Our wonderful three story, Davide, our “engagement Labrador” and I, unfortunately ended suddenly during a bad accident where Lucky left us. After his premature death I had a sort of nervous exhaustion. In a week I lost 8 kg and when people talked about that I couldn’t help crying desperately. I had suddenly lost my best friend, my furry stinky.
I could never fall asleep with him, I could never get angry with him when he stole the cats’food, I couldn’t’ go back home knowing he would wait for me wagging. I missed everything: his wet nose, his anti-stress paws with which I relaxed on the sofa at night, my best friend. I was destroyed.
Worried about my state of mind and my weight loss, my mum and Davide decide to go and take a new Labrador and Beatrice arrives, a puppy “ on sale” like Marley in the famous movie who nobody wanted because she had a slightly crooked fingertip.
Bea enters my life in her foot toe, she is almost 5 months and her sweet eyes seem to understand my pain soon. I admit that I have not loved her immediately because I was still suffering for Lucky, but she has been able to wait. Love is patient, love is kind and Bea is just like this, patient and kind. She loves the ball more than anything else, from morning to night it is all like” launch the ball, give me the ball, let’s play with the ball”.
She is fantastic, she has any kind of balls and she stores them jealously in her bed, they are her treasure! Bea is also a pretty good swimmer, we always go to the seaside together and we stay hours in water without efforts, then we lay dead tired under the sun. By moving so much, she is always in perfect fit and her ears are very beautiful, the most perfect I have ever seen! When my children are born she was crazy: some small humans to scramble who.. launch the ball to her”. She has been the best of friends and the best of babysitters.
> Read the article about Lucky, the engagement Labrador
To say goodbye
One morning, strangely, Bea doesn’t come to say hello at breakfast with the ball in her mouth for the usual morning trainings and my children get alarmed immediately: “mum, why isn’t Bea coming?” Honestly I don’t’ care because we are late as usual: breakfast, snack in the bags and school… but children are right!
Bea is in her basket, swallow, huge… we have taken her soon to the veterinary and the response is not the best one: cancer at the pancreas and at the spleen with metastasis everywhere. Though the age and all the veterinary’s downsides, I decide to make her operated because selfish I fear the idea to lose her, it can’t happen again!
The day after the veterinary comes home and help me to load her in the car. The Maremman shepherd dog Dado growls and howls in a frightening way, as he never did before. The veterinary looks at me: “But does Dado do that ever?”
“No, he doesn’t.”
“He is saying hello to her, he knows that this is a goodbye.”
If I think back now I feel the thrills, but at that moment I don’t give any importance at those words, because I am too busy to carry Bea. Before making her asleep we make a selfie, I don’t want to forget that moment ( and today I am happy to have made it). After 30 minutes the veterinary makes me enter. Bea is on the table, her suffering abdomen is open.
I see the cancer and all the organs compromised, and she explains that even “cleaning off” all the metastasis they are so wide that in a week she would come back at the same situation. Bea is 14, she had a beautiful life, she has been loved, now she is sleeping, we can send her to the angels without making her suffer. She, but for me..OH MY GOD WHAT A BLOW TO MY HEART!
The veterinary explains me everything on euthanasia but my ears don’t hear anything in this moment. How you can decide to put an end at your best friend’s life, who I am to decide, why I must decide. I cried and the veterinary cried with me. I call my husband and Elisa, my best friend: I need advice because I am not able to take that decision, but at the end I give my consent to the euthanasia and I rest with her until her heart stops. It was heartbreaking, you need an endless love to decide to make who you love fly away and the heart never heals, it adapts, it goes ahead, but the wound rests forever and it is right like this.
The medical opinion of our veterinarian Cristina
Deciding to put an end to our dog’s pain is never easy. It is a matter about which many people prefer not to talk until they are obliged to. But it is very important to be prepared and know what to expect, before, during and after the dog’s euthanasia. The euthanasia: what is is? The euthanasia is the act to put an end to an animal’s life in a sweet way with the last aim to avoid him useless pains.
The suppression of our own dog represents the last solution that has to be decided in agreement with the veterinary and after a rigid and precise reflection. In particular the veterinary will have to evaluate with care two main aspects: on a side the quality of life of the dog and on the other one the effects on your daily life.
The veterinary has a key role. He is able to understand when the dog can not keep on living without suffering too much and in an emotionally detached way he has to make you understand when the therapeutic zeal has no more sense.
Generally speaking it is necessary to take into consideration the euthanasia when the quality of life of the animal is no more acceptable. Like in the case of ancient or ill dogs at the last stages of an untreatable pathology, for which the palliative cares don’t have any more effect.
