Sadie

We've had quite the adventure over the past week with our newest pup, Sadie. It's been heart-wrenching and tearful and such a roller coaster...I'm a bit exhausted.

To start from the beginning...

Sadie had never been fixed when we got her (something you're supposed to do when they're much younger than she is), so we decided to go ahead with the surgery last Monday.

I took her in, they did an initial exam, and I left. The surgery ended up going great, she stayed overnight to come completely off the anesthetic, and then I picked her up the next day.

We got home and she was really sore, so I brought her bed out into the living room so she could lay down but still be around us. And also so she wouldn't try to jump on our bed and break open her incision.

She slept a lot, which was to be expected.

I stayed up late that night out in my studio working, and when I came to bed and turned out the lights, there was suddenly this loud gush of water from her. I thought her incision had broken open or something, so I sat up and turned on the lights and woke Adam and saw that she'd thrown up. After cleaning it up and getting settled back in with the lights off, it happened all over again.

So we moved her bed into the bathroom so that if she threw up, it'd be on a tile floor instead of our bedroom carpet.

The next morning, I left to go workout, and was gone for about an hour. When I got home, the floor in the living room and dining room was covered in vomit. It took me 45 minutes to clean up. I called the vet to see if this was normal, and they said it wasn't and that I should bring her back in. So I did.

She threw up in the car again, and once we got to the vet, she was just very sad and lethargic and weak. They wanted to put her on an IV because she was dehydrated, and give her a few medicines to try to get her feeling better. So we left her there overnight.

I called the next day to see if she was doing better and if I could come get her. The doctor said no, she was still very sick and he wanted to keep her another night.

Same thing the next day when I called.

Finally they decided to do a blood test on Friday. I took Sutton to go visit her to maybe lift her spirits, and the doctor had the results of the test. They were really really bad. Not sure what all the numbers meant, but one test whose number was supposed to be below 25 was at 150. He said he didn't think these problems could be related to the surgery, and that there wasn't anything else they could do besides keep her on IVs and see if her numbers went down. He wasn't optimistic at all.

While I was there, we couldn't take her out of her cage because she was hooked to an IV, so I just had to stick my fingers through the bars to pet her. She was so sad. I was trying to choke back tears while talking to the doctor who was basically telling me that she was having all-out kidney failure and while he would try some things over the weekend, there was probably nothing we could do.

I left the vet and cried the whole way home. All weekend, I tried to make peace with the fact that Monday morning, we were going to have to make the final decision to put her down. Seeing all of Sadie's things at our house would sting my heart...her food dish, her bed, the lack of her constant presence.

The thing is...I've always thought she was the most annoying dog ever. We half-heartedly tried to get rid of her for a few months after we got her. Mostly because of her clingyness...we took that as a sign of her not being happy as an indoor dog. But she did NOT feel the same way about us. She attached herself to me like no dog I've ever had. She was ALWAYS where I was, even if it meant she was uncomfortable.

And as it goes...I'd come to really love her too.

So when Monday morning came around, I knew I couldn't deal with having to tell the doctor to go ahead and put her to sleep when he called with the final blood results. So I jumped the gun, called them as soon as they were open, and told them I'd be unavailable all day, and that the doctor needed to call Adam with the results instead of me.

Mid-morning yesterday, I got an email from Adam. He said that the doctor had said her blood tests came back much improved and that she'd actually eaten something. He said they were going to start giving her pills instead of injections. He said that they wanted to keep her til Wednesday to see if the numbers would go down anymore, but then after that, she could go home.

Oh my goodness.

I didn't know what to feel. I had already begun to let her go, and suddenly I get her back? All the things I'd been thinking all weekend - how I wouldn't see her again, how unfair it was to have to go through this all again just a year after we lost Axl...those things were all gone now?

We went to visit her at the vet last night and she's lost a ton of weight, but she was really happy to see us.

We're still not completely out of the woods, but things are looking up, and we'll hopefully have our Sadie-girl back tomorrow sometime.