Maxspinel
02-02-2006, 06:10 PM
I adopted an eight year old Pomeranian nine years ago. He had been a constant joy in our life and I could only bless our good fortune that we were allowed to be a part of him. He was going through the normal aging process but always acting happily like a puppy until the day that he died. One year ago, he got very ill, would not eat anything and kept vomiting. I took him to a vet and they found a piece of foreign material getting stuck in his intestine in the x-ray. The vet recommended immediate surgery which will involve opening him up and cutting off his intestine. I questioned the vet at the time since Coffee was almost 16 ½ years old and what would be the chance that he could survive the surgery. The vet said since he was healthy, he got a real good chance. I did not believe him for a moment since this would be like open heart surgery for an eighty year old man. However, I couldn’t face the other alternative, which was to put him down. I allowed them to operate on him and I could still remember the look that Coffee gave me before they tucked him away, like he was pleading and blaming me for not being with him.
They made a six inch incision in his belly and cut off four inches of his intestine. The foreign material was a broken piece from a plastic watch band. I couldn’t figure out until this day how he would swallow that. He lost almost all his teeth by then and every meal that I made for him had to be chopped really fine. He was strictly an inside dog and I seldom let him out of my sight. The only time that I could think of was he sneaked out from the house via the background one night when the gardener forgot to close the back gate. After the surgery, he was very weak and they had to put him under IV with heavy doses of pain killers. He never woke up and died 3 days later. They called me at work and told me that his temperature was cold, had massive organ failures, then a heart attack. When we saw him again, his eyes were open and bulging, his tongue was sticking out and his legs were all stiff, as if he was suffering greatly. We tried to close his eyes but we couldn’t.
I always wondered if I had made the correct decision to go along with the surgery; may be a more humane way was to let him go in peace but my emotion overrides my common sense. In my own selfish way, I tried to hang on to him, however slim the chance might appear to be, hoping that he would come back to me. In the course of my action, he had to endure the surgery, and suffer the pain as a result of it. I missed him so much.
They made a six inch incision in his belly and cut off four inches of his intestine. The foreign material was a broken piece from a plastic watch band. I couldn’t figure out until this day how he would swallow that. He lost almost all his teeth by then and every meal that I made for him had to be chopped really fine. He was strictly an inside dog and I seldom let him out of my sight. The only time that I could think of was he sneaked out from the house via the background one night when the gardener forgot to close the back gate. After the surgery, he was very weak and they had to put him under IV with heavy doses of pain killers. He never woke up and died 3 days later. They called me at work and told me that his temperature was cold, had massive organ failures, then a heart attack. When we saw him again, his eyes were open and bulging, his tongue was sticking out and his legs were all stiff, as if he was suffering greatly. We tried to close his eyes but we couldn’t.
I always wondered if I had made the correct decision to go along with the surgery; may be a more humane way was to let him go in peace but my emotion overrides my common sense. In my own selfish way, I tried to hang on to him, however slim the chance might appear to be, hoping that he would come back to me. In the course of my action, he had to endure the surgery, and suffer the pain as a result of it. I missed him so much.