View attachment 8148649View attachment 8148650View attachment 8148651This is Dollie, she was our 5 year old rough Collie that we had to make the hard decision to lay to rest yesterday. I met her for the first time almost 3 years ago when my now wife brought her with her on our first date and she has been with us ever since even being present for our engagement last year. She had many names, a super fluffy coat that left itself everywhere, an appetite as big as a buffalo, which she loved to eat, and a personality that she loved to share but only with people she knew. She has been predominantly trouble free with zero health issue until recently but the last couple months have been hell.
It started around Christmas, one day she started favoring her one rear leg after a walk with my Fiancé so we thought she just stubbed her leg while on the trail. After a couple days the limping stopped and she could run fine but she was still slow getting up from laying down. We took her to the vet but they checked and found nothing wrong. This continued for a couple more weeks until her legs started getting puffy but another trip to the vet and a blood test showed nothing abnormal.
Then at the end of February her face swelled up so we took her to the vet and she was given some steroids to help but the side effects were bad and the swelling went away so we stopped. At this point she started becoming more lethargic, she used to get super excited to chase deer but became much more subdued on walks and wasn’t as hyper around the house. Towards the end of March we took her for another vet visit with a full blood panel that showed she was a little anemic.
After that the month of April was one of the most stressful months of my life, not only were we finishing the final planning for our wedding but her health start to rapidly rapidly decline as well. We had set up a specialist vet appointment for mid April but at the end of March she started getting sick, first once a day and then multiple times a day at all hours. I was usually up at least 2 or 3 times a night to clean it up and she always looked so sad even though we knew and told her it wasn’t her fault. We tried different foods, going to multiple smaller meals even feeding her ground bison from my hunt last year just trying to find something she would keep down. By the time her vet appointment came around she was lethargic, having trouble breathing with a fever and her head had started to hollow out.
When we went to the vet appointment we were fully expecting a cancer diagnosis, they came back with aspiration pneumonia, megaesophagus and an underlying auto immune issue. Since all of these were possibly treatable we were glad to have a better diagnosis than we had expected but in the end and actual cancer diagnosis would have been better as we wouldn’t have spent another month, thousands of dollars in tests and treatments getting our hopes up only for it to fall apart again.
We were able to treat the pneumonia but the megaesophagus left her continuing to get sick and greatly increasing the risk of reasperating. Additionally while she was recovering we couldn’t do anything to curb her auto immune issue as doing so could compromise her pneumonia recovery. During this time she continued to lose weight, dropping from 85 to 65 pounds in only a couple weeks as her immune system began to eat at her muscles.
Just prior to our wedding she had started to level off, she wasn’t getting sick as much and it seemed like the medicine was helping. We left her with my mother in law who took good care of her during the week of our honeymoon. When we got back she had lost a little more weight but had otherwise not gotten much worse while we were gone. We had a vet appointment last Thursday to confirm we were cleared to start a steroid treatment to try and fix her immune system.
It didn’t work, neither steroid helped and on top of it she began throwing up again and started to have more labored breathing. I spent the weekend at home with her to monitor her as she spent the days laying around hoping that eventually the steroids would kick in and she would start to feel like her old self. Instead she continued to hollow out more each day and by Tuesday morning her head wasn’t much more than a skull with skin on it and her legs had almost no muscle left. We didn’t realize it at first but she had reasperated Friday giving herself pneumonia again and sending her immune system into overdrive which caused the rapid decline in muscle in only 4 days. At the end she was down to 55 pounds, down 30 pounds in a little over a month and a half even with us feeding her more than her normal amount of food.
So with her breathing that much more labored we took her to the ER yesterday afternoon to get her checked. The doctor had confirmed that she did in fact have pneumonia with very low oxygen levels and we realistically had two choices left. The first option was the spent close to $10,000 leaving her in the hospital for several days so that they could get rid of the pneumonia. The next step would be surgery to put a feeding tube into her stomach so that we could feed her intravenously to hopefully avoid her getting sick. For a dog that loved food as much as she did that would have been adding insult to injury. In the end we would be $20,000+ in the hole and still not have even touched the main autoimmune issue that caused everything in the first place. They still did not know what type of autoimmune issue she had and as such had no way to treat it.
In the end we chose the second option, to lay her to rest and end her suffering. We were both there for her and I got to hold her as she left us as my wife held her head and whispered to her as we said our goodbyes. As my first dog it was one of the hardest things I have ever had to do. We both know it was the right thing to do but it hasn’t made the last 30 hours any easier. I consider myself a rather strong person and not a lot generally gets to me but I haven’t cried this much since my grandfather passed away when I was 13.
She hadn’t been herself for a couple months and by the end would spend almost the entire day laying around the house or in the yard. She used to get super excited and zoom around the house and the yard when we got home, she would regularly sprint back and forth between us in the house for scratches, she was always on the couch with us if we were watching TV and she loved to snack on bacon, bison and beef. By the end she would barely look up at us when we walked in, she could barely muster a trot let alone a run and only for a couple feet at best, she couldn’t jump up on the couch any more and if she ate anything other than her special food she would throw up within a couple minutes.
So much about her personality had changed by the end that the only two constants were her absolute love of food and her absolute hatred of foxes. She loved food more than life itself and if she even considered you had food she would be by your side as your new best friend. Even the day she left us she still sat by us while we ate lunch hoping to get a snack. It killed me to not give her any table scraps because she would always throw it back up shortly after.
The other constant was her hated of foxes, she never really saw foxes with my wife prior to our meeting but at my house one played peek a boo with her through the fence one time and it was fight on sight from then on. If she so much as smelled the fox near the yard she was barking and more than a few times was I awoken at 3am because the fox screamed outside and she had to scream back. Even Friday night, with pneumonia starting to take hold and almost no muscle left she ran for the first time in months because a fox slipped under the fence when we let her out. Even with a good head start she almost caught it then barked and pranced back to the house looking happier than I’d seen her in a long time.
Tonight the house feels quiet, I know it’s going to take a while to heal, so many things in the house remind me of her. Even her paw prints that she left in the carpet yesterday right before we left leave me choked up when I walk by the room. I know this was a very long post but writing it down makes me feel a bit better so I figured I would share it all with you.
Rest in Peace Dollie, we love you and we miss you Miss Ma’am.
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