One of my cousins printed off an oversized (20-something inches) photograph of this. It's one of my favorite pictures of her as an old dog
Some of my favorite pictures of her; this must've been sometime in the first week
I had her for fourteen years, from about two and a half months before my fourteenth birthday until about a month away from my twenty-eighth birthday. She died from complications due to a heart murmur she recently developed, which was caused by one of her heart valves opening the wrong direction. This caused her heart to enlarge, and fluid to enter her lungs. When we took her to the vet a little over two and a half weeks ago, her blood-oxygen levels were at 80 percent, and she had to spent two days in an oxygen cage before she was able to come home. It came as a shock, because she was in very good shape - able to walk two or three miles on hikes in the woods in cool weather, and could speed walk around the block. This is what happened with she went on a walk with my mother, my mother's friends, and all their dogs, though she eventually wore herself out. She wasn't arthritic or slow or out of shape at all, and I at least had expected her to have a decline before we had a crisis like that. We thought we might get as much as six to nine more months with her before we had another episode, but it didn't happen... On Thursday evening, about two weeks later, she was breathing at a rate of about 135 breaths per minute. We decided that the best thing for her would be to put her to sleep, since the only other option we had would be to put her back in the oxygen cage, back on the catheter... It just felt selfish to make her miserable like that for just another two weeks, if that.
I've been an absolute mess about it, in spite of knowing it was the right thing to do, mostly because I'm one of those negatively-inclined people who dwells on regrets and missed opportunities. So, I've been looking at pictures of her because I find that it gives me perspective about how much time I had with her and how lucky I was to have had such a wonderful dog, and I wanted to share pictures and ramble.
First bath
Jenni was born May 10, 2000, and we got her on July 4, 2000. She spent her first night in her crate... or at least a few hours until I went downstairs and slept with her on the couch under a blanket. I couldn't listen to her whimper like that. She was an absolute nightmare to potty train, and my mother threatened my brother and I on more than one occasion with having to give her up if she didn't get potty trained. We made a breakthrough when she discovered that banging the blinds on the backdoor alerted us to her needs when we didn't see her standing by the door. I started working at my first job, a veterinary clinic, when I was a sophomore in high school. I was a month away from my sixteenth birthday, and Jenni was two years old. I tried to commit suicide that December, and more than anything else I remember leaving the in-patient program and seeing Jenni in the car with my parents. I was happier to see her more than anyone else, if for no other reason than because she was the only one who wouldn't be asking questions, judging, or trying to understand. I spent most of my adolescence in a state of self-loathing and depression, and while I did have friends I talked to about my problems, Jen meant so much to me in terms of clueless (in a good way!) emotional support.
On an adventure with her parents at Ft. Harrison State Park
When she was a bit older, I'm not sure about the exact age anymore but relatively young for the degree, she started acting oddly lethargic, and it was frankly depressing to see. She seemed to have no zest for life, no interest in anything but sleeping and eating. If we tried to go on a walk with her, she'd go at a trudge that was slower than you could believe. She barely was willing to do a cul-de-sac, at that. But then we learned that she had Cushing's Syndrome, and the medication that we put her on gave her a new lease on life. After a few months her energy started picking up again, and she was once again able to do long walks. She was in such great shape that I was taking her on walks three or four times a week, and sometimes going to the state park to the trails. It made me so happy to see her running along the trails full bore, even if that was only strolling speed at that point in her life, because four or five years before that it seemed like she was just laying around waiting for the end of her life. I'm glad that the veterinarian's office we went to figured out the problem, because she would've had a very depressing latter third-ish of her life if they hadn't.
Preparing to pounce on her unsuspecting sister, Zoe
Posed on the steps with Oscar, our cousins' full-size dachshund, and her sister
Her sister, Zoe, was a short-haired dachshund, who was the runt of the litter. Their parents were both long-haired minis, so I guess Zoe just got unlucky. The breeder called us after, offering her to us for free because no one wanted the runt, but we weren't looking (or rather, our mother said no)... but our cousins were. The first time Zoe and Jenni met after being separated was at Christmas.... and they tried to attack one another. Go figure, right? They eventually made friends, though.
Zoe died earlier this year, I think in March, after dealing with health problems for a long time. She had a heart murmur, which is why it was a surprise when Jenni went so quickly. Zoe had lived with her heart problems for years before she passed; Jenni's developed quickly and she passed very soon after.
Zoe had always been the more athletic one of the two, before her health problems. She was the only one who succeeded in their life-long dream of killing a rabbit, and she brought a leg back for her proud (????) mother! Jenni, on the other hand, did manage to catch more than her fair share of birds, though birds didn't elicit that panicked and excited baleful scream of murderous intent that rabbits did. Rabbits would sit outside the windows, just in front of her, while she tried to find a way to make the glass disappear. For some reason birds didn't think she would get to them as fast as she did, and they took off too late on a few occasions. In happier (for her, anyway) news, she did once find a dead rabbit, and it was a joy finding her sitting on top of a maggot-infested rabbit in the middle of the night while it was drizzling down rain. We had been looking for her for almost an hour and a half, and she'd been ignoring us because she was too busy munching. It wasn't until the flashlight caught her eyes that I found her laying in the grass ignoring me. She was very disappointed when we took her inside.
The husky next door made a mistake of leaving his bone outside. This wouldn't be the first time she brought home one of his bones
The first snows of last winter. She didn't appreciate being asked to pose
Posing with her mother's friends' dogs
Napping with her ducky
Sitting on the back porch with her parents this July
I teared up more than a few times putting this together, but it's been cathartic
