| 4:34p |
TGIF
Oh I've got a whole buncha stuff to say. First of all, I'm turning 25 tomorrow. That would be one quarter of a century. Sweet. More like bittersweet, I guess. I am happy where I am right now: engaged to Matt, teaching in my own classroom. But I also feel like I haven't done enough with my life yet either. I don't know...
The second thing is sad. Last Saturday my family pet of 10 years, Smokey, passed away. He was an enormous black lab full of love and happiness. You'd walk by him, and even if he was lying down on the floor half-asleep, he'd wag his tail because he loved being with his family. He always looked happy, always smiling. Well, Smokey had testicular cancer. He had one undescended ball and that's probably where it all started. The tumor grew to the size of a kidney- human or canine I do not know. We didn't even know this though until my mom took him to the vet. She took him to the vet because about a week prior to his death, he fell down an entire flight of stairs along with Lola, the family pekingese. They probably tripped each other and Smokey's arthritic as it is. Well he slowly got up from his fall, but that really weakened him even more than he was before. He stopped eating and drinking, even when my mom got food that a healthy Smokey would have literally inhaled under normal circumstances. The day my mom took him to the vet, he could barely lift his head off the floor to greet you, and wagged his tail very weakly. Mom and Gretchen had to carry him out to the van because his arthritis, along with the cancer and soreness from the fall, prohibited him from getting up. He had an accident in the van on the way there. Mom asked the vet people to put him on IV fluids because he hadn't been drinking and then check him out. They found the cancer and told my mom it was going to cost $3,600 to put him into surgery the next day. My whole family loves him so much that she said she'd do it. After 3 hours at the vet with Smokey, mom left him there for the night in the crate the vets put him in. She said he looked like he was in another world. Well, about an hour later, my mom got a call from the vet saying that they were prepping Smokey for the next day's surgery and they gave him a chest x-ray, only to find out he had pneumonia too. So they sucked a ton of fluid out of his lungs. Shortly after that, the vet called to say that Smokey was coughing up blood and then his heart stopped. They were doing CPR on the poor thing for 10-15 minutes before they got a very weak pulse. My mom said to stop putting him through it all and just let him go. So they euthanized [sp?] him. My mom still feels bad about it. He was more than just a dog to us. He was family, so it was a difficult loss for everyone.
This entry just made me cry, but at least I know he's not in pain anymore so I'm relieved in a sense.
On a brighter note, I survived my first month of teaching 5th grade. I'm still hanging in there. It's a lot of grading and a lot of photocopying, but it's fun and I have a great group of students. |