Sunny had been diagnosed with congestive heart failure back in January. Unlike her earlier self, she was ready to return from walks after just a few blocks, but she’d been doing well with the help of meds.
Then around 3 o’clock in the morning, Monday, April 30, I was awakened by her coughing, gagging and gasping for air. She scratched at the door to go outside, but balked at the two steps that led down from my kitchen into the patio. I carried her outside and set her down on the grass, thinking she needed to pee. But she just stood there, struggling to breathe. I took her back inside, put her on my bed, and lay down beside her. This was usually a place of comfort for her, but she struggled to get down and go back outside. Perhaps it was the cool air she wanted, or the slight breeze. Whatever it was, she stood gasping and heaving for breath. Nothing I could do relieved her distress.
I called the emergency vet. They recommended that I bring her in so they could give her an intravenous dose of Lasix, and oxygen for short-term relief. They confirmed, though, that the results of such treatment would be short-lived. The question was not only why would I put her through that, the long drive, the lonely medical procedures, but how could I afford such treatment?
I comforted her as best I could. I got her to our nearby regular vet as soon as they opened. By that time she was unable to walk and her struggle for every breath was even more severe. At that point the kind thing seemed to be to help her on her way. I held her close as the vet injected her with the drug that would ease her ending. Her body slowly relaxed, the struggle for breath ended, and she was gone. By the time I left the parking lot, I was missing her terribly. But I had no doubt that I’d made the right decision. Although her last few hours had been extremely difficult, she’d had a long, happy life, and was amazingly healthy until her last few months. Not bad for an old girl of 93 dog years.
She had been my alarm clock, regularly rousing me within 15 minutes on either side of 6:30. The Tuesday morning after that fateful Monday, about 6:15, still mostly asleep, I heard Sunny stirring, shaking her head and rattling her tags, just as I’d been hearing over the past 13 years, ever since we bought her first puppy collar, and secured her first license and identity tags. It took a moment to realize that the sounds I’d heard were only ghosts of the familiar—that Sunny now only lived in the realm of dreams and memory.
Would that I had been able to do for Mike what I’d done for Sunny. But Mike was destined to walk his anxiety-ridden loop, day in and day out, until something less certain and comfortable than the vet’s potion relieved him of his tortured life.