Playful Rooted

I have so, so, so many updates to share. Seriously, life has been a real whirlwind these past few months, and we have had a lot of good changes and a lot of difficult ones. Lots more to come, but for now I’ll start with the one that’s caused the most change-up in our family and house.

This time last year, we had a cat, Nala, and two Beagles, Scout and Shiloh. Now, they are all gone. All of them. It’s unbelievable really; we expected Shiloh to pass away, as he was 14 years old and had many ailments. But Scout was only nine, and Nala was only two. It’s still so surreal.

Nala

It was about a year ago that we discovered our little Nala cat had a big heart problem. Her heart had a significant defect that caused it to be massively oversized and pumping blood in the wrong direction. Obviously no good. I remember getting the call from the vet, and she said that in cases of heart defects, normally the x-ray comes back with a small gray dot. In Nala’s case, it was a big black circle, the biggest one she had ever seen. Guh.

There was really very little the vet could do; we could have tried surgery for $6,500, but even if it was successful, Nala would have to be an indoor cat for the rest of her life and never get her heart rate up too high. We knew that wasn’t the life she wanted. Our girl was an outdoor cat through and through, and she loved running around in the backyard, chasing birds and jumping fences.

The vet recommended monthly ultrasounds of Nala’s heart, and at the time, we were already doing monthly ultrasounds of the little baby in my tummy who we were afraid wasn’t going to make it. So at the time, that recommendation felt particularly hurtful. We decided to let Nala live out the spring and summer, and then we would reassess her condition in the fall. But as it turns out, we didn’t get that far. One morning in June of last year, we awoke to find that Nala had passed away in her sleep in one of her favorite spots by our back door.

Horribly sad, but in so many ways, it was a blessing. Though it happened sooner than we expected, we weren’t completely caught off guard. She died at home — thankfully, because she was rarely at home — and she didn’t seem to suffer or struggle. It was the best way it could have happened; peaceful and quick. I still can’t really believe it; she was only two years old. And although it’s been almost a year, I walked out to the garage the other day and fully expected to see her lying on the hood of our car as she so often used to do.

Life is weird.

Scout

This one hurts, you guys. Our boy Scout was only nine, and he was athletic, healthy, and happy.

Until one day in January, he wasn’t.

We will never know what happened, and that sucks. But somehow, Scout hurt himself – badly. Maybe jumping down from somewhere? We don’t know. He went from being fine one minute to suddenly having a ruptured disc in his spine that caused him to slowly become paralyzed, which was gut-wrenching to witness. Our poor buddy. In 48 hours, he went from just walking oddly to dragging himself around on the ground to not being able even to stand up, whining and panting and suffering the whole time. It was clear he was in excruciating pain through all of this and that he was also confused and scared. So awful.

Ben took him to the emergency vet twice during that time, and they gave Scout painkillers and Ben an estimate for surgery — at least $8,000. There was no guarantee surgery would work, and even if it did, he would never be fully the same. We had to make the terrible, horrible, no good, very bad decision to have him put down.

It was a really, really, really, really bad day. The worst day. I’m crying remembering it. That dog drove me CRAZY, but I never wanted it to end like that. He was a really good, really naughty dog (here’s one of the MANY times we had to bust him out of the pound after he ran away).

I miss him.

Shiloh

I just searched my own blog to see if I had posted about Shiloh’s history, but it seems I haven’t. So, in case you didn’t know, our Shiloh spent the first six years of his life as a laboratory animal, meaning that he, along with countless other defenseless pups, had tests done on him to determine whether cosmetic products were safe for humans. So sad, right? We adopted him in 2014 from Kindness Ranch Animal Sanctuary, a wonderful organization that takes in animals who’ve been discarded after testing is completed. He was six years old when we adopted him, and he enjoyed eight more years with us. I’m very glad he spent more of his life in freedom than in the lab.

In his later years, Shiloh had many of the common old-dog ailments. He was fully deaf, had bad arthritis that made it hard to get up and down the stairs – and even to stand up in the end, he had a horrible hacking cough for two years (this is common in senior Beagles), and for the past few months, he had been throwing up several times a day. It was time, for his sake.

Luckily for Shiloh (and for us), he got to skip the traumatic emergency vet experience. We were so grateful to have found Lap of Love, an in-home pet euthanasia service. We had the most wonderful, gentle, and sympathetic veterinarian come to our home and help our sweet Shiloh boy across the rainbow bridge. The kids (oblivious to what was going on) watched a movie upstairs while Ben and I snuggled Shiloh and fed him treats as he lay in his bed and slowly went to sleep for the last time. It was so comfortable and peaceful for him. As sad as we were and are, it was truly the best ending I could imagine.

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Nala died last June, but Scout just died in January, and Shiloh in February – only five weeks apart. So we quickly went from two dogs to zero, and the sudden, unexpected absence of both of them was really painful for me and Ben.

We adopted Shiloh and Scout at around the same time, and Nala joined our pack a few years later, so these three really felt like our trio of pets, and it has been so hard and surreal to lose all of them in the span of eight months. It truly feels like the end of an era.

The boys have been….oddly fine? We have had an inordinate amount of animal deaths in our extended family this year (my parents’ dog and my sister’s dog both passed away as well), so I feel like they’ve been somewhat desensitized to it. And to be morbidly honest, I did spend some time preparing Luca for what we were afraid was going to happen with the baby. (Remember, kids: Doctors aren’t always right!) There are lots of good kids’ books out there about grief and loss; this one uses very simple, direct language; this one is gut-wrenching but helps kids understand long-term illness and eventual death; this is the one I bought later to help them process pet death specifically, but as mentioned, they’ve been pretty unconcerned about it. Kids.

Anyway, that’s our sad story and the biggest upheaval in our home life lately. I have lots more to share, most of it happier! Stay tuned for my next post, to be published….whenever I get another hour to myself. So maybe tomorrow? Maybe four months from now? We’ll find out together, ya guys.

xo!