Miley

I lost Miley to osteosarcoma on Monday August 6th.  I've been through this before.  Unfortunately, this exact same thing.  It just progressed differently with Miley.  I've been meaning to write this post for a bit, figuring that it would help in the grieving process.  I've gone through that process twice before, but that doesn't make it less raw or at all the same.

Here's a twist to the knife.  Miley developed the tell tale tumor on the same exact leg, in the same exact location as Bess.  Only her tumor appeared basically in front of my eyes, while we were at the vet's office.  I fucking hate cancer.

I took Miley in to see her vet due to a slight limp that just wasn't going away.  After a week of me being out of town and her brother staying with other people, she should have been able to rest up enough to signify that this slight limp meant something else was going on.  I thought it was something to do with her shoulder.  So we went to the vet.  She did flex tests on her, she had me gait her, she poked and prodded her to see if she could get a pain response in a specific location or feel heat in a particular area.  Nothing.  Her recommendation was that she was going to send me home with antiinflamatories, rest her for a week and see what happens.  I felt like something was up and I still felt like it was the shoulder, so I asked her if she'd x-ray her shoulders.  She was more than fine taking the x-rays at my request.  Shoulder x-rays came back clear.  We'd already had a conversation about her first guess given Miley's breed was osteosarcoma, and since she wasn't the same vet that Bess had, I explained the process with Bess.  As she was showing me Miley's clear shoulder x-rays, she said that she didn't do any scans of the rest of her legs since nothing warranted it.  Well....

After she brought Miley back to the waiting room she gave me the option of hanging out in the room until the receptionist was ready to ring me up, or I could wait out in the waiting room.  Thankfully I opted to wait in the waiting room.  As I was sitting there, I was looking at Miley's front legs and I could SWEAR that her left front was now swollen in that tell tale region.  Which seemed impossible.  The vet and I had been all over that area.  How could either of us have possibly missed that.  Clearly i was something that had already been seen.  But I couldn't stop staring at it.  Finally I just decided that if I didn't get it x-rayed right then, it was going to drive me crazy and I'd just be bringing her back in the next day.  So I grabbed a vet tech, who grabbed the vet.  She came in and was shocked that she hadn't seen it.  Then said that as we were talking she could almost swear that it was increasing in size.  Back off for x-rays Miley went.  The vet came back and told me that she was about to be my least favorite person.  They could get a biopsy to confirm, but Miley's x-ray looked just like Bess'.

From there, Miley's progression was very different than Bess'.  Bess was only on meloxicam until the end.  Miley was on meloxicam, tramadol at an increasing dose and gabapentin at the end.  By the evening of the 5th she was no longer weight bearing on the leg.  Despite all the meds that she was on, she was still herself at times.  She just couldn't play as much.  Then finally she stopped putting weight on the leg.  It took both Tanner and I to gently lift her out of the house so that she could potty. 

A friend of mine who's a vet came on the morning of the 6th to put her down.  Even then Miley was excited to see her and was bouncing around to the best of her ability so that she could say hi.  Which had me glad that she had asked if I preferred a light sedative prior to the injection. 

This is just hard.  I keep thinking about great Miley was during my recovery process.  How incredibly happy she was to see me when I finally came home from the hospital.  She never wanted to leave my side.  Those two months while I was wheelchair bound and basically stuck inside my house, she only wanted to be next me.  She moderated her play around me throughout the entire process.  This is beyond unfair.  She was only four.  And she was significant to me.  Part of the loss is knowing how amazing she was.  How much time we should have still had together and all the things we should have still been able to do.  I will never hear her fake grumble at night when I glom on to her.  I will never see her punching the garage door handle because I'm clearly too dense to understand that she wants outside.  I will never get another chance to tell her she's got too much sass in that ass.  It's just not okay. 

I am glad that I have so many pictures and so many videos of her.  Looking back at those does reaffirm for me that I did give her a good life.  She did know that she was loved.  And I have so many amazing memories with her.  I put together a video of some of the snippets.  Nothing will feel like enough, but this helps.