Post about "golden"

Early this morning, I dug a grave. It was the second this month and I am weary. I have seen our wonderful pack of three dogs dwindle to one; a fourteen-year-old Australian Shepard put down because of massive cancer three weeks ago; our golden retriever lost to cancer yesterday.

The loss of the Golden was especially hard. We thought we had a chance against the lymphoma that claims 65% of Goldens, and began chemotherapy on September 12th. Eighty-five percent of patients in this condition achieve  a remission averaging nearly a year.

Summer Blossom

No price was too high, we said, even to keep her a few more months hoping for a year, so we joined scores of others who once a week brought failing dogs wishing for miracles.

On that same day, in Miami, Golden Retriever Rescue of South Florida saved a golden mix just ahead of euthanasia. They spayed her, found hookworm, and began treatment.

Our wonderful Blossom was a lesson in bravery, enduring needles and side effects and still wagging her tail for us, the nurses, for anyone. She was that kind of dog. In Miami, on the same day Blossom spent 4 hours being fed intravenously, the rescue golden mix was reassessed after surgery. She was on a road to recovery.

Our Blossom wasn’t so lucky. An infection, a common problem when cancer is intestinal, was the final battle that we lost. Each week the white-cell count was higher, even though that week’s antibiotics had been more powerful and we finally acknowledged that there was a price too great to pay, and we couldn’t ask our Golden to pay it any longer.

Blossom (her full name—Summer Blossom) lived a charmed life, a rarity in a country where millions of cats and dogs live on the streets or in shelters and 3-4 million are euthanized each year. As a puppy and young lady, she lived with a family with a young girl and horses in Washington State. Her puppy-hood was as idyllic as a dog’s can be.

But when her family moved to Florida and needed to travel and work long hours away from home, her separation anxiety brought on neuroses. Her family loved her enough to let her go; I now know how that felt.

When we lost our prior alpha dog, she came to live with us, which through a strange twist of fate brought her back to a house she’d previously lived in with a dog who was now in our pack. She started her second career as alpha dog in a pack of three.

She proved to us how wisdom always trumps intelligence. Our border collie never knew how artfully she gamed him. Her friend the Aussie recognized her superiority and was her dutiful subject. To us, she continued to teach us where our last alpha left off, walking in, sizing up the situation, and claiming his bed for her own.

We miss her terribly. But there’s a happy ending to the story. This afternoon we first learned of this wonderful golden mix who had been saved in Miami but was being fostered in Palm Beach County. So on the very same day we laid our Blossom to rest, the golden mix from Miami joined our pack. We named her Autumn.