Beautiful dog. Sorry for your loss. I know how it feels.
jd | Homepage | 05.18.08 - 8:37 pm | #

Thanks. It just came so fast, you know. We only had about 12 hours.

He had a second life full of new tricks. & was planted in a good spot.
matt | Homepage | 05.18.08 - 9:16 pm | #

Oh man, when my dogs have gone -- there are three buried down by the river -- we always had them for a while once we knew they were sick. Again, best wishes to your family.
jd | Homepage | 05.19.08 - 8:25 am | #

Matt, we're all sorry to hear about Dutch. We know how hard it is to lose a pet - especially to cancer. Adopting older dogs is always hard: their second chance at life and their time with us can be so short.
Craig | Homepage | 05.22.08 - 2:28 pm | #

Hey Craig- thank you. At least he had one last camping trip.

The doctor was in tears at the mere sight of that x-ray; we were amazed Dutch hid that enormous tumor so well, that is up until the very last few days when his discomfort became obvious.

They catheter-drained his bladder of about 500ml (see incredible before and after shots above) and gave him some painkillers for the night. It was just too large to operate (and probably irreversible not to mention pushing up against all kinds of organs, etc.) even if we found 5 or 6 grand lying in the gutter, and well, obviously we weren't quite ready to let him go at 2am, having only had several hours...So as you can see we built a fire and stayed up all night by his side and had someone come by in the morning.

(I don't know if I could have used a gun, honestly, but it would have saved about $600...death indeed "is painful and expensive.") We knew what adopting older dogs meant from the beginning, and despite the cost it felt right to do it this way. Not to be overly callous, but months of wiping an incontinent dog's ass and such would have surely been worse.

To be honest, we saw the symptoms for about a month, but opted to treat the symptoms for a week or so - hoping it was just a urinary tract infection.

To which he responded very well. So yeah, he had one last euphoric camping trip, and we remained unburdened with the facts up until that one endless night.

Lucy is anxious and acting strange, but we are keeping her busy and she'll pull through.

Anyway thanks again everyone for kind emails, and comments (and for excusing such gratuitous documentation of an event so many people have experienced).
matt | Homepage | 05.28.08 - 1:20 pm | #