Not to be out done, or shown up by his brother...here we go again, Mack.
I feel as though my entire blog lately has been about my dogs. Sorry about that, but I can’t shake what’s happening in my life with my four legged babies, so bear with me. Once again the Bisson family finds them staring down the barrel of our sweet boy Mack living on borrowed time.
Mind you, he will be twelve on March 18th. Anybody who knows boxers knows that this is a good, long life for one of their kind. For Mack it’s an even better amount of time since at four months he came down with HOD, it’s a complicated explanation, but in a nutshell he became a quadriplegic over night. One vet, a Toronto vet, wanted to put him down right away. Our Dr. Matt in Oakville not only didn’t want to put him down, he took him home to his house and nursed him over the weekend, because he didn’t want him left at the clinic with just his staff. Once Matt stabilized him enough, he came home and was on bed rest for WEEKS. Try keeping a pup, who’s brother was running, and bouncing all over the place down. It wasn’t easy but we did it, and he recovered.
Then at three he had a tumor on his prostate…he was neutered and given a clean bill of health.
At four he was diagnosed with a very aggressive Mast Cell tumor, given four to six months to live. All vaccinations stopped, except for his rabies, and no more flea tick medication. This combined with a whole raw food diet, and a battery of holistic remedies administered three times a day for six months…he not only survived, he thrived. Then came the cataracts, in both eyes at different times. The loss of his spleen, the rupturing of an ear drum, losing half a jaw and the teeth that used to sit in it, and finally thyroid cancer last spring.
We’ve been through it all with this boy of ours, but he fights on. He’s never been done with us, or his will to live. So we fought with him, side by side. But it appears that we’re entering the stages of the final round, he now has an adrenal tumor, which is incredibly difficult to get at. This is not a huge problem, since there are surgeons who specialize in just this. The trouble is he also has a condition, Degenerative Myelopathy, or DM for short. I’m not a vet, so I don’t have the vocabulary to explain it, or the symptoms, if you are interested in knowing what it is, you can go to this link… http://www.caninegeneticdiseases.net/DM/basicDM.htm
The combination of both diseases make operating on him senseless given the timeline of the other disease. None of this is good. And there isn’t anything to be done. So we wait. The toughest part of all of it was trying to plan the “perfect” time to let Mikaela know. He’s her dog. Her soulmate. Or as she likes to call him, “my best friend.”
For weeks I’ve been agonizing over; do I call her and tell her on the phone? If I were to do that, what time, before class, after class? When she’s by herself or with her sister? When? How? Finally Yannick and I decided to tell her over dinner tonight, she took it badly, as you can imagine. It’s never easy getting ready to say goodbye to a loyal, loving, kind, and perfect family member. None of us are ready, even though you think we would be since he’s been a sickly boy his entire life.
Who knows, maybe he’ll surprise us once again, maybe he will live longer than the four months they’ve given him? I guess we’ll wait and see what Mack decides he wants to do. Stay a bit longer, or go.
Hmmm, hmmm, hmmm…
