It’s been a little over a month since my last blog post.  When I started this blog my goal was to post 2-3 times per month but y’know what, sometimes life just happens, and my inspiration for this blog; my boys, needed me more these past few weeks.  It feels like so much more time has passed, we’ve been through so much in a month.  Including Mike hitting a deer in his new car, Loki’s story which you’re about to read and Kato’s progressing DM. We’ll start with how Dogfather left for a couple of weeks at the end of February to do some training for work.  This was the first time he had been gone for any length of time since we moved into the new house last summer.  I may be an adult, but I still don’t like to be home alone. Somehow, even though I’m a fiercely independent woman, I become an anxious wussy who is afraid of the dark and sleeps with the bedroom door locked and all the lights on in the house! I don’t even know why! Maybe someone with a psychology degree can tell me!  

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My boys’ diet is quite specific, we worked with a holistic doctor and have a combination of a dehydrated commercial and home cooked diet, so cooking for them became my job while Mike was gone.  No big deal, I’ll use my day off and a weekend day.  Loki’s chronic eye ulcer was still healing so having him in a cone and needing eye medication four to six times a day, on top of their already full medication schedule, added some extra tasks to my plate. I started a couple of new classes at the beginning of March, increasing my load from 1, to 4 classes, along with homework, cleaning the house, and working a full-time job.  All of this was fine, I only had to do it for a couple of weeks then Mike would be back, and we’d share the work again.  But then the shit hit the fan. 

Loki hadn’t wanted to eat breakfast one Thursday morning, I made him some scrambled eggs and he took his meds, eventually he ate some normal food then walked away.  I didn’t think much more of it until he didn’t want to eat dinner that night either.  He’d become more lethargic throughout the day and when he didn’t want to eat dinner, I gave him some medication for nausea, thinking his tummy was upset.  Shortly after he ate but still wasn’t right all night. I figured the combination of all the eye meds, an increase in his heart medication, and him missing Mike all while being in a cone for 4 weeks, had finally made him miserable. It turned out to be much more than that. 

At 3AM Loki woke up out of a deep sleep, I’m a light sleeper anyway and when he began coughing, I got out of bed and went over to him as he started to get out of his bed. I put my hands on him and just as I did that, he started to have a seizure and fell over.  Thankfully I caught him and pulled his cone off his head as he was shaking.  Not violently or erratically like what probably first comes to mind when you think “seizure”, but it was a seizure none the less.  He had an accident on the floor and as I started to look at his face I could see he was having trouble breathing and his gums were a scary grey colour.  Gums should be pink.  Very pale, white,  blue or grey are bad colours for gums!  Whenever anything happens to my dogs I’m caught between a rock and a hard place. Mentally that means for me, overthinking the physiological and pathological processes going on in their body while trying not to have an anxiety attack because my first-born child looks like he is about to die right in front of me any minute.

After about 1 minute the seizure stopped but he continued to cough and hack and his gums didn’t return to the pretty pink colour they should have been. He sounded wheezy like he was trying to breathe through a straw. After I felt like he was stable enough, off we went in the middle of the night to the ER. Going to the emergency vet is an ordeal in itself given that the one I trust is over an hour drive and 75 miles away. Having to do it alone, at 3am with two 80 lb dogs, one of whom is paralyzed, raises additional challenges.  We got there super early, and he was seen right away, he had xrays and bloodwork and was ultimately diagnosed with cancer in his chest and pneumonia for which he started antibiotics that day. 

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After a few hours we made the long drive home. Loki was still coughing and hacking, not wanting to eat and still very lethargic for him.  He may be 12 and a half, but he doesn’t usually act like it.  He still has a feisty puppy streak in him.  I stayed home with him that day and probably spent 23 of the 24 hours of that day in tears. Mike was gone and ultimately came home a few days earlier because we didn’t think Loki was going to make it through the weekend.  All I could think of was how am I going to live without my soul dog? How would Kato survive without his brother?

Over the past year with both of their health in decline, I have finally had to admit that my boys are not going to live forever.  The few of you who are exceptionally close to me will know how hard of a pill this has been for me to attempt to swallow. So many of Loki and Kato’s dog friends they had living on the East Coast are now gone. I know they’re living on borrowed time (12.5 is antique for a Boxer!).  It breaks my heart every time one of my friends lets me know they have lost a fur baby.  Although I feel so lucky and beyond blessed to have had so much time with my boys, I also feel for my friends who haven’t had as much time with their dogs.  Nobody is promised tomorrow; not people, nor pets.  If you can spend a little more time with a loved one, do it! Tell people you love them and spend time doing things you love. If you can take your dog on vacation with you, take them.  Going to Starbucks? Load up the pups for a free puppacino! Going to the park? Let the dog come too.  Can’t take them with you, that’s OK…just put down your cell phone, laptop, beeper or whatever it is, and snuggle them, massage them, really feel them and look at their face; it will be grey much sooner than you realize. 

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