Sandy

My dog's back legs quit working on Saturday morning. We took her to see the vet, and he ran blood tests and x-rays, and came back with a.) she was old (13 is old for a rottie-lab mix), b.) the hip that wasn't working at all was the good hip, and c.) she might be having kidney failure, on top of other things. My mother the R.N. later noted that Sandy smelled like people did who were going through kidney failure.

We fed her pain pills and stomach pills, and over two days you could see her getting thiner, and drinking less and less, and hardly eating - at least nothing that stayed down. But the worst part was that I got rid of the bricks at the front of her pen, so that in case she got back on her feet, she wouldn't have to step over them (they were there to prevent her from burrowing out when she was younger). That prompted her, while she was resting in the back yard alone, to crawl into her pen, dragging her legs behind her, as she pooped, leaving a trail behind. She was trying to be a good dog. I carried her back and forth to the pen for the weekend, so she could try to pee where she was comfortable, although mostly she just peed on my legs and feet once we got into the pen.

But she was happy and (mostly) alert, and we kept her outside with company (Pooteewheet and Eryn read out loud in the lawn chairs) for most of Saturday and Sunday and part of today. But she was just getting worse, and surgery isn't really an option for a 13 year old dog, and what do you fix? the kidney? the legs (and surgery for a dog right before winter is like surgery for a person right before winter)? the swollen heart? So later this morning, while Eryn was still gone with Grandpa and Grandma and we didn't have to take her with us, we took Sandy in to the emergency vet for euthanasia. There was a lot of crying in the Scooter household. She had been a member of our family for ten years, even if not always a well-behaved member (I don't have a link to how she unlocked her pen and ran across 66th Street in Richfield and ended up in Bloomington, or poked herself in the eye by chewing threw a wire cage, or how she broke Melissa's nose, or Dan'l's lip right before his wedding - but those are all fond memories in retrospect. She definitely had a stubborn streak), and I'll miss seeing her sitting in the backyard grass in the sun, panting happily and cocking an ear whenever she heard something interesting.

Here's a picture from the weekend. Eryn and Pooteewheet made Sandy a fort out of the sawhorses, slide and sleeping bag so she could stay in the shade without having to drag herself to a new spot.


Sandy and I as Paul Bunyan and Babe the Blue Ox for Halloween 2000. She was very proud of the t-shirt and all the attention she got and didn't want to take it off after the party was over.


Sandy at 3, when we picked her up from the Humane Society.