Thursday, January 04, 2007

a long hard silence


I know it has been a very long time but I am finally back. Shortly after my last post, which featured Slick, he passed away suddenly. He had hemangiosarcoma, a cancer that is known as the silent killer in dogs. And it was just that. At 11 years old, Slick had been in tip top health. He spent his last morning doing chores with me and laying in the sun. In the evening after dinner he came stumbling into my room and jumped up onto my lap and collapsed. I new instantly he was dying. I held him in the back seat of the car while fox drove us to Tufts. By the time we got there his abdomen was full of blood and the diagnosis was made pretty quickly. We decided to put him to sleep right then. He was a such good dog and had a good life up until then. We did not want to send him to surgery to stop the bleeding of a tumor that would only kill him a few weeks later. I'm so thankful that we were with him when he died.

I couldn't bare to blog about it or even look at the pictures on my last entry. So, this is why I fell of the blogging wagon. Once I was ready, life had just gotten so hectic that it was hard to get in the habit of posting again.

But fear not, Three Dog Farm has prospered in my time away and there are many many things to report. I will do my best to bring you all up to speed and to keep you apprised of my farming revolution.

So, this entry is for Slick Fox, coonhound extraordinaire.

1 comment:

El said...

Holy crap! The same thing happened to my dog this spring. He was 11, a German shepherd/Golden retriever mix, the best dog in the world. The day before, he chased a rabbit on our walk about the property. The next day, he lay in the sun as my family played outside. I got home from work, saw him, looked in his mouth and saw he was anemic (bluish lips) and hopped in the car with him to the emergency vet an hour away. The vet said it was probably cancer, and there was nothing I could have done beforehand to know, and that we could try surgery, but, well, is he a couch potato? I decided he couldn't really understand the pain he was going through now, much less post-surgery recovery. It was awful. I was quite literally depressed for months.

Some dogs bring so much to us. He was one. It sounds like Slick was, too.