Just Bad Luck

Life has a funny way of keeping you in your place, doesn't it?

As if life isn't hard enough and the year that started out as a year from hell and then became the best year of your life with sober revelations and then just as quick as you felt you had it all together, it became hell again. How quickly it can all change, unravel you and make you come undone.

I will be very honest. I have never been a huge animal person. I love them but Ive always been that person that would say, its just a dog, its just a cat. I was very detached and realistic about their life spans and that they come and go and that it couldn't be deeper than that because they are our pets and thats what happens. It's the circle of life. I had a very matter of fact attitude towards pets. Then I fell apart at the end of last year, didn't leave the house very much and sometimes lay alone for days on end in tears in a dark hole of depression. This is where Blue who had been with us for a 10 months already really walked into my life. Some days I would be lying there and she would come push herself into my space with her face. I remember a few occasions pushing her away and saying no, go away very sternly. All I wanted was to be alone, in my dark hole with nothing. But she didn't go, she kept coming back and eventually would just lie with me, curled up either by my head, sometimes my back, in front of my tummy or at my feet, always there and always close. Eventually a few weeks into this behaviour, I put my arm on her and she would just fall asleep next to me. If I was crying, she would stare at me with her head tilted to the side, until I would sit with her on the floor and then she would lie in my lap. I was battling to feel anything at all at this time and when this started happening, it was like this warmth washed over me every time. It was the start of a bond I had never felt with any animal. And I know it was because I didn't need to say anything, it was just this love that came with no strings attached that didn't need an explanation for anything. As the weeks went by she almost never left my side. I will always believe she knew my soul was in trouble and that she was a not a dog but an angel sent to me. I would go to the bathroom and she would be waiting outside. I would be in the kitchen cooking and I would feel this wet nose against my calf and I would look down and of course, who would be there and I would just smile. It bordered on ridiculous how close she was all the time. I would send photos to my husband where I was doing the the most random of things and she would be sitting right there. I would always put up videos of her on my instagram stories of her just staring at me if I was watching TV with the song, I always feel like somebodies watching me. She did my pilates qualifications with me earlier this year. I really let all the rules slide for her, I spoiled her rotten, she had stolen my entire heart and I attached her very much so, as one of the major beacons for my ability to find my way out the dark and a massive stepping stone in my sobriety journey. Who knew you could laugh with an animal, she did funny things and kept me very entertained and I would often find myself, if not smiling, laughing. She was good for my soul and bringing back a part of me I needed so desperately.

Some of my darkest hours at the beginning of this year were spent with my puppy, Blue. She is only 21 months old.

We've had a few vet visits over the last 3 months and its always been something or the other but then we were given the devastating news that she had untreatable lymphoma and my world just collapsed. It shattered into more than a million pieces. For me this felt likethe same punch in the stomach that hit me the night we got the call to say my Dad had died in a car accident. I asked the vet is it something we did or fed her or was it genetic?

I wasn't in complete shock, because we had done every test available the week prior to find something, anything, until that final scan that confirmed it and nothing was looking good up until there. It was all pointing towards cancer and not the good kind because of what the bloods were showing. But we always hold on to hope and that news is never what you expect to hear. The vet with a very dry, no beating around the bush attitude replied, when a human gets cancer you don't ask them if it's something they ate do you, no, this is just down to bad luck. Yeah bad luck. Because why would one of the things I love the most, that spends every minute of the day with me, that sat with me and pushed herself into my space constantly when I felt I was the most unlovable human alive, be able to stay with me. I felt this huge amount of self pity even though she was the one who's days were numbered. I felt empty and broken and angry. I was so angry. All I could think about was how hard this year has been and I have woken up every single day and tried every day to fill it with gratitude and always looking for that silver lining and always looking for the positive and I was just battling here to accept that this was our luck. Why is it our bad luck? Why? Why out of so many dogs on earth and not that I would wish this pain on anyone, but why her? Why Blue?

And it gets better because we will have to make that decision when the time comes to send her to her final sleep. Kill the thing you love the most — yeah that's going to be great. The angel that loved me unconditionally, when I felt the most unlovable, the most vulnerable I ever been, this lifeline that got me to another day when I was at my lowest, I get to make the decision to end her short life. How can this not make a person angry? How can I not question where the fairness is in this and how and where do I find a silver lining in this? So far all I can tell my kids is, let's just be grateful we get to spend another day with her.

And we have been enjoying every minute. She never gets passed by without a love or a kiss. We lie with her every chance we get, in the evenings while we watching TV. I talk to her like a crazy woman even more now. Ive always spoken to her like she understands me and she has always just stared at me, that hasn't changed. She still follows me everywhere. She lies next to me while I work everyday. That hasn't changed but her gaze and skinny face and sunken eyes remind me that she has changed. Her laboured breathing, her frame which is mostly spine and ribs and her extended stomach, remind us she is terminally unwell. But she is still here with us and she still manages to get up and greet us with a wagging tail when we get home and she still walks over to us to rest her head on us to show us she loves us. She is still here and it is not her time today.

As hard as it was and is to wrap my head around the fact that we will make that decision to put her to sleep humanely when the time comes, I have made a promise to her that I will hold her till the end when she closes her eyes. Its the least I can give her for the amount of times she saved my broken soul this year. The least I can do for her, is to comfort and hold her in her final moments. But today is not that day and I am grateful that it's not.

I hope she knows that she's not just a dog and that she saved and changed a life and that when that day comes, her short time on earth living with us was not wasted, not one-second and that she was so very loved.