Today you are not going to get any funny from me. This is going to be a very long post, and it was very difficult for me to write.
Friday night, we had to make the very difficult decision to put our puppy to sleep. Yes, my beautiful puppy, Harley, turned 15 weeks old on Friday. And now she’s gone. She was in our house for exactly 7 weeks, but the love I had for her made it seem like she had been here forever.
The seven weeks that Harley was in our house was a struggle. I was having a difficult time potty-training her, and a lot of my time was spent cleaning up pee off my carpet. My husband was getting frustrated, and it seemed every waking minute was spent keeping an eagle-eye on this tiny 2-pound puppy. I had to take our king-sized comforter to the laundromat 3 different times because the puppy would have accidents on it. I was at my wit’s end but chalked it up to her just being a puppy. I knew puppies can’t control their bladders yet, and when they have to go, they just go. We had heard from so many people that this breed of dog is hard to housebreak, so I felt like we weren’t the only ones having this problem. Unfortunately, it was beginning to cause many arguments between my husband and I. This was my dog. I was the one who wanted her. I needed to get her to quit peeing in the house. It became a mission of mine over the last 7 weeks.
The last 7 weeks have been tough on me. It was like having a newborn in the house again. I had to get up contantly throughout the night and take her outside. I’m sure my older dog was wondering what the hell was up since she was used to sleeping all night, and now got to go out and play every 90 minutes throughout the night. Not only was I not getting any sleep, but I also had to come home on my lunch hour every day to let her out of her kennel. If we didn’t, she would pee in it several times. I was getting worn out. I was tired, and I was crabby. All the stinkin’ time.
While we were in Omaha last weekend for Thanksgiving, we took both of our dogs to the vet to stay for the weekend. They love having my older dog come visit, and now they were excited to get the chance to have Harley stay with them, too. We dropped the dogs off on Wednesday afternoon and were to pick them up Monday morning, and headed out of town. I was so excited to be able to have 5 nights of SLEEP, knowing I didn’t have to get up and let Harley outside. I missed my dogs terribly over those 5 days, but I was glad to have the opportunity to catch up on my sleep.
Over that weekend, I made a decision. I needed to quit babying her. The vet had told me on many occasions that it wasn’t going to hurt her to stay in her kennel at night. I was leaving her out, because I felt sorry for her. She stayed in it all day while we were at work, and what a mean mommy I was for making her sleep in there, too! But for my sanity, and merely because I hoped it would get her used to sleeping through the night, I started making her sleep in her kennel. So last Tuesday night, I kept her up late, so she would go to sleep. Once I was ready for bed, I took both dogs outside to potty, and I put Harley in her kennel. I had moved her kennel down to the basement so that when she started barking and/or crying, I wouldn’t hear her.
For the next three night (Tues, Wed, Thurs) I would put Harley in her kennel, come upstairs, shut my bedroom door, and sleep. Harley was quiet through the night, and I was so very thankful. I kicked myself for not doing this sooner! I kept telling myself, “By Christmas, she’ll be sleeping through the night!”
Friday afternoon, both daughters were going home with friends after school, so I was the first one home. I got home from work, and went down to the basement to take the dogs out. I noticed Harley stumbled a bit when I let her out of her kennel, but I figured she was just off-kilter because I had woken her up. I took the dogs out to potty and brought them back in. I noticed Harley didn’t run to the food and water dishes like she usually did, but instead she meandered over to me where I was sitting on the couch. She put her feet up on my legs, which is her signal she wants to sit on my lap. I lifted her up, and she curled up in a ball and dozed off. I sat and went through the mail, feeling this little warm ball of fur snoring away on my lap.
After my husband got home, we sat around the living room and discussed what we were going to do that evening since we were kid-free for the night. While we were talking, I started noticing something was wrong with Harley. She was pacing the floor, she was wandering, running softly into walls before turning to go another direction, and she still hadn’t eaten or had anything to drink. She almost acted as if she couldn’t see. She began getting more and more disoriented. She walked up a couple steps towards our bedrooms, and came tumbling back down. She stumbled around, running into walls and when I picked her up, the look in her eyes was just a small blank stare. She didn’t act like she was in any pain, and she never barked, cried, or whined.
I immediately called the vet and they suggested her blood sugar might be low. Dogs of this breed are prone to that, and because of her tiny size and her not having eaten anything all day, it seemed logical to us. We were told to put some Karo syrup on her gums, and wait 15-20 minutes.
After 30 minutes of no change, we called the vet. They told us to bring her in immediately. I grabbed my purse and Harley and headed out the door. When we got there, they rushed us in immediately. They did bloodwork and found nothing was wrong. Her blood sugars were fine. They did notice her white blood cells were extremely high, which would signal an infection. Upon further examination, they determined her pupils, which would respond to light, would not respond to anything else. I could have stuck my finger in her eye, and she wouldn’t have blinked. She wavered back and forth from wanting to be held to wanting nothing to do with and practically jumping out of my arms. She was hard to control, and no one knew what was wrong with her.
After about an hour at the vet, they decided to send us to the Animal Hospital – aka, the Doggy Emergency Room.
I stopped home, got my husband and the dog kennel, and we drove into Des Moines. After seeing the vet, we were told there two different explanations for Harley’s problems. One being encephalitis, which does occur in Yorkies and is untreatable. The only option is putting her to sleep.
The second option, which the vet was leaning more towards, was that Harley had what is called a Portosystemic Shunt. This happens to be another common ailment in this breed of dogs. This is basically a shunt that should close after the puppy is a few days old, as its purpose is to pass food, blood, and oxygen from the mother to the unborn puppy. In a healthy puppy, the shunt disappears and the puppy’s liver takes over.
The symptoms? frequent urination, running in cirles, disorientation, drooling, lack of interest in activities, poor appetite. The list goes on, but you get the picture. Even now I can see the signs were there, and in an adult dog, we would have noticed something was wrong. But in a puppy? It was barely a blip on the radar, until it got worse.
The option for this shunt was surgery, but she did warn us that not only was the surgery not guaranteed to work, but Harley might not even make it through the operation. She was too small and very sick, and her body just wasn’t equipped to fight as hard as it would if she were older. If the surgery did work (and it would cost a total of about $5,000 for everything), there was no guarantee that the shunt wouldn’t act up again. Unfortunately, surgery and meds would only treat the symptoms, but the shunt is not going to be fixed. What this boils down to is, even if it did work, it might flare up again as she gets older.
After a lot of discussion and a lot of tears, we made the decision to leave her there for the night. They would treat her, give her some antibiotics, get her some IV fluids, and we would discuss what we wanted to do. I cried the whole way home, and I think neither of us wanted to be the ‘bad guy’ and suggest we give up and put her to sleep. Mark was trying to be strong for me, willing to do anything in his power to save this dog. But the decision was ultimately up to me. I had to decide the fate of this tiny 2-pound lovable little creature.
We were home about an hour or so, when I knew what we had to do. I couldn’t stop crying, so my husband called the vet back and told them we decided to put her to sleep. She too tiny and too small, and we didn’t want her to suffer through a surgery. They asked if we wanted to be there when they did it, and I feel horrible for saying this, but I couldn’t go back. I couldn’t watch it happen. I couldn’t be there, knowing I wasn’t going to bring her home. My husband drove back to the vet, and spent the next 90-minutes laying on the couch bawling my eyes out. I couldn’t bear the thought of knowing my husband would soon be coming home, with a small box containing my precious puppy, so that we could bury her in our backyard.
When Mark finally got home, I could tell he had been crying. The vet had told him we had made the right choice, because after we left and they started doing some testing, they discovered the ammonia levels in her body were three times what they should be. Her own body was poisoning itself, and there was nothing we could have done to prevent it. It was inevitable, and she probably would not have made it through surgery. There was a sense of relief that she wasn’t suffering anymore, but the pain I was feeling was indescribable. Some people don’t realize how emotionally attached we can become to our pets, but it just happens.
Our next decision was to decide where to bury her. She hadn’t been with us for very long, just a mere 7 weeks, so it wasn’t as if we had a special place for her. We debated burying her back by the garden, out by the garage, or even back by the fence at the end of the yard. I finally decided to bury her over by the corner of our house, which my bedroom window overlooks. It was the closest spot I could think of.
Mark spent the next 20 minutes or so digging a small hole in the backyard. When he was ready for me, I grabbed some Kleenexes and put my coat and boots on, and headed outside. I don’t I had ever stopped crying. He went to the car, and brought back a tiny box. I cried some more, and I could hardly bear to watch. He laid the box down on the ground, opened it, and there she was. Wrapped in a tiny blue surgery pad was my puppty. I gasped when I saw her, uttered an “Oh my god” and started bawling again. I watched as he wrapped her up, laid her in the ground, and began throwing dirt on her. He stopped a couple times, and caught his breath. I know this was hard on him, too.
After that was over, we came inside, talked about getting a special stone or something to put there in the yard, and I began to crumble all over again. I layed down on the couch, curled up in a ball, and I couldn’t stop crying. My husband sat next to me, and we began talking. Talking about how even our vet didn’t notice anything wrong, and Harley had just spent 5 whole days there. We talked that now that we knew the symptoms, there were signs we could look back and recognize as sometihng being weird or off. Again, because she was a puppy, those symptoms didn’t register much alarm until the end stages.
Mark and I went to bed that night, and we turned on the TV. We watched a few DVR’d shows, and I laughed at some of the funny ones, but it was exhausting. After the TV was shut off, I laid there and cried some more. Cried thinking how cold it was outside, and how that tiny little puppy was all alone. I tossed and turned all night, as our other dog couldn’t seem to get comfortable. She had been searching the house earlier for Harley, and I think she was confused as to where she went.
This morning I sit here, and I am sad she’s gone, but thankful. I am thankful we caught this now, and we were able to keep her from suffering. I am thankful she didn’t die a slow death in her kennel while I was work or while we slept in our beds that night. I am thankful that out of some sheer divine coincidence, both kids happened to gone at friends’ houses that night. I sit here at my computer and look at Harley’s tiny puppy bed which now sits empty, except for a couple of her toys. I see her pink “Doggy Diva” t-shirt sitting on my desk, which she refused to wear even thought it made her look adorable. I think of the Christmas stocking, full of treats, that she won’t get to eat, and the basket of toys sitting down in the living room.
I just have to keep reminding myself it was for the best.
My baby girl, my sweetie pie, my cuddle buddy.
Sweet dreams, my Harley bird.
Harley
August 28, 2009 — December 4, 2009
