My love is gone...

My love of 13 years has left me, or should I say I let her go?

It's unbearably painful. I've spent 10 years crying over others' pets that had passed, and now it's my turn. Writing about Caprice may take days, between the crying, but I will tell her story.

Right before I retired from teaching, I knew it would be a good time to get a puppy.  I had gone without for quite awhile, ever since I lost Persi to kidney failure I think. Knowing nothing about finding a good breeder, I looked for breeders on the Internet, those close enough for me to pick up a puppy.  Nothing in Albuquerque.  I didn't know much about finding a breeder  or the questions to ask.  All I thought I knew to ask about was sebaceous cysts.  I found Ash's Mystical Poodles in Las Vegas. This was a big breeder with lots of beautiful dogs on her page, and she had puppies and one for me!

The time to pick her up was right after I retired from teaching, May 2006.  

My niece Michelle took me to visit her the day before she would come home with me.  Caprice was the last of the pups to leave her mother, Monet, so there she was in the room with her mom.  I cried when I saw her; I was so glad to have a poodle girl again.

I don't remember much about the flight home, with my little treasure below my plane seat.  Her hard crate and goodies from the breeder, were checked in with luggage.  What I do remember is that Michael fell asleep before he was to pick us up, and I sat in an empty airport at midnight with this beautiful little girl and a huge crate beside me.

She came with an umbilical hernia, not unheard of, but not mentioned by the breeder, and, as I discovered in a few days, worms.  Both fixable, but questionable.

She was a love to watch. She chewed, she barked, she destroyed. I was in love!

She was an independent little cuss.  So independent and full of energy, that I decided to get her a brother three months later Rondo (who's his own story).

New and Not New

I last wrote over a year ago.  Part of my blogging is about not blogging.  

What's new since then?  A lot that's not new anymore, some even notable.  A 70th birthday.  A change in the world. 

What sticks in my mind? Caprice. I worked so hard to keep her alive.  But she had to leave on June 24, 2019. Her Addison's was under control, her digestive issues were under control. She received acupuncture and took Chinese herbs and pills for all sorts of things. I arranged all sorts of food on my Fiestaware to get her to eat and was able to maintain her weight.  Michael constructed a ramp so she could continue to sleep with us when her weak rear end kept her from jumping up on the bed.  I protected the growth on her foot from her licking by putting little pink and purple socks on the food. She had dental work, supported by a veterinary anaesthesiologist,  brought in from Phoenix.  I would have done anything for that girl, but there came a time when I best thing I could do for her was to let her go.

I came back from an agility trial and found she had a swollen eye.  A long trip to the Emergency room resulted in a possible diagnosis of something I can't even remember the name of.  Possible treatment- large doses of prednisone.  As I talked to my vet the next day (Canon was having dental work done), she told me Caprice probably couldn't tolerate the treatment, and so I made the very difficult decision to let her go.

I scrambled to find a vet who would come to my house to release her.  It all happened so quickly.  And so now I am sitting at my computer, nine months later, weeping for my 13+ year old girl, who left me. 

I cried when I first met Caprice, and I cry now.