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Saturday, April 28, 2007

On Death and Dying

If you look in my pictures you will see a picture of our basset hound Lady. In the past month Lady was diagnosed with cancer. It started with a lame leg, which the vet originally thought was soft tissue damage. Three weeks later the x-rays clearly showed a tumor on the bone. The biopsy confirmed cancer, a rather agressive form at that. The vet thinks it started somewhere else in the body and the tumor is an outgrowth of that. The cancer is so aggressive that the vet did not recommend trying to treat it at this stage and instead to make her as comfortable as we could for as long as we could.

It has been three weeks since then, Lady has lost a lot of weight and as of last night she is starting to lose her ability to move around. Her good back leg works sometimes and sometimes not at all. We called the vet and determined that she is probably in a lot of pain and it is time to let her go. Today at noon we will be putting her to sleep.

It's going to be a rough day