New Dog

As I noted a few posts ago, we had to put our old dog “T” to sleep after the pain from his cancer left him pretty much immobile. While the pain from his loss has not left us, and we both know that we cannot simply bandage the wound by getting another dog, we both knew it was time for us to bring a “tail” back into our house.

So yesterday we spent the better part of the day meeting the breeder and basically being interviewed by them to make sure we were not insane and were capable of handling a puppy. By 8pm last night, “Z” was back at our house and was pretty happy scoping out his new digs.

As you can see in the pic, he is definitely still a puppy!

I should also mention that we do not see ourselves at “dog snobs.” Yes we went to a breeder because we wanted a Rhodesian Ridgeback. But we went and got one of the ridgeless Ridgebacks, as we do not care about the “show quality”, we just know we wanted this breed and we wanted a puppy.

Needless to say, you can expect a few more posts on “Z” as he grows up!

Life isn’t always fair

It is 3am. Dark / cold outside. My wife is asleep – I should be as well. But my heart hurts, more than it has ever hurt before.

Today I am going to lose one of the best friends I have ever had.

9 weeks ago, our soon-to-be-eleven-year-old dog was diagnosed with osteosarcoma. It is basically bone cancer. And I can add that it is a complete, 100% bitch. The tumor is in the shoulder (at least the tumor we can now see), and has completely taken away the use of that limb.

Our kid dog (I’ll call him “T”), was only given 2-4 weeks to live when they first diagnosed him.  I don’t think “distraught” is a strong enough word to describe the emotions that were swirling around us that week. We spent our days trying to do all the things T wanted to do, spent nights crying as we tried to imagine life without chewy bones smeared in peanut butter and dog hair on everything. Funny part is, T never cared what we did as long as all of us were together. And as far as he was concerned, it wasn’t living if it didn’t involve peanut butter.

I had friends tell me how lucky we were to have 9 weeks to “get ready” for today… That they had to make that emotional leap in 48 hours. To that I say bravo – you could have given me 9 more YEARS and I wouldn’t be ready to make that last drive to the vet.  But I know that T gave us those 9 weeks as a blessing (hell the 11 years were a blessing) – he wanted to make sure we filled up our “love meters” as my wife likes to say…

For those of you that have a four-legged best friend, you should read this eulogy by Jameson Parker. Read it now before – like me – you find it as you are sitting at 3am searching Google trying to find the right words to express the emptiness in your heart. It can be summed up in one line:

If life is a system of balances, of yin and yang, birth and death, light and dark. then the proof of the great pleasures he gave me lies in the quantity of pain his passing has caused.

Goodbye T.