In Memoriam

Yesterday, Maeze our dog of about 12 yrs, passed on.  It was a said day for all of us especially Pete as he's had Maeze before we had ever even met.  She lived a long full life but at the end she was ready for all the pain to go away. I would put a picture of her up, but I don't have access to one on this computer.

As if that wasn't bad enough.  The puppy we adopted in October had to be put to sleep this afternoon.
11 days ago we noticed that his nose was swelling slightly, over the course of the next few days his nose swelled even more.  We finally got him an appointment at the vet for yesterday, they looked at him and said "Wow, we've never seen anything like that before."  They gave him a shot of steroids and a shot of antibiotics and took some blood to run labs to find out what was going on.  He ate some food that afternoon, and drank some water.  But then his health continued to worsen during the night.  He started coughing, and drooling excessively, as well as other equally worrisome symptoms.  We tried to administer the antibiotics that we had been instructed to give him, but his mouth was so swollen you couldn't shove anything down it, let alone a pill, and he had stopped eating/drinking, so we couldn't put it in there.  We waited until 11am, when we still hadn't heard from the vet about the lab results we called.  We were told that the lab results showed, he was anemic, and had a bone marrow deficiancy and that his kidneys were starting to shut down, on top of the infection that was raging through his body.  We took him back to the vet today around 11:30, where after consulting an internal medicine dr.  the vet told us the sad news.  Hermies had been born with bad kidneys, as he grew, they were shutting down.  It had only been a matter of time, we couldn't have known, and there was nothing we could have done if we had known.  He had literally started dying the day he'd been born.

The vet said that over time his kidneys had started failing little by little as Hermies grew, add to that his anemia and bone marrow deficiency.  Supposedly the kidney failure trigured a serious of events, that began with the bones in Hermes jaw basically being leeched of calcium making his jaws brittle.  His jaw had actually broken which had begun the swelling and then ultimately ended in infection.  Typically the cell counts in the marrow would have begun to fight the infection but because of his anemia and marrow deficiancy his body wasn't fighting at all.

It's been a hard two days, and I know that some people are coming to Sierra's birthday party on Saturday.  If you read this and are coming, I would appreciate it if Hermes was not mentioned as I'm not sure how I'll be feeling and would rather not chance crying at Sierra's birthday party.

Sierra and Ivan are dealing with the loss of both Maeze and Hermes better than I had thought they would, which is a relief.  Though they keep asking me when we'll get another dog.  All I can say to them is when the time is right.  Right now, I can barely make it 15 minutes without seeing something or thinking something that just seems to trigger the water works all over again.

I can say, that when I'm emotionally ready I would love to adopt another weimaraner.  When we are ready and can afford to adopt another weimaraner puppy, I'm hoping that it's another blue one, who has a lovers spirit.