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Posted by Meredith
on August 15, 2009, 1:49 pm
70.139.218.162
Not sure how I ended up here, but I'm glad I did, because I just want to get it out.
Two weeks before the infamous Hurricane Ike, we happened upon a new family member. My husband, a deputy sheriff, had some buddies who found an approximately 10 week old puppy in an abandoned house on Navajo St. We brought him home with us and named him Navajo. You couldn't ask for a better family dog.
On April Fool's Day 2009, our dog jumped the fence and ended up getting hit by a car. Strangers found him, took him to the vet, and pretty much saved his life, as he almost died that night from shock.
He came home the next day; besides the cuts on his body, his primary injuries were a shattered femur and a completely displaced hip. The femur was pinned up a few days later in surgery; the hip would have to wait, it was secondary to healing the femur.
Every 2 weeks, they kept telling us to bring him back to get checked out again - the bone just wasn't healing. It was the week before the 4th of July when we woke up and noticed the pin had poked a hole through his skin - we took him into the vet where he had the pin removed and a cast put on in the hopes of saving the lef.
On the 7th, my husband came home and found the cast scattered all over the backyard. He took him to the vet where sure enough, he had re-broken the leg. The plan was to re-pin it, and cast it, and fix the hip while she was in there.
I got the call on the 8th mid-surgery that there was no hip socket left to join his leg to, and she could either try to create one, or just amputate the leg. Our poor dog had suffered so much, and was already used to 3 legs, that we opted for amputation, as there was no guarantee the other option would work.
She called me as he was coming out and said he did great, would stay overnight, and come home tomorrow.
I went home that evening and found out that right after she got off the phone with me, they went to tube his tube out, and he went into cardiac arrest and died. She called my husband as she felt horrible and didn't want to call after she'd just told me he was fine.
I was so sure he was going to make it, I'm still in shock, over a month later. I finally picked up his cremains last week, I still don't know what to do with them. We were going to scatter them in the backyard, but I'm not ready. Our almost 4 year old is now starting to realize he's not coming back, so it's like reliving it all over again.
I don't know if I'll ever have a reason to post here again, but I'm glad I found this place just to get this all out, as it just all still feels so surreal, it wasn't supposed to happen like this. That, and I feel horrible that his last 3 months may have been miserable recovering, and I sometimes question why we even bothered trying to save him.
So if you made it this far, thank you. Here's to hoping this helps with our grief. 
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