Today, I had to let my Caramel finally get some rest after four days of off and on pain. She would have been fifteen at the beginning of August, but on Wednesday, the 29th of June, she came to us in pain, breathing hard, her back arched, and not walking very well. Her eyes were not Caramel’s, and she no longer ran outside. Over the next four days, we made two trips to an emergency vet, trying different pain medications, but with no results. So, today, after a vet said she either had nerve issues or a slipped disc, we chose to relieve her of the pain.
We got Caramel at the McKinney SPCA, which the only way you could find it in 2001 was to get lost and then look for the nearest building. She was one of four six week old puppies. We actually didn’t pick her at first. Her sister seemed rather calm, so we took her into one of the acquaintance rooms to see how she would be with my six and one year old sons. The puppy was scared, and wouldn’t come out from under the bench. So we swapped with a family that had a dog that was too hyper, and had our Caramel.
The SPCA required that she be spade before we could take her home. When I went back a week later to get her, I was told that she would probably need to be carried to the car. Not my Caramel. She walked out of there like she’d never had any surgery. And that’s how she was through a lot of life: Nothing was going to slow her down. From age 7 weeks to 14 years 10 months, she would go running out the back door into the yard, chasing anything or nothing. Inside, she was a good alarm, barking at people walking by and door bells ringing.
She learned to sit and shake, and my wife taught her to play peek-a-boo when she was laying down. She never did really take to fetch, because she didn’t want to have to stop. If she did go grab something you threw, she’d almost make it back to you and then run away with it.
She never did like thunder. But the universe knew her time was up, so thunderstorms came on July 4th this year to herald her passing. So her last night was rough, but it also meant I spent even more time hugging her in her last 24 hours, telling her everything was going to be all right, and that I would take care of her. I know I did, but the tears still want to flow.
Edit: Thanks for all the wonderful comments. They have helped.
Edit 2: I wanted to share a story about her. As I said, we had two boys when we got her. Because of that, she treated the two of them as siblings. When we had our third son, though, she decided she was his other mother. Unlike the first two, he could crawl all over her, play with her, and when he cried, she got to him before the rest of us did.