I called the vet on monday and we got him on monday afternoon, we both took him after work. I was very upset and convinced we would be putting him down.
It seems that Draco had lost about 10 of his 135 pounds. He was already a very thin dog, no doubt some of it had been over the weekend but he must have been slowly loosing before that and we couldn't tell since we saw him every day. The vet looked him over and recommended that we put him down. They are very familiar wiht him due to his near miss the previous year with bloat and everyone loved him. They said with his age and that he wasn't eating and was having trouble urinating they felt it was his time. Upon exam they found that his prostate was enormous and no doubt constricting his urethra and preventing urine from leaving his bladder. The vet said with a prostate enlargement that size it was probably cancer though it could also be prostitis but he couldn't tell without more tests and he thought that while only we could make the decision putting him down would be his recommendation.
Since we do not go out in the yard and watch him go we have no way of knowign how long he had been having problems with hesitation when urinating and being the stoic dog that he is he never let us know anything was wrong until it was too late.
Jared and I were so upset and I was bawling. Jared couldn't bear to put him down that day and in hindsight I don't know if I could have done it either. Jared decided we would take him home for one last night and bring him back in the morning to have a complete work up to see if there was anything that could be done for him. On the way to the car Jared was able to catch a urine sample and we took it back for analysis by the vet who found lots of blood in his urine, it was actually brown more than yellow. He did not find anything that would be indicative of cancer and therefore thought it was prostitis and we took Draco home for his probable last night with us. We put him in our bed for the night and those of you who know me well realize this is not the norm. We tried feeding him anything we thought might be appetizing to him, the only thing I could get him to try was a few bites of rice pudding. Jared and I both called in to work for the next day.
Tuesday morning we took him to the vet at 8:30am after saying our goodbye's just incase. We took pictures of him and the girls hoping it would not be their last time together. The vet decided it would be best if we just dropped him off for the tests and came back after lunch when they were done. We were both such a wreck there is no way we could have went to work. We came home and tried to decide what we would do depending on what they found. I was more in favor of putting him to sleep than Jared was simply becuase I know Draco and if he wasn't eating and acting himself he was truly miserable and I knew that if they could do anything to make him better it would be very hard on him, not to mention it would not buy him much more time as he was so old anyhow and I didn't want him to suffer so much at the end of his life. The vet called in afternoon and we went in to talk with him.
He had found that it was indeed prostitis and Draco's bloodwork did not indicate any cancer activity and all his x-ray's looked ok however the size of the prostate was enormous and Draco was very very weak with low blood pressure. They said that they could castrate him which would reduce the levels of hormones and help with the prostate enlargement as it was basically extremely enlarged due to irritation and some infection was probably present too. However, since Draco was so ill he was too weak for surgery so they recommended that we could put him on very high dose strong combination of antibiotics to help reduce the tumor and it may ease things up and allow him to urinate. Then once he was able to eat again and regained some strength they could do the operation. He would need to remain on the antibiotics for 2-6 months perhaps.
I know Draco very well and knew this would not be a viable option for him, he had been on antibiotics for staph infections in the past, he does not do well on antibiotics at all. I felt that bringing Draco home would just prolong his suffering as I did not think he would start eating again and we would end up having to put him to sleep after prolonging his suffering or he would get so weak he would die on his own. In the end the vet left us with Draco to talk it over. We decided to put him down. This was the hardest decision either one of us have ever had to make and I was crying so hard in all my hormonal-ness that I was choking and sobbing to the point of almost vomiting.
The vet came back in and said that it was a decision that only we could make and he respected that though we both got the feeling that he wanted to try treatment which did not help us to feel we were doing the right thing though in hindsight I 100% believe in our decision. They shaved his front paw and brought in the sedative at this point I began sobbing and telling Jared we didn't have to do it, luckily he maintained the course and we went ahead, I have never seen Jared so upset.
They said they would inject it and he would drift off into a deep sleep and never know what had happened. Well, if only all things went so smoothly. Draco's blood pressure was so low all his veins kept collapsing, the vet got a bit in at one time and Draco started looking sleepy though Jared thought he was looking confused and sad at what was going on. Then another vet came in to try and finish the job, she needed us to turn him over but he couldnt get up so we had to flip him over and this is when Jared thought he looked scared. She was able to get the rest of the sedative in and he slowly stopped breathing. It was incredibly awful we were beside ourselves. We stayed in the room with Draco for a long time and cried and apologized and told him how much we loved him and that we hope he knew we tried to make the right decision. I hope he heard us.
We arranged to have Draco picked up by a local pet funeral home and cremated. Jared opted not to have the remains returned in an urn as he felt seeing this urn every day would be too painful. We are going to frame a nice picture of him and put it up later. When we got home we went on a cleaning rampage to clean away all hair, drool, food, beds, leashes, etc that were from him as we didn't want to look at it.
The next day at work was very hard, I didn't want to talk to anyone nor did Jared. It was toughest for a few days, a few nights after he died I went out into the living room to check on the dogs and cried as I somehow had expected him to be there. Then there was the episode of Gray's anatomy that showed a dog being put to sleep and that was the worst. The girls would pace around where he slept and whine for a few nights and Nala went to tryign to lay on top of Sachi as that is normally what she did to Draco. We all still miss him very much.
I realize this post is way too much detail for anyone to want to read in it's entirety but it is good therapy going over all of this and I somehow dont want to forget it.
Draco on his last day
Siblings last day together
Nala (top) misses Draco - her old sleeping pillow. Her new sleeping pillow, Sachi, is not thrilled with this development (4 days after Draco passed, she did this for about 10 days)
1 comment:
Such a sad thing to have to do. It reminds me of when we had to but Brody and then Blackie to sleep. Blackie was 10, but Brody was only 3. We have to love them when we can and think of them often when they are gone.
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