We are a dog family......3 dogs. Two chocolate labs, and a long haired dachshund. Birdie is our first and oldest lab, she's our pound puppy. Bogey is our 3 year old lab and we call him the smartst dumb dog we know.....sweet lovable boy who is 90lbs of sheer puppy! Bear is our youngest guy, he's a 2 year old with an attitude, he loves our family of 5...but no one else!
During Winter Break, the girls and I went to see Marley and Me. Great movie, however I should warn you, if you've not seen it........SAD ending! As we are watching this movie play out and can hear the entire theater sniffing through tears, I'm thinking to myself, this was not the greatest of movies to bring three girls with a very aged Lab at home! Best laid plans :( Little did I know how poignant that would be.
So.....Birdie has been coughing a lot lately and we'd constantly joked that she thinks she's a cat....coughing up fur balls all the time. She kept getting worse though so Ryan and I finally decided we should call the vet, both thinking we'd feel terrible if there was really something wrong and we'd ignored it. Well, it turns out our old girl has cardiomyopathy, or an enlarged heart. Really enlarged. Our vet showed me her xrays and I was shocked....(not that I know what size a dogs heart is supposed to be....but it was really big!) She also already has fluid build up in her lung, causing her to breath extra hard and also causing her heart to race. Long way to say.....our girls not gonna be with us much longer. WOW......we thought she acted like a cat, and she has a heart problem. I was comforted that Mary Lou told me big dogs have a shorter life span....typically 10-14 years, and for labs usually around 12 years, our sweet girl will be 12 in may and it doesn't sound like she's gonna make it to her birthday. Ryan was so worried when I txted him "cardiomyopathy....need an xray and EKG" that he showed up at the vets office just to hang with our girl while we waited. The xray showed such an enlargement there was no need for the EKG. Ryan mustered the courage to ask what we do and what this means for birdie. Marylou put her on a diuretic to get some fluid off of her lungs which will hopefully calm her heart rate down. However, the sad news is that this is all really just a comfort measure for Birdie. Dogs with cardiomyopathy typically only live a few months. There it was.....the time frame. Ryan was heartbroken. At some point I asked Marylou if we needed to prepare our girls and she said that was definitely a conversation we should have....sooner rather than later. It was like a blow to the heart. She's our sweet birdie girl.....she's one of the family. No, not that we thought she was gonna live forever....OK well actually Allysa says Birdie IS going to live forever, but it seems like just yesterday we found her at the Animal Welfare League. She's the first dog we owned, shes the most behaved dog we own. She's the mama of the bunch, she looks at Bogey as though he's the big goof that he is and she lets bear run all over her, chew on her ears and just generally play like the complete puppy he is.
One by one I talked with the girls last night, they all knew she was going to the vet so they each asked about her appointment as they saw me. I very cautiously told everyone we were keeping her comfortable and happy, but most likely we won't have Birdie for her 12th birthday. Needless to say they were all very sad, Allyson however took it the worst (as we assumed would be the case.) As one point Ally was laying on the floor with birdie, rubbing her belly and wiping away her own tears at the same time.....it was heartbreaking. Lizzie said "who thought you could die from having too big of a heart, the grinches heart was two sizes to small!" WOW.
Birdie will be the first pet we've lost. Luckily not the first loss my girls have experienced as in the past few years we've lost several family members, grandparents included. I still expect this will be like losing a member of our family.....she's our youngest child.
So, god gave us a plan, I definitely think it was all a god thing deciding to take her to the vet, it was his way of preparing us for the inevitable. His way of making sure we didn't just find her one morning and not have had any idea this was coming. He is just and fair god and he has allowed us to prepare our kids for sucha time as this.
What is god trying to prepare you for? Will the message come in a movie, in an email or in your daily devotional? Pray daily for an open heart an open ears to receive messages such as this. God is good.
your blog is very good......
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