Well it’s been a month since we lost our best friend Kermit and I think I’m ready to write a little something on the blog about him. My mom was watching Ada on the morning of Wednesday, September 26th while I met with a new website client. When I got out of my meeting I had a message from my mom about Kermit. I called her back right away panicking, and she said he just had a seizure. Since he hadn’t had one before, I had no idea what was going on. I raced home and picked him up and took him to the vet. They did a checkup and said that his lymph nodes were swollen and that they’d like to monitor him for the day to make sure he didn’t have another seizure. They also wanted to do a biopsy on his lymph nodes the following Tuesday. I was confused that they would automatically jump to a biopsy since he was in seemingly good health before the seizure. Well we picked him up around 6 and they said he didn’t have another one all day and to watch him carefully. He had a seizure at 10pm and another at 3am. They were absolutely horrible to watch. I stayed up with him in the living room and tried to keep him company, but all he wanted to do was pace around the house.
We took him back to the vet Thursday morning and they kept him all day, they started him on a seizure medication so he wouldn’t keep having them, which he didn’t…while he was there. The meds made him groggy, which was to be expected but we thought that was better than more seizures. He was very clingy and unsettled that night and finally calmed down and sat next to me in the living room at about 10pm. Not even 10 minutes later he had another seizure. The worst thing after the seizures was that he was so unsettled that he just paced around all night. We had to put him in the backyard because it was very hard to get any sleep while he was walking around the house. The next morning you could see a path in the grass where he must’ve walked over and over. Friday he was so lethargic that it was almost as hard as watching the seizures. He barely moved and when we finally got him to walk around, he would stumble and fall down. The vet said this was completely normal and recommended we keep on them and that it would get better. The weekend was more of the same, but he didn’t have any more seizures that we knew of. I talked to the emergency vet clinic on Saturday and asked if we could drop his dosage of the Phenobarbital, and he said we could go down to 1 1/2 pills instead of 2. I just said I was concerned that it was sedating him so much that I didn’t want him to stop breathing.
It was supposed to get colder on Sunday night and since he had been staying outside at night, Eric wanted to move him into the garage so he didn’t get too cold. We laid down next to him around 10:30 in the garage and said goodnight. He managed to lift his head enough to give us both kisses before falling asleep. I got up to use the bathroom around 4am and went to check on him. He was up pacing around, so I got Eric up to let him outside. Eric said he had to pee and then he let him out in the backyard for the last couple hours so he could have more room to pace. When we woke up the next morning, he was sleeping in the backyard in a usual spot. We didn’t really think anything of it. Before Eric left to drop Ivy off at school, I peeked out the window again to see if I could see him breathing. I didn’t say what I was looking for to Eric, but he must’ve known because he went out to check on him. He put his hand on Kermit’s belly and looked at me with a sad, scared look on his face. Then he shook his head to tell me he was gone. I ran out and we both sat there petting him for a while. We didn’t know what to tell Ivy, but we knew she would want to say goodbye to him. We told her and she cried and ran out to see for herself. Ada didn’t grasp what was going on, so that made it easier for her.
Eric has Mondays off, so we were lucky that he was able to be home that day. Dawn came over and picked up Ada, and my parents came over for support. Eric took him to the vet and they did a post mortem. They said they found lymphoma in every organ they tested. Kermit was only 7, and I knew that someday he would get old and probably sick. I just figured that once he was sick, we’d have several months or years to come to terms with it. I guess for Kermit’s sake, this way was probably easier for him. They didn’t think he was in pain, or suffering at all. We didn’t have to make any difficult decisions at the doctor’s office.
After having a dog in the house for 7 years, it really feels like there is such a void. Every time I hear a noise in the house, I think it’s him. Every time I get ready for bed at night, I wish he was there to give him a goodnight kiss. I still do a double take when I walk by his '”spots” in the house because I think I saw him out of the corner of my eye. I think it should be an unwritten rule that a pregnant girl shouldn’t lose her dog. We will all miss him forever and it really hurts that he’s gone, but I wouldn’t trade the pain for the time we had with him.
Love you Kermit.
