Chapter One

At the dog park today someone suggested I make a blog about my dog and all of our adventures..

So I guess I should start from the beginning..

I was living in Tallahassee with a boyfriend when I decided we needed a dog in our “little family”…so I did what every other girl does and went to the animal shelter “Just to look”. I wanted a smaller dog, and after taking out and playing with 6 or so small dogs I walked by “Tracy”. I wasn’t thrilled that she was a medium sized dog, she was so sad and quiet. She was the only dog not barking, and just sat there looking at me..waiting. I took her out of her kennel and walked her to the one-on-one area..Tracy immediately laid on her back and stretched out for me to pet her. I was in love. If you’ve ever seen a hound-mixed dog you know those eyes. The eyes that stare into the deepest part of your soul, and tug on every heart string you never knew you had.

Once we got her home..
(November 2012)

I couldn’t wait to do normal dog things with her, fetch, run, tug of war, wish she would stop barking. But she never did any of those thing. As we later named her, Sophia never did everything I thought she would.

..today I know that she’s done everything I didn’t think she could.

Sophia doesn’t bark, she doesn’t fetch, she doesn’t play games and have random bursts of energy from being cooped up when I’m at work or school. After the break up and two moves we finally settled back into a normal life. We live in a little studio apartment that’s walking distance to our dog park. At the end of May (2014) Sophia’s back ankle started to swell up, an x-ray at the vet showed no real reason for the swelling but we were given medicine for swelling and pain and instructed to come back two weeks later to re-xray. In the vet’s office they have a computer screen that is linked to the one in the back that they load the x-rays to. Alone in the room, I watched the image load on the screen and immediately I cried. I could see something was wrong, and I didn’t know what, how, when, why it was happening. The next two days after that I was instructed to put her down or amputate the limb. Something had started to take the bone and they couldn’t biopsy unless the leg was gone because of the location of the deterioration.

I consider myself a realistic person..

I spent a lot of the first couple days after hearing my options online. (Which honestly, was the worst idea). Osteosarcoma (bone cancer) was all I could find. And Osteosarcoma in a young dog? Forget it. 3 months? 5 months? 2 years tops? I really struggled with that. Do I keep her alive and take her leg, find out its cancer, and watch her slowly deteriorate with her health out of my hands and control? Or constantly be concerned about why she’s coughing? Is it in her lungs? Does her other back leg hurt and I don’t know because she only can hop on the only leg left she has back there? Really…It hurts to think about it again right now.

Coming home from the cancer specialist..

I saw a man at a crosswalk with no legs, he was in  a wheelchair and seemed to be perfectly content with life, and I knew I had to give Sophia a chance. Sort of against my military-K9-training-father’s advice, I asserted I would figure it out. I’m a college student, living on my own serving at a restaurant. $1200 isn’t really in my budget.. but she had been through so much with me that if I didn’t at least try… I would live with the regret for the rest of my life. We went straight to the vet from the specialist Thursday to set an appointment for that next Tuesday.

The first time I ever heard her cry…

was the first time my parents and I saw her after her surgery. It wasn’t even a woeful cry. It wasn’t loud or dramatic, it was more like a whistling. I asked them to call me as soon as I could come see her. She put her paw on my chest and looked back at her “leg”.. She was wrapped up in pink gauze like a diaper, with a small cut-out heart shaped gauze over her surgery site- my vet is so sweet. Her hind-end looked especially small. She’s a thin dog to begin with, but she really looks small now. We snuggled and hugged her while she flopped around heavily medicated I’m sure. The next morning 24 hours post-op they called me. “She woke up in beast mode” they said. Sophia had already been up that morning using the bathroom and roaming around their fenced in back yard. I couldn’t believe I could already take her home.

Watching her walk towards me..

was, at the time, the most proud moment I’ve ever had as a dog-mom to her. She bumped into the end of the door with her cone and her body pivoted, but she kept moving. I was on the ground calling her towards me. Sophia doesn’t lick…she’ll get right into your face, but never licks..but that day she did. From that point it was a few weeks of recovering. Ever since then, she’s been teaching me a few things. Initially, she taught me

Acceptance
ac·cept·ance

noun
willingness to tolerate a difficult or unpleasant situation.