See you in another life, brotha

Yesterday, following a long and hard week, we put Max to sleep.  I wrote about him a while back here, when he first got sick back in September.  Sorry for this long post, but I want to write down the progression of everything that happened, just so I don't forget.

Shortly after he first got sick, we surmised he had cancer in his lymph nodes.  His calcium was high, he wasn't eating, his lymph nodes were enlarged....  Because we were going to the beach that weekend, we didn't do a biopsy and instead put him on steroids (which we would have done regardless).  He started to feel better almost immediately and went in to a remission-like status.

In early December, his eating started to slow down again.  We ramped up his steroids again in mid-December, and started to play the waiting game.  My vet and friend, Lori, said if he didn't eat for 3-4 days, that would sort of be an indication that maybe he was ready to be put down - that the cancer was back.  Well, last Friday night was Max's last decent meal.  By that point, he didn't want eggs, cheese, peanut butter, canned chicken or tuna, and would only occasionally eat the gourmet treats he liked.  He had diarrhea several times during the week and slowly was getting more lethargic, so on Wednesday we took him in, thinking it would be the end.

When we got to Lori's office, Max perked up.  His lymph nodes weren't enlarged, like she would have expected if the cancer had returned.  She wanted to run some blood work to find out if his calcium was back up, or if there was something else going on.  So, she took blood and we brought Max home.

Yesterday, she called me with the results.  His calcium was normal.  There was blood in his urine and a few kidney enzymes where high, which might indicate some renal problems, but she wasn't sure what was going on.  However, since yesterday morning, Max had not been acting like himself.  I told Lori how at one point, he was standing there and I thought he was going to collapse right in front of me.  That he had a hard time walking, and I had to lift him over the threshold to come inside.  Had to lift him on to the couch to snuggle.  And that when outside, he sort of just stood there, seeming to be a bit unaware of what was going on.  With the blood in his urine and the diarrhea, we wondered about a perforated ulcer or some other GI problem (secondary to the steroids) that was causing him to not eat.

So, we brought him back to see her in the afternoon.  A quick blood test showed that he wasn't losing blood internally.  But he definitely wasn't the same dog she'd seen the day before.  She did a simple neurological test (bending his neck different ways to check his reflexes) and it was easy to see that something was wrong with him neurologically.  We talked and talked, and decided that we were either going to have to put him down or she would send us to the vet school (NC State has one of the top 5 vet schools in the country) for what would be potentially thousands of dollars of testing with no idea whether what we would find would be fixable.  So, the choice was clear for us.  I was with him when he died and it was really peaceful.  I definitely know he is in a better place because he certainly was in pain and not himself anymore.  I had been looking for a sign - how do you know WHEN? - and yesterday was it.

I wanted to share a few of my favorite pictures of Max from the last 7 years.  I got him at the end of January in 2004, and we guessed he was about a year old.  So he was approximately 8 when he died - far too young.  I loved his sweet face, his ear hair that was way longer than anything else, and that he was such a good snuggler.  He really was a wonderful pup.  Love you, Max.

 

 

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