Strider Dog

It was July 7, 1999. I happened to be off work on a Thursday and my roommate Christie called, "Hey, Jen? There's a Chocolate Lab hanging out outside my office. She has no collar and appears to be a stray. Do you want her?"

A few months prior I had bought my first house and decided I needed a dog to go with it. I already had a cat. :-) I research different dogs and decided I wanted a Lab but what color? Chocolate. I wanted a Chocolate Lab.

I drove to Christie's office looked at this dog, fell in love and said, "Hi girl, would you like to come live with me?" I justified not calling Animal Control or the Humane Society to see if she belonged to anyone because I felt that she had not been well taken care of. The insides of her ears had been neglected (you have to clean out floppy ears often) and the owners didn't bother to put a collar on her. I guess it didn't occur to me that maybe she did have a loving home and somehow she happened to not have the collar on that day. Nonetheless, she became mine. I named her Strider. Kind of a boyish name, I know, but it suited her. It was estimated by the vet that she was between three and five years old. That was ten years ago.

Fast forward to recently. She had been losing weight and was not active. "She's just getting old," Rick and I would say. But then she started throwing up a little each time she would eat or drink. We became quite worried when she started to lose control of her bowels. It became worse and worse over the past few days.

I took her to the vet at PetSmart this morning while Tyler was at school. Essentially, the choice was to spend a couple hundred dollars to run tests or to put her to sleep. The issue with running tests is that even if the vet could pin point what's wrong, it's not likely anything can be done anyway. The vet addressed my obvious pain and indecision. She said that if she didn't think Strider was an appropriate candidate to be put to sleep it wouldn't be an option. And second, the vet felt that Strider had a tumor in her intestines and nothing could be done about that. Still, I felt like a cheapskate if I didn't have the tests. But then the nurse brought up a good point, "If she can't control her bowels, that problem is only going to get worse." That was the point that had the most weight on my decision. "I think we need to go ahead and put her to sleep." Who wants to live like that? She's 14 and had a good life.

I decided to stay with Strider as they put her to sleep. I wailed. I knew it would hurt emotionally but I started to hyperventilate! Rick had to come get me which I was glad about that because he was able to say "goodbye" to her. My mind was playing tricks on me because I kept seeing her breathe. She looked like she was asleep and breathing. I told Rick, "I don't feel like I did the right thing." He said, "But you did," and he listed all of the reasons why. I'm not convinced. What if she had a couple more years of life in her and we could have fixed what was wrong, even if it cost a ton of money? I don't know. I'm sick to my stomach with wonder and guilt.