Whiskey's Photos

A Little Bit About Whiskey

Breed: Mixed

Gender: Female

Favorite Toy: Big rawhide bones

Favorite Treat: Pork

Favorite Game: Tug-of-war

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Whiskey was an 8-week old pound puppy when we got her. We'd just lost our Golden, Daisy, and we got her as a companion for our Chocolate Lab, Moose. He weighed 125 pounds, and she was maybe 10 pounds. The first thing he did when he met her was bite her in the face because she was jumping around like a mad thing. As she grew up, they became best buds. Shortly after we got her, we found out that her lower jaw had been broken and wired back together. Our vet said that if we wanted to find her owner, just start calling the vets in town. They would definitely remember doing that on such a young dog. We opted to keep her and didn't worry about who had had her before.

Whiskey didn't really have a "dog" personality. She was very intelligent and always had either a smile or a quizzical look on her face. Her forehead would get all wrinkled up like she was trying to understand something. But she was not cuddly, even as a puppy. She didn't seek attention like our other dogs. There was an aloofness to her, more like a cat. We started calling her "the cat in a dog body" fairly early on. We didn't know how prophetic the nickname was.

She was 8 years old when we noticed that she wasn't acting right. We took her to the vet and the next thing we knew they were giving her a blood transfusion because she had non-regenerative anemia. Lots of lab work, tests, medications and devotion from us and our vet pulled her through. About six months later, she turned into an 80 pound walking bruise because her immune system was destroying her platelets. More lab work, tests, medications and devotion got her through again. Our vet began referring to her as "the Miracle Dog" because either one of her illnesses should have killed her. It was a very close thing. She was fine for 4 years, until this past April when she was suddenly diagnosed as insulin-dependent diabetic. She had never been on a feeding schedule, but now she had to accept the fact that she could only eat twice a day and that food was followed by a shot. Being a tolerant dog, she got used to it pretty quickly. She was stable for about 4 months, and then her glucose numbers started fluctuating wildly. We had to get a monitor and test her 4 times a day. Even that she accepted and got used to. She got really sick the week of Thanksgiving, and things went rapidly down hill from there.

When I got up last Thursday morning, Whiskey couldn't get up. She wouldn't eat, she just laid there like a lump. I called my vet and he had me take her to a specialty/emergency pet hospital. They ran a bunch of tests and finally called me in the late afternoon to tell me that they's found a large tumor that had completely invaded her spleen. She was too weak and sick for surgery, all they could do was give her transfusions and medications and see how she did. I spent 3 hours that night lying on the floor of the vet hospital, watching her heart monitor, petting her, talking to her, and telling her how much I loved her. By the next morning, she had started to turn septic, and we had no choice about putting her to sleep. Her body just couldn't take any more. She knew we were there though, and we stayed with her until she was gone.

It's been almost a week now, and I'm still crying. I miss her so much. I picture her romping through a big sunlit field with our other two dogs, and she's happy and having fun, not sick and in pain. I know I'll see them all again some day. 

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