Well, this is one post I didn't expect to write for a long, long time. Jake had some health issues for quite awhile. He had an autoimmune disease but in the last 2 weeks he became very sick. He quit eating, he slept all the time. He went to the specialist twice. Lots of tests and waiting for results. Finally, they had to admit him to their hospital. Was it cancer? Was it a systemic infection? We kept waiting for answers but in the meantime, Jake was getting worse and worse. I kept thinking he would beat this but when we went to visit, he looked a little more down, a little more miserable. Finally the vet said his kidneys were not working. We kept him in the hospital one more night to see if the antibiotics would kick in and he would show improvement. The next morning we all went in. I was really half-expecting him to see us, wag his tail, and the vet would tell us he had turned the corner and things were improving. Unfortunately, when the vet came in she told us his kidney function had declined even more, his chances of survival were now very slim. The selfish part of me just wanted to keep trying, keep plugging in the drugs, not give up. But when she brought him in to see us, we all knew. He was tired. He had fought as long and as hard as he could. It was time to let go. I won't go into details, it's too hard.
In the end, we don't know what it was that took our strong, young dog down so quickly and I don't really care at this point. The vet had her theories but was unable to completely diagnose it without doing some invasive tests that, at the time, could have proven fatal to Jake with his platelet count so low.
So, here we are. I'm wondering when I'll be able to walk in the door without expecting Jake to come running to us, tail wagging, expecting us to sit on the floor with him and scratch his belly. (our ritual every single time we walked in the door). What will it be like tomorrow when I pick Abigail and her friend up from school, and Jake isn't riding with me?
Just a couple of weeks ago I started to write a post about our Thanksgiving trip with Jake. It's really a pretty funny story. I started the post with a resolution to write more often on Jake's blog. I didn't finish writing it and just a couple of days later, Jake started getting sick. I'm going to miss writing this blog. I'm going to miss the funny things that Jake did that made me laugh. I'm going to miss the way he loved to play tug of war, the way his tail would wag the second he saw Abigail walking toward our van after school, the way he would run back and forth alongside the pool everytime Jeff swam laps, our visits to Pine Gully Park when he and I would just sit on a bench and look out at the bay.
I know there are lots of people out there that think "he's just a dog". But Jake wasn't a little dog to sit quietly in the corner and come out and play with you when you wanted. From day one, he wound his way into every aspect of our lives and he was not going to be left behind. He had decided he wasn't going to be an ornament in our house, he was going to be a part of our family. And he truly was a part of our family. We miss him.
