Dell

We put Dell down today.

She was born July 27, 2002 and died April 15, 2013.

We are all a very sad bunch.

She had not eaten for about two weeks, she was throwing up about every day, her eyes were not looking right, and she was losing weight. Her lump in her throat had also grown quite a bit in the last month.

I called the vet this morning and talked to her about it and she said, "It is time, unless you want to do a bunch of testing and spend quite a bit of money, but in the end, we may still not know what is going on. Honestly, it sounds like she has cancer."

Matt and I thought it was time too. I made an appointment for 5 pm. This was at 8:15 this morning.

To avoid crying all day, we got right to school.  I thought about taking the day off of school, but then I thought, what else would we do? Sit around and cry all day? At least with school, we could take our mind off of what was going to happen at 5 pm.

We finished school about 3 and Matt got home from work about 3:30. We spent the next hour as a family crying and sharing memories of Dell.  She didn't want to be around us at all! I think she knew her time was coming and while we were making a big deal out of her, she was hanging out outside!

About 4:30, Matt thought it was time to head out. We all gave her a last hug good bye and followed Matt to the truck and watched him drive off. We all continued to cry!!!

It was nice out, so I thought some fresh air would help us all. I forced the kids to get their shoes and socks on and get outside and they did! We played, rode bikes, walked, and then we all felt better.  Eventually we ended up back inside playing Mario on the Wii. The kids were laughing and being themselves again.

Matt soon came home and said he never wanted to do that again! He said it was one of the saddest things he had ever done in his life!  I told the girls to give dad a few extra hugs because he had the hardest part of all of this!

We ended up going out to eat to drown out our sorrows and now it is time to go to bed.  This is the first time in almost 11 years that Dell has not been in our house overnight. 

It will definitely take some time to get used to her being gone.  We can clean our carpets good now and not worry about her throwing up on them again. We can clean up the dog food that is all over our house in all our attempts to get her to eat.  We can scrub the bathroom floor from her throwing up every night for the last week. 

It is really a transition time for us.  Matt will need to fix the doorbell now since Dell will not be around to alert me when somebody is at the door. I don't have anybody to tell me the UPS, FEDEX, mailman, trashman, snowplow or any other loud vehicle is going by our house. I will no longer need to ask Matt at night, "Did you let Dell out? Did you let her back in?"  We don't need to remind Megan to feed Dell. 

I will also have nobody to chase the birds out of the backyard before we can go out there. If you would mention the word "outside," she thought she had to be the first one out. She would knock a kid out of the way to get out there first! I can picture her at the door, fighting with one of the kids to get outside first. While outside, she would always sit under the slide and chew on sticks while we played on the swingset.  She would also bark anytime somebody was on the slide- it was so annoying! So tonight after Matt had left, Courtney was on the slide and I pretended I was Dell. It made her cry! No more picking up dog poop or being scared you are going to step on some. No more worrying that she is going to wonder out of the yard and we won't find her again.

We had just had her at the vet a month ago (the vet remembered us) and gotten her all her shots and her pet license.  Her lump on her throat was not there at that time. Today, she was down 10 pounds from a month ago when she was in there.  We have an almost full bottle of proin and about 20 pounds of dog food left.

Matt said that the vet did a quick exam on her today and noticed that her eyes were yellow, this is a sign that her liver was not functioning well.  She also thought that she had cancer somewhere because her lump had grown so much in the last month. We wanted to know that this was the right decision to make and we think it was.  It was not fun at all, but we knew it was right for her. We didn't see her getting any better and the vet didn't think so either.

Megan and I really wanted to bury her somewhere, but we ended up cremating her and we will go back in a couple of days to get her ashes. We will probably bury them in the backyard, where she loved to be!!!