep them there, knowing that they're not going to regenerate into a new dog!
I think that probably is a very normal part of the grieving process, but don't blame yourself.
ReplyDeleteI went through the same thing with M. I still go through it, even though it's been over seven years and she's in remission, and there's no reason to think that doing things differently would have yielded a very different outcome. But I still think I should have brought her back to the doctor's sooner, I still think that if I had just typed the right search terms into google, I would've figured out what disease she had before the doctor did and we could've started treating her sooner. Maybe she wouldn't have cataracts.
I never know when to take my children to the doctor. Once I brought M in and they called an ambulance -- I didn't think she was that sick. (In fairness to me, her oxygenation was 98% at the hospital, and maybe if they had a pulse-ox at the dr's office back then, I wouldn't have had that eighteen minute ride of panic.) Other times I bring my children in and they tell me it's just a virus, they're fine, nothing the dr can do. With my own body, I waited five months with a mole once and then was told it could be fatal. (It wasn't.) I thought a breast lump was nothing (it was), but the dr. had me in a panic with his reaction.
Who knows? Even they don't know. And of course, hindsight is 20/20.
Don't beat yourself up. That's probably the best advice a doctor ever gave me. She also said not to become a ghoul -- that usually the answer is the simplest, most common thing, and not some horrible disease. Your dog is lethargic, and you know she hasn't had anything to eat or drink, you don't assume she's had kidney failure. You assume she hasn't recovered enough yet from her medication overdose to eat. That was a perfectly reasonable assumption. Sadly, in Polly's case, it wasn't true. But there's nothing you could have done, and there's nothing you can do now to find out why she had the kidney failure. I know we always want to know why. There are some questions we'll just never have answered. I think I have a weird little fantasy that I never voice that some day I'll know all the answers to everything. If I had one wish, I think that's what I'd wish for. I don't know why it seems like knowing would help, but it does.