It wasn't supposed to end this way.....
she didn't deserve this.............
Behind the cut is the background on this.
Several months ago, when we noticed Brooke was limping on her back left leg (it only got worse) we took her to the vet. She said Brooke would need to have surgery because she had a torn ACL. Since it was putting her in a lot of pain, the few months before the surgery we gave her doggy pain pills.. except they didn't really help her pain. So we asked for a stronger kind a few days before her surgery. The morning before her surgery she threw up (my mom said there was grass in it). The next morning, her surgery day, she didn't want to eat - which for a lab is cause for alarm. She didn't even ask for it.. she wasn't allowed to have it anyway because of her surgery
but we just thought maybe she "knew" she couldn't eat that morning.
So she had her leg surgery and we brought her home the next day. All she did was cry and cry and cry and cry. We thought it was because of her leg, but she wouldn't stay off it. She just kept on walking around and couldn't find a place to land. She wouldn't sleep.. all she would do was pace and when she finally sat - she would just stare off into space.
Gradually, she started throwing up all of the food she had eaten (her dinner the night before and her breakfast the morning we got her back). She wouldn't drink any water and if we got her to eat something she would just throw it back up.
We called our vet and they sent someone over to give her an anti-nausea shot and a pain shot and we put her in her cage. She just kept crying and wailing and we tried to give her some time to rest but she was crying so bad.. we called our emergency vet place and they said she just needs to rest (or something like that). That night my mom slept downstairs with her but she wouldn't sleep still. She just wanted to sit outside and stare. At 7am I went down and she was still acting strange but we managed her the rest of the day.
The next day she just kept throwing up and was acting really funny. So we brought her to the emergency vet and they gave her a water IV pack "to go" that they load up in the skin under their back (thats where they hold their liquids). We brought her home and I slept on the couch. She couldn't settle down. Just kept pacing and panting. And the only way you could get her to rest was pet her or lay with her with your hand on her side so she knew you were there. She threw up some water-like stuff and my mom decided to take her back to emergency vet at 2:30am. They took her and decided to keep her overnight. The stuff she had been throwing up was brown and they couldn't figure out what it was. While she was there she got a bunch of medicines to try to help her (they thought maybe she had an ulcer), but she ended up throwing those up too.
Saturday, my mom and I went to visit her at the vet after church. We were waiting in the lobby to meet Brooke in a visiting room and my mom just started bawling all of a sudden. Then she saw these people walk away with their pet's ashes in a little box and she just lost it. I kept telling her it was gonna be OK but she just told me she had that bad feeling.
We saw her in the room and now I had started crying. I didn't want to lose her and things were sort of going downhill. She came in the room panting and wouldn't even acknowledge us. She just layed down, panted and stared. She threw up once and wanted to leave the room, so we let her go back to her kennel. Saturday night my mom just cried and cried and cried. She said that Brooke had "told her." I didn't want to believe it and I didn't want to think about it either.
Sunday morning, Mom woke me up at 10am and told me that Brooke wasn't doing well. That her body was failing and we'd probably have to put her down. She wasn't eating or drinking and she was really weak. They had her on an IV but she was pretty unstable. Her vital signs weren't doing that great with her blood pressure and stuff.
At this point they still didn't know what was wrong with her. She was still throwing up the brown stuff. We decided to go that morning and visit her.. figuring we would have to make "that" decision. She was just laying in her cage with her head down..her eyes looked up and us and her tail gave a few weak thumps. We pet her and kissed her and talked to the doctors. We made sure she had her head on her pillow and her stuffed bear by her. At that point we thought maybe she had turned a corner because she was a little more stable and she looked like she usually did.. just really tired. Her meds were making her sleepy. So we left to let her rest and told her to get better. Later in the day, they scheduled an ultrasound for her, they called and said they didn't find a mass or tumor and our next option was either to put her down or try an exploratory surgery (a couple thous. bucks, they didn't even know what they were looking for). My mom, dad and I discussed that we didn't want to lose her but she was way too weak to have another surgery on top of her leg surgery, she just couldn't take it and probably wouldn't even come out of the anesthesia. We all cried in the living room.. and since Tim was in FL my Dad called to leave a message on tim's cell to say what was going on but in the middle of leaving it, the emergency vet called back to say that they were losing her and we better come quick. her heart rate was slowing down. My dad could barely choke out the words to tell us. We ran out the door and a few minutes later we were there and one of the nurses we had seen before said "I'm so sorry..." She hadn't made it. She had died soon after they had called us. She died at 7 years old (almost 7 1/2).
[[[[They think that maybe her intestines had a rip in it, leaking the brown fluid into her belly and building up. And when she threw it up it would eat away at her asophogus. It's also possible the pain pills we gave her ate away at her and caused this. Personally, I think it was either some undetected health problem or she ate something in the grass (like chem-lawn). We really don't know... and never will.]]]]
Well they let us go back and see her. She was in her same cage in the corner, laying on a pink fuzzy blanket that they covered up her bottom half with. She was laying on her right side.. just.. staring - with her eyes open, starting to glaze over. Her head was on the edge of the pillow we left with her and while my Dad wanted to take it home I said to leave it, because if we took it her head would have fallen off of it and I just couldn't let that happen.. (we did take her bear home though). We cried and sat with her for a few minutes, in disbelief of the whole situation. We kissed her and I rubbed her ears like I always used to.. I could never keep my hands of her soft ears. It was really heartbreaking. I kissed her a bunch of times, on her head, her whiskers, her cheeks, her neck.. and I just didn't want to leave her. She just smelled sick.. and like the hosptial.. and medicines. She was even still warm and she just felt heavy when I touched her. My dad even kissed her goodbye on her head.. which I don't think he had ever really done. He knew he loved her but I think he actually saw how MUCH he loved her. For the guy who didn't really want her in the first place, she grew on him so much and he didn't realize how much he needed her. I've never seen him cry.. even when my grandpa died. Like when we got home after she died and my dad emptied a paper towel tube and he had to throw it away instead of giving it to her to chew up, like we usually did. Little things like that are the hardest.. and coming back into the house. It's just so quiet.. and dead. She really was the light of our lives and made our house a home. It even smells different.. you can really notice the difference and its sickening. You can just feel that shes not there. You know where she'd be sitting in the room and what she'd be doing and with what toy.. but theres just an empty space...................and its so wrong. =(