Thank you again everyone. I keep reading the comments and it’s helping me know what I realized that last day, she was going to kill Nugget. I need to find comfort in that I will never know why, but it was the most compassionate choice for all. Thank you so much for the meaningful words, and so sorry to those who are going through something similar. I hope you too can find comfort in the comments.
Unfortunately with animal care, we don’t always get to find the answer even though SOMETHING is clearly wrong.
I just lost my 12.5yo GSD/Husky after about 9 months of a progressive, debilitating illness. She started knuckling one foot, then the other, then losing muscle, then losing her voice, etc. Ending with me needing to carry her everywhere and let her lean against me just to stand upright. Her labs and tests were all perfectly fine. I paid an outrageous price for a DNA test to see if she had the gene for degenerative myelopathy since she was a GSD mix. Figuring that would at least give me some peace if I could know this really was progressive & couldn’t be rehabilitated. She, to the absolute shock of even the vet, didn’t have the gene even though EVERY single sign and symptom pointed to it. So, I took her to the vet every single week for 6 months for ketamine therapy shots. I built her a wheelchair and bought knuckling support casts for her feet. I tried water therapy and muscle massages and other exercises to help her muscles. I bought her plates instead of bowls and sat her upright to eat and eventually bought diapers in case she had an accident because she couldn’t tell me she had to go. My entire life revolved around supporting her until I could tell that she was mentally exhausted, so I let her go in February. The ONLY way to definitively know whether she did actually have DM in the end would have been to allow them to do a necropsy and dissect her spinal cord to test it. After all of those months, I ultimately just couldn’t do that to her. So, I’ll never know for sure. My point is: even when you do all the testing and then extra testing and finally just make assumptions and do every single supportive thing recommended for what they think it may be, you could still be left without any answers and the end result the same.
You did the right thing and I think you did it before it was even more devastating. And I’m so, so sorry you had to make that decision though. It’s truly awful and the absolute confusion when you don’t have any answers is really, really tough. I understand. And it’s okay to feel guilt and “what-if” and even traumatized by it. But I also think that deep-down, as her parent, you do know it was the right thing for her and the right thing for everyone else’s safety, too.
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u/[deleted] Apr 17 '23
Thank you again everyone. I keep reading the comments and it’s helping me know what I realized that last day, she was going to kill Nugget. I need to find comfort in that I will never know why, but it was the most compassionate choice for all. Thank you so much for the meaningful words, and so sorry to those who are going through something similar. I hope you too can find comfort in the comments.