dPaige was another freeads dog. My fault for looking again! Paige's owner was dying from cancer, and her son in remission from the very same cancer so reluctantly, they were looking for a home for her. She was 6yrs old, had an absolutely awful start (they rescued her at 9 months old from a 'person' who beat and kicked her, starved her, and left her with untreated mange that had caused her whole head to go bald), and was unspayed and untrained. But, an absolutely fabulous dog! I offered to look after her and she stayed. She was a dobe, so of course she stayed.
She left me at 2 months shy of her 15th birthday, and almost to her last day she was still a fruitloop! But a brilliant one - very affectionate, one of the very few dogs I know that genuinely liked the top of her head being fussed. She had silly ears, which I adored; a prey drive, which I did not, although it mellowed considerably in her last year; and a dodgy back - like River, Paige also had a chronic slipped disc. She also had spondylosis ( a form of spinal arthritis) under that disc and since spring 2018, a partial tear in both cruciate ligaments which was much worse on the right. And in the summer, she developed chronic bronchitis. Nearer christmas, larangyeal paralysis too! But did all that slow her down? Did it heck! With the right meds regime and a few months in a brace to help her worst knee, she was still going strong until her last few weeks.
What I didn't know was that underneath all of that, towards the end of 2018, liver cancer was taking hold. Her last weekend was not so good, as it really took over, and she left me just two days after the first hint showed that something much more serious was going on. She was an absolute legend of a dog, and I still have no idea what I'm going to do without her.
She left me at 2 months shy of her 15th birthday, and almost to her last day she was still a fruitloop! But a brilliant one - very affectionate, one of the very few dogs I know that genuinely liked the top of her head being fussed. She had silly ears, which I adored; a prey drive, which I did not, although it mellowed considerably in her last year; and a dodgy back - like River, Paige also had a chronic slipped disc. She also had spondylosis ( a form of spinal arthritis) under that disc and since spring 2018, a partial tear in both cruciate ligaments which was much worse on the right. And in the summer, she developed chronic bronchitis. Nearer christmas, larangyeal paralysis too! But did all that slow her down? Did it heck! With the right meds regime and a few months in a brace to help her worst knee, she was still going strong until her last few weeks.
What I didn't know was that underneath all of that, towards the end of 2018, liver cancer was taking hold. Her last weekend was not so good, as it really took over, and she left me just two days after the first hint showed that something much more serious was going on. She was an absolute legend of a dog, and I still have no idea what I'm going to do without her.