Sara the Dog

We had to put our dog, Sara, to sleep yesterday. She had started to lose complete control of her bladder and it had gotten to the stage where she was peeing right in front of us, without any warning she needed to go outside.

She was an old dog of 13 years, with arthritis in her joints and a no-nonsense attitude towards other dogs which screamed “leave me the hell alone!”. She found it more and more difficult to get up or down the steps to go outside and had fallen down them on a few occasions, towards the end. I even built a ramp for her a couple of weeks ago, but it wasn’t something she was ever used to and she just couldn’t use it.

We adopted Sara from the humane society in October, 2008, so we had her for 10 months and gave her a good retirement, at least we think so. She lived in a quiet environment with us and was always shown plenty of affection, even though she wasn’t the type of dog who sought it from anyone; she pretty much kept herself to herself and slept all the time. It’s strange, but she didn’t even like to go for walks, she always pulled on the leash to get back home to her bed once she’d done her business. She didn’t appear to have much enjoyment in life and we often wondered about her history, whether or not she’d been overly neglected by previous owners.

We’ve had a number of pets and have always done the right thing for them when the time came. However, this time it was hard. Sara was a cranky old dog and didn’t like anyone touching her too much – especially vets! She was very stressed when we finally got her to the animal clinic and she had to be given a sedative immediately. Even so, when it came time to give her the final injection she still had plenty of fight left in her and would snap at the technicians until they were forced to give her more sedatives. In the end, they had to sedate her four times before she finally calmed down.

We were with her all the time, holding her and comforting her as much as we could until she finally let go her last breath.

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