We are putting my beautiful Bella to sleep today. My heart is broken. I haven't been posting around the forum at all lately, some of my friends may have noticed, but I just haven't been able to come out from under the cloud of despair. She goes today at 4:10 and we will never see her again. Never look into her beautiful eyes, never get a face full of Bella droola, never have the surprise of a 6 foot dog popping her front legs up on our shoulders so she can look us eye to eye. My pet, my protector, my best friend will be gone.
Two or three weeks ago she was limping, I just thought that she sprained her ankle or something trying to break out of the kennel to get back into the house with us. I kept an eye on it since she was still walking on it, I figured that it wasn't that bad and she would be fine in a week or so. She never got fine, it got worse and started swelling so I took her to the vet last week. He took the xray and came back and said she does have a slight fracture but that's not what's causing the swelling...it's cancer. Evidently, Danes and other giant breed dogs have a tendancy toward cancer in the bones, a large percentage of them get it in their middle years. Dr. said that it can grow for quite some time inside the bones without any indication that it's there, eating away little by little until the bones become so brittle that they are prone to fracturing. When they get a fracture, the cancer seeps out and begins to aggressively attack the surrounding tissue and that's when you find out. He said by that point the dog generally only has about 2 to 6 months to live. He talked about amputation but he said that doing that may only add a few months because in most cases by the time the bones are brittle enough to fracture, the cancer has progressed to other areas of their body.
I brought her home thinking that we would have at least a couple months, but the cancer has eaten away at her and she is in terrible pain now. She won't eat or move, I knew we had to let her go, but it seems so wrong, she only just turned 6 this summer. My heart hurts.
I'm sitting here watching the clock, dreading the turn of the hours and at the same time wishing time would go faster. I don't want her to go, but I don't want her suffering with this horrible thing any more either. I can't spend the time I want to with her because the boys (1 year and 3 years old) will go in her room with me and want to climb all over her like they always have, they don't understand that it hurts her. So here I sit, waiting, watching the clock.
Raven
