Crossing the Rainbow Bridge
On Losing a Dog
"My Only Fans would just be videos of me chasing my elderly dog down the street braless," I said to Vince after bringing Ein back in from a potty break in the front yard.
"You'd have tons of subscribers," he replied with a laugh.
“She tried to make a break for it this morning, and I had to scoop her up just as a truck careened around the corner. I'm pretty sure the driver got an eyeful."
We laugh, but my dog is a few months away from 16 years old, and her senior moments are increasingly senior minutes. Sometimes when she’s outside, she seems to lose her focus, and I get the impression she thinks I’m a stranger following her. It’s kind of weird and sad but also a blessing in its own way. Her aging brain has come into razor sharp focus for me because only a few weeks ago, I lost my younger dog, the one I thought I would have for a few more years, to an insidious case of kidney disease that progressed rapidly from asymptomatic to end-stage. I've lost pets before, but this was the first animal that I raised from a baby that I've had to watch cross the rainbow bridge.
During a significant portion of the last twelve years, it has been just me and my girls. And, now, on those nights when Vince and Tiberius are in Orlando, it's just me and Ein, and I feel the loss even more deeply.
Cookie didn't get a chance to go deaf, turn white in the face, or get cataracts. She didn't have moments where she wandered around like she was lost in her own house. She was her usual goofy, food-focused self until she wasn’t.
The ER vet called it the worst incidental find ever. Her breath had been extra stinky, so I made a vet appointment to get her checked out in anticipation of a dental cleaning. They noted her gross teeth, but she seemed otherwise normal to the vet. The next day, a Friday, I received an urgent call advising I should take Cookie to a full service clinic immediately, because her creatinine was 6.1. A healthy range for dogs is .5 to 1.5. It was bad. I immediately drove her to BluePearl, and they put her on hydration therapy, but she was also tachycardic, so it became a damned if you do, damned if you don’t situation. Within 24 hours, she’d stopped eating, and the hospital was only able to get her levels back down to 4.8. She wasn’t stable.
I took her home on Sunday and hoped I could get her to start eating again. Maybe she would have a few good weeks left. It was not to be, though. She barely ate on Sunday, wouldn’t eat Monday, had half of one meal on Tuesday, and wouldn’t eat after that. At night, she would growl and was severely uncomfortable. I made the impossible decision to have her euthanized at home on Thursday. We spent the last couple of days together sitting in the sunshine, smelling the smells, growling at cars, and observing the lizards. When the vet sedated her with the first injection, she became agitated and growled and snapped at me and Ein. I held her close and soothed her, but it was clear she’d been in a lot of pain and just holding it at bay because she was a good dog. I knew then I had made the right decision.
It’s been ten days, but it feels like I haven’t seen her in a month. My heart will always be a little bit broken, but choosing to love and lose a pet is worth the heartache. That great twelve years far outweighs the pain of the loss. I know I’ll be here soon again when Ein passes. It’ll probably weeks to maybe months now, but I’ll cherish the almost sixteen years I had with her, and I’ll carry that love with me until my end.