I’m not gonna lie to you all when I say this past week was an emotional roller coaster. It always is as back in 2017, at the end of January, my health declined and my son was brought into this world via emergency c-section on February 2nd. It’s always this weird emotional roller coaster for our family as we are so thankful for my son and I still being here but we also sit back kind shocked still that this happened. But this past week sadly became worse than our normal yearly struggle.
We have known for a few months that our time was limited with our beautiful German Sheppard, Kaia. She was just shy of 11 (birthday is March 2nd) but we could tell that her hips were starting to give her some issues with pain. She would easily slip and struggle some days with strength in her back legs. We have been talking about how we think at most we were going to have a year left with her but this past week she took a massive down hill turn on her health. She started breathing different and we were keeping an eye on it but she was still doing just fine. But Tuesday is when it all of the sudden became a massive struggle with her and she was heavily breathing. She attempted to get up and one of her back legs couldn’t get under herself and I had to assist her to get up. Then it slowly became a complete struggle for her to get up so we had to assist her multiple times in getting up.
With great concern we called her previous owner, a close friend, to let them know what was going on and it was time for her to come and make a decision for Kaia. Our friend came and sadly she saw the same thing we did, Kaia was struggling and fighting really hard to stay with us. At that point we all decided that if she made it through the night, we were going to have to take her to the vet and be put down the next day.
Wednesday we woke up and found Kaia still struggling. Sadly we took her to the vet and the vet could see instantly that she was struggling. We tried to be nice and give her one last treat but she wasn’t interested. She let us love her and she could see that I was struggling with loosing her. She stayed by our sides and we loved her through the last seconds of her life.
Y’all I have been bawling randomly since last week. Especially when the fire trucks drive by with their sirens. She would usually start howling at them and it would take mom yelling at the top of my lungs, KAIA, for her to finally realize the fire truck is no longer around and bugging her. Every morning we had a greeting and any time we came home from errands she would greet us. Kaia loved in a different way compared to all of my dogs. She was that old soul that showed her love in very rare forms by licking you. That was like her highest form of love, if you got a kiss then you were absolutely the best person in the world. In the 2 years we have had her I may have gotten 20 licks from her over all. Even for 10 years old she truly loved all the trips we took and going on all of the adventures we took. Thankfully we got to have one last Christmas with her and that was her last trip with us.
I am a mess because of this beautiful dog but Im being open about this. I am surely wrecked by a dog. But I cant complain about loving such a beautiful soul! We are hoping for a better time this week but last week wrecked us!