To a new year, and good dogs gone

Keeper smiling up at me as I pet her.

2018 was rough emotionally, physically, and financially. Keeper dying so unexpectedly shattered me. She was a sweetheart. She was my Burly Girlie. She was my independence, my sense of balance, so many things. And then she was gone. My world fell apart for a while.

I found a new love, another tricolor girl. Her name was Izzy. She was a champion Greater Swiss Mountain Dog retired from breeding and looking for a new lease on life. She joined us as a potential stop-gap service dog canidate March 23, 2018. We all fell in love with her within days. She was a great dog. In early April, we did pre-spay blood work and found she was in Stage 4 kidney failure.

Her breeder offered to take her back as soon as we learned, and a couple other times as things progressed, but I needed Izzy. I needed to fight and make a difference and lose in the end. I needed to do for her everything I could not do for Keeper and Duncan. I threw everything I had at slowing that down, at giving her good time and happy memories.

Izzy, who also loved getting petted.

I didn't train Turner as much as he deserved because I was so focused on Izzy's health. There were days I sat on the floor and hand-fed Izzy and cried because I knew all we could to was delay, we could not cure, we could not save her.

It hurt. But I could do something. I needed to be able to do something. And for a far too brief window, Izzy was playful, happy, sassy and full of life. I had given her that reprieve. I had been able to help her.

I still wish I could have had anything proactive to help Duncan or Keeper, but Duncan was so stoic it wasn't until there was nothing we could do that he acted less than cheerful. Keeper didn't have any warning. I hope with every fiber of my being that she was not scared or in pain at the end, and that she didn't notice she was alone because I had let her out for her morning potty trip and was inside making her breakfast.

I got to channel the guilt and the pain and the feeling that I hadn't done enough into doing things for Izzy. She had a number of good months, but her system couldn't fight off infections on its own anymore. She was on antibiotics most of the time we had her. In the end, a nasal infection turned into pneumonia, even with targeted antibiotics, and I let her go on November 2, 2018.

Turner working over the Thanksgiving break.

It's been a hard year, full of heartbreak. Kidney failure is not a cheap disease to fight. I was struggling with my body and in physical therapy much of the year as well.

2018 was not all bad, and the calendar changing isn't magically going to make everything easier, but
I'm hoping that 2019 is a good year for me and Turner. He's been coming along nicely in his work, though I haven't spent nearly enough time on him. I'm hoping that I can channel the same drive I used to focus on Izzy's wellbeing into his and my partnership this year. While I've sort of been blogging about him on the Instagram account I started for Keeper, part of me misses text-based formatting, so I'm hoping to update here at least once a week.

Here's to the new year. May it have more hope than heartbreak.